The apartment had a rhythm now, and Feby was ashamed of how quickly she'd learned it by heart.Alex left before she woke. He came home after dark. And every night he set two hundred dollars on the counter — sometimes three — peeled off whatever the day had paid him, without being asked, the way another man might take off his shoes at the door.Like it was nothing. Like it didn't cost him twelve hours of his body to earn it.She'd stopped arguing around the fourth night. There was a certain kind of stubbornness that wasn't worth fighting, and his was cut from the same stone as her father's had been.Or so she imagined. She'd never known her father well enough to be sure, and that small hollow ache surfaced at the strangest times — like now, watching money she hadn't asked for sit quietly on a counter that wasn't really hers.She was at the little table doing what she'd done every night for a week — filling out another application, this one for an assistant coordinator role two rungs be

The ink on the tile contract wasn't dry when the door didn't knock. It slammed."Beatrix." Cornelius Hargrove filled the doorway the way he filled every room he'd ever walked into — loud first, right second, if at all. "Twenty minutes. I sat in that boardroom for twenty minutes."Beatrix didn't stand. "Uncle—""Don't." He threw a folder onto her desk hard enough that it slid into the tile Alex had set down an hour ago. His eyes found Alex, flicked once, and dismissed him completely. "And you're in here with — whoever this is."Nobody had ever looked at Alex like he was furniture. It was almost restful."Two years." Cornelius's voice cracked down the middle of the word, somewhere between fury and something rawer underneath it."Two years watching Ferrowgate eat us alive, quarter by quarter, and every time I ask what the plan is, I get told to trust you. I don't trust you. I trust numbers. And the numbers say this company's a corpse that hasn't stopped twitching yet.""We have something

The knock came at the hour when decent visits have already ended.Feby was at the little table with her one good blouse laid out over the chair back, pressed twice and inspected three times, and a borrowed almanac of New Avalon's great firms open to the chapter on the Reagent Group.She had read the same page four times without retaining a word of it. Tomorrow sat in her chest like a swallowed coal — bright, secret, hers.She had told Alex nothing. He had asked nothing, which was its own kind of noticing.Three knocks. Softer than Wilhelmina's, more certain than a stranger's. Feby knew the hand before she reached the door."Mother."Adeline Rydell-Steinmeyer entered the way she entered everywhere — perfume first, apology never.Her eyes made the same slow circuit of the flat that Wilhelmina's had, arriving at the same verdict by a politer road. Then she stepped aside, and the doorway filled with a man.Tall. A charcoal traveling coat with silver thread worked through the collar, cut by

Alex leaned close. His voice was for her alone."Take it.""It's a shell, Alex. They're laughing at me." She could hear it — the little coughs behind hands, the smirk Rael wasn't bothering to hide."Let them. A licensed trade seat is a door. Doors matter more than what's behind them." A pause. "Take it in writing. Every share. And this time, I read the pages first."He looked at her, quiet and level. "Do you have any other choice?"She didn't. The money was already gone — swallowed by his mother's family, then chased with a lawsuit for good measure. You can't pay back people who took everything and then billed you for the privilege.Alex started reading the pages. Aloud, where it suited him. He struck one clause that would have quietly kept the trade seat with the family.Then a second — one that would have draped Rael's personal guarantees over Feby's shoulders like a hand pressing down on her head. He didn't announce what he'd found. He just drew two lines and watched Rael's face co

"Show them the letter, miss," Prue said from behind the counter. She hadn't been paid in two months. A woman with nothing left to lose has the steadiest voice in the room.Feby laid the award letter on the counter, seal up.Leon snatched it first. He read it indulgently. Then quickly. Then twice — and the color climbed his neck line by line, like water filling a glass."It's fake," he said. "The Reagent Group does not hand a two-hundred-million expansion to—"He stopped. His eyes had finally caught up with his mouth.The address line.Rael took the letter from him. He read the line once. Then again, the way a man rereads a telegram hoping the words have been persuaded to rearrange themselves.The letter was not addressed to the Rydell Advertising House. It was not addressed to any house at all.Awarded to Febyella Steinmeyer. In her own name and person. Sole awardee. Non-transferable."That's a mistake," Rael said. "Contracts of this class go to licensed firms. Trade seats. Not to — n