The rest of the world carried on while Ethan's stopped drastically.Jordan Marsh regarded him with a knowing grin, revealin to Ethan that he knew exactly what was happening and he regaled in it."Ethan," Jordan said, his voice smooth and charming. "Come in., why are you standing out there? We're celebrating."Ethan didn't move from the spot. His gaze shifted to Simone and met her eyes for a second before she looked away coldly.. In that one second, he saw the full, ugly shape of the last four months."What contract?" Ethan asked shakily."Calloway Infrastructure," Jordan replied, his fingers tapping the glass of his champagne flute. "Twelve million. Signed, sealed, and delivered this morning. I’ve been laying the groundwork for a while.""This morning," Ethan gasped."Ten-fifteen exactly. They were decisive once the right proposal was in front of them." Jordan boasted.Ten-fifteen.At ten-fifteen, Ethan had been sitting in a plastic chair in the Mercy General waiting room, his heart p

Burials weren't exactly his thing, but it was his granny and he couldn't miss it. The church held four hundred people and every seat was filled in her honor.Ethan sat in the back row wearing a black suit Nora had sent to the hotel that morning without asking for his size, which meant she had remembered it from nine years ago. That told him something about his sister, she hadn't changed. The suit fit perfectly, it was better than his old one in fact.He had not told anyone he was coming. Nora had added him to the evening list but the memorial service was its own thing, and he had decided to see it first, from the back, before the room knew he was in it.Eleanor Cole had been seventy-nine years old and she had built the Harmon Group from a sheet metal fabrication company into one of the most significant private enterprises in the country over the course of fifty years. The people who stood to speak about her were men of high calibre. He recognized two senators, a federal judge, the he

The reception filled the Harmon Group's fortieth-floor's event space, and it was exactly the kind of room that Jordan Marsh thought he was built for.He moved through it the way he moved through every room, with the easy authority of a man who thought he had the world under his feet simply because he knew the names and knew who mattered. He knew all of it and he moved through it like water finding the fastest route downhill.Arden Walsh had been receptive to him, so that was a start. Patricia Ng had been cooler but not closed. Jordan had two hours to close her before the announcements began.Simone stood near the bar, holding a glass of white wine with both hands and watching the room with the focused attention she always had in places like this. She was good at reading rooms. It was one of the things he had liked about her initially before she became a means to an end, which was the actually the path most people followed in his life.She had called him three times since that morning

Arden Walsh was the kind of man who had decided at some point in his career that directness was a personality that would get him to the top of the food chain. By the time Ethan sat across from him in the thirty-first floor conference room at eleven that morning, Walsh believed he was being frank when he was actually being exactly as calculated as everyone else in the building, but was just louder about it."I'll be straight with you," Walsh said, settling into his chair with the comfortably, feeling like he had the upper hand here. "I voted against the succession confirmation last night. I want you to know that.""I know," Ethan said flatly. "You were the second one, no?"Walsh blinked for a moment, then cleared his throat and adjusted his tie."Your grandmother was a brilliant woman who ran this company for fifty years, but she was also a woman who had spent so long building something that she became afraid to let it move fast, and the green energy pipeline is the single most valuabl

She arrived on Thursday at one fifty-eight, with an air of certainty and confidence that made Ethan like her even before she sat down.Reyna Voss was thirty-one years old and had been running the Voss Industrial Group's strategic partnerships division for three years under her father, who was sixty-four. She walked into the thirty-first floor conference room in a dark coat she did not remove and sat down across from Ethan with a folder and a legal pad.She was not what he had expected, though he was not certain what he had expected. The Voss name carried a weight in this city's corporate world that generated a particular image, the sleek, produced confidence of generational wealth, and Reyna had that confidence but it sat differently on her, like something she had earned rather than inherited."The Harmon Group's green energy pipeline," she said, without preamble, opening her folder. "Current capacity, sixty percent, projected to reach eighty within six months per the supplier documen