“Zero?” Victoria whispered, her voice suddenly stripped of its brassy volume. “Richard... Richard’s twenty-four percent says zero? That’s—that’s a glitch. Somebody hacked the transfer agent!”
Right on cue, the heavy glass doors at the back of the boardroom swung inward.
“Sorry I’m late, everyone, Midtown is a parking lot—”
Richard Vance, sixty-two years old with silver-templed hair and a three-thousand-dollar pinstriped suit, stepped briskly into the room holding a takeaway espresso cup. He took three steps toward the head of the table before his shoes seemed to glue themselves to the carpet.
Eleanor didn’t turn around in the Chairman’s seat; she simply pivoted the chair forty-five degrees to face him.
“Good morning, Richard,” Eleanor said, her tone as smooth and welcoming as if she were hosting him in her own living room. “Take any open seat on the left. We were just reviewing the updated cap table.”
Richard’s face went the color of wet cement. His eyes jumped from Eleanor sitting in his chair, up to the massive eighty-inch monitor displaying his zero balance, and finally to Victoria, who was staring at him as if he had just set the building on fire.
“Richard!” Victoria lunged toward him, her chunky gold necklace clattering against her collarbone. “Look at the screen! Look at what this woman did! She’s claiming she bought out the Thorne trust and Greystone, and the computer says your shares are gone! Tell them! Call the SEC right now!”
Richard didn’t reach for his phone. He couldn’t even look Victoria in the eye. Instead, he stared down at the plastic lid of his espresso cup, his jaw tightening as a dull flush crept up his neck.
“I can’t call the SEC, Tori,” Richard muttered, his voice barely carrying past the first two chairs.
Victoria froze. Two feet away from him, her hands stayed suspended in the air. “What did you just say?”
“I said I can’t call them,” Richard repeated, louder this time, though his shoulders slumped under the stares of the five other directors. “The transfer is real. I signed the closing papers with Meridian’s brokers three weeks ago.”
“You—you what?” Victoria shrieked, the polished Manhattan socialite veneer snapping completely. “You sold the family block? Behind my back? To her?”
“I didn’t know who the principal behind Meridian was until ten seconds ago!” Richard shot back defensively, finally looking up at Eleanor with a mixture of dread and confusion. “My real estate fund in Miami went belly-up in September, Tori! I had forty million in personal margin calls hanging over my head. Meridian offered twelve percent over market value for a private block purchase, cash wired in forty-eight hours, provided I signed a non-disclosure agreement until the Q4 board meeting. The Thorne trustees took the same deal last week!”
Victoria staggered back half a step, her back bumping into the edge of the walnut table. In less than four minutes, her entire world—the private drivers, the corporate box at Lincoln Center, the undisputed power of the Vance name—had evaporated, leaving her stranded on an island of seven percent.
Then her eyes narrowed. Panic hardened back into venomous spite. She spun back toward Eleanor, planting both hands on the polished wood and leaning over the table.
“Fine!” Victoria spat, her chest heaving beneath the black satin blouse. “So you bought your way into the room through backdoor brokers! You think that makes you one of us? I still own seven percent of this company, and the Q4 restructuring package on today’s agenda has already been signed off by the compensation committee! You can sit in that big chair all you want, lady, but the disbursements scheduled for noon today are locked in!”
Eleanor watched Victoria’s knuckles turn white against the dark wood. She didn’t lean back. Instead, she reached into the open black leather portfolio on the table and slid her fingers past the white shareholder certificate to a second document underneath—a thick sheaf of bank audit spreadsheets marked with a stiff crimson tab along the side.
“Are you referring to Agenda Item Four, Mrs. Vance?” Eleanor asked quietly. “The eighteen-million-dollar emergency consulting payout to an outside firm called V-Lux Styling & Strategy, LLC?”
Across the table, Richard’s head jerked up. “Eighteen million? Tori, you told me that restructuring line was three million for warehouse automation software!”
Victoria’s face went dead white beneath her rouge. She didn’t answer Richard. Her eyes were glued to the crimson-tabbed spreadsheet Eleanor had just pulled halfway out of the leather folder.
“We won’t be voting on the eighteen million today,” Eleanor continued, her voice dropping an octave so every word landed with surgical clarity in the hushed room. “Because before we discuss the eighteen million you were trying to push through at noon, Mrs. Vance, we need to discuss the four point two million that was already wired to V-Lux Styling & Strategy last month—straight out of the Apex Employee Pension Reserve.”
Across the table, Arthur gasped aloud. “The pension reserve? That’s a restricted fiduciary trust!”
At the top of the crimson-tabbed page, highlighted in yellow, sat an internal bank wire slip stamped with an executive override code: AUTH-VV-09.
When Victoria saw her own authorization code staring up from the paper, her composure broke entirely. With a sharp cry, her right hand shot across the walnut table to snatch the crimson-tabbed sheet out of the portfolio—only for Eleanor’s left hand to come down calmly and close the heavy black leather cover right over Victoria’s gold bracelets with a quiet, decisive snap.