She began to suspect that Vivien Blackthorne had not simply hired a mechanic with a small shop, but had unknowingly hired one of the very engineers who helped design the repair standards the entire industry now relied on. After 6 months of relentless work, the Gulfstream rolled out of the hangar, looking nearly indistinguishable from the day it first left the factory floor. Its fuselage polished, its cabin rebuilt, every ground test passed without a single flag. Vivien treated the handover like an internal press event, inviting board members, business partners, and the full flight crew to witness the aircraft's return in person. When Rowan handed the final invoice to Dorian, it included the remaining contract balance, the additional cabin work Vivien had personally requested, the material upgrades, and the structural repair costs tied directly to emails Dorian himself had approved months earlier.
Dorian announced in front of the assembled crowd that Blackthorne would not be paying the invoice at all, citing a 3-day delay in the delivery schedule as grounds for withholding payment entirely. Rowan calmly pointed out that the delay traced directly back to Vivien's own requested changes to the interior and communication systems. Changes documented in writing exactly as he had insisted from the very first week of the project. Vivien did not so much as glance at the paperwork Rowan offered. She took the invoice from Dorian's hands, mocked Rowan for believing that a handful of emails could ever obligate a company worth billions of dollars, and tore the pages in half in front of her entire executive team.
She reminded him loudly enough for everyone in the hangar to hear that he was nothing more than a mechanic running a rented shop with a skeleton crew and that if he tried to sue Blackthorne's legal department could drag the case out for years until his small business simply collapsed under the weight of it. She went further still mentioning that she understood he had a daughter's tuition to worry about. A detail that made it clear Dorian had done some quiet digging into Rowan's personal life. Rowan asked her only one question in return, calm and direct, was she formally refusing to complete the handover process as outlined in their contract. When she answered that the aircraft belonged to her, and needed no one's permission to fly, Rowan reached into his jacket, placed his technical certification card on the table between them, and quietly began gathering his personal files.
He did not argue further, did not threaten legal action in the moment, and did not ask anyone to physically stop the aircraft from leaving the hangar. As he walked out into the afternoon light, Vivien ordered Mara to prepare the Gulfstream for immediate departure, eager to prove that no single contractor, however skilled, could inconvenience her for long, Mara opened the aircraft's completion binder out of habit, flipping toward the final page, where the return to service authorization was meant to be signed, the box remained empty, and she stood there for a long moment before quietly closing the binder again. Vivien climbed aboard with Dorian and a handful of assistants, luggage already loaded, ground crew already clearing the tarmac. A flight plan already filed for a morning departure the next day. The cockpit, however, stayed dark and silent.