Justice of the Supreme War God

Chapter 18: The Spoiled Deal

Sophie had the grace to look briefly apologetic.

"I'm sorry for coming in like this," she said, glancing between Diana and the garden with the careful peripheral awareness of someone who had learned precisely where the edges of her employer's patience were. "You weren't answering your phone."

Diana's hand moved automatically to her blazer pocket. Silenced. She had silenced it during the confrontation with her mother last night and forgotten to reverse that decision, which was the kind of operational lapse that happened when one's household had become inexplicably chaotic.

"The representative from Strong Inc," Sophie continued, the urgency returning now that she had the room's full attention, "is en route to your office. He'll be there in forty minutes."

Everything else — Marcus, the garden, the conversation that had been going nowhere productive — dropped away with the clean efficiency of a shutter closing.

Strong Inc was not a routine meeting.

Strong Inc was the largest privately held import-export operation in the country, moving cargo across fourteen international ports with a client list that read like a Fortune 100 index. Diana had spent four months engineering the approach, six weeks in active negotiation, and more political capital than she cared to calculate getting their representative to the table. A signed contract with Strong Inc would do more for Morrison Accounting Group's profile in a single quarter than three years of conventional growth.

"Forty minutes," Diana repeated.

"Forty minutes," Sophie confirmed.

Diana was already moving toward the house.

Marcus watched her go with the same unhurried attention he gave everything and then returned to the rosemary bush he had been examining. He stood a moment later with a small cluster of cuttings and carried them back toward the kitchen, Sophie trailing behind him at a distance that suggested she wasn't entirely sure what to do with a man who had been present for that conversation and seemed entirely unbothered by any of it.

He set the cuttings on the counter and began separating them with methodical precision.

"Strong Inc," he said mildly, not looking up. "What's the nature of the contract?"

Sophie stopped near the kitchen doorway. She had a tablet under one arm and a phone in her other hand and the overall bearing of a woman who had places to be, and she looked at Marcus Hayes the way people in Diana's orbit had consistently looked at him since his arrival — the brief, comprehensive sweep from worn shoes to unremarkable jacket, the invisible calculation, the conclusion drawn and filed.

"I don't think that's something you'd have much context for," she said, with the careful politeness of someone being rude as professionally as possible.

Marcus looked up.

"Import-export logistics," Sophie continued, her tone acquiring the faint condescension of someone explaining a concept to a person they have already categorized. "Major corporate contracts. Accounting portfolios." She let the words settle with their own weight. "Not exactly — I mean, it's quite specialized." A brief, conclusive smile. "I'm sure Diana has it handled."

Marcus's mouth turned up slightly at one corner.

"I'm sure she does," he agreed pleasantly, and went back to his cuttings.

Sophie gave him one final, unconvinced look and left to catch up with her employer.

The kitchen was quiet. Marcus worked the rosemary into the small clay bowl he'd found in the back of the cabinet and added two other components from the garden, combining them with the methodical patience of a man who had learned field medicine in environments where improvisation was the only option available.

He knew exactly what Strong Inc was.

He had known for considerably longer than Diana had been pursuing the contract.

Diana made it to the Morrison Group's downtown offices in thirty-one minutes, which Sophie logged as some kind of record. She had changed into her navy meeting suit in fourteen minutes, briefed herself on the contract's remaining open points in the car, and walked through the glass lobby of the Morrison tower with her game face so completely assembled that no one who passed her in the elevator would have guessed the morning she'd had.

This was her skill. This had always been her skill.

The conference room on the twenty-second floor had been prepared correctly — water, the right pens, the bound proposal copies arranged at precise intervals. Sophie had called ahead. The view of the city through the floor-to-ceiling windows was the kind that made visitors understand, before a word was said, that they were in a room belonging to someone who had built something real.

Carter Reynolds arrived seven minutes later.

He was Strong Inc's senior acquisitions representative — mid-fifties, methodical, the kind of man who had sat across from enough boardroom tables to be immune to most of the theater that happened in them. He shook Diana's hand with the brief, evaluative grip of someone deciding in the first four seconds whether the next hour was going to be worthwhile.

Diana made sure it was.

She was, whatever else could be said about her, exceptionally good at this. She walked Reynolds through the Morrison Group's portfolio with the precision of someone who had built each component herself and understood every number beneath the numbers. She answered his questions before they fully formed. She anticipated his concerns about scalability and addressed them with documented case studies from comparable partnerships. She was prepared, authoritative, and entirely without the anxious over-explanation that undermined otherwise qualified people in rooms like this one.

Reynolds made notes. He asked four follow-up questions. He made more notes.

At the forty-minute mark, he set his pen down and looked at her with the expression of a man who had stopped looking for problems.

"Ms. Morrison," he said, "I think we have a basis for a very productive relationship."

Diana slid the contract across the table.

She signed her section with the clean, decisive signature she had used since she was twenty-four years old. Reynolds accepted the document, reviewed the final page, uncapped his own pen —

The conference room door opened.

Not knocked. Opened. With the specific, proprietary energy of someone who had decided that the social convention of knocking applied to other people.

Liam Steel walked in.

Diana's pen was still on the table. She looked at him with an expression that contained, in compressed and dangerous form, everything she had been managing since the previous evening.

"Liam." Her voice was a flat line. "This room is occupied."

"I can see that." Liam smiled at Reynolds with the warm, practiced ease of a man who had spent his entire life having doors open for him. He crossed to the table without being invited, pulled out the chair two seats from Reynolds, and sat in it with comfortable ownership. "Carter Reynolds, right? Strong Inc." He extended his hand across the table. "Liam Steel. Steel Family Holdings."

Reynolds shook it with the neutral professionalism of a man waiting to understand what was happening.

"Diana's done a wonderful job, I'm sure." Liam gestured at the contract on the table without looking at it, the way one gestures at furniture. "Solid firm. Good reputation. Modest." He smiled. "But before you finalize anything, I want to make you an offer."

Diana's hand was still on the table. Perfectly still.

"Whatever Morrison Accounting Group is offering you," Liam said, leaning forward with the satisfied energy of a man who had planned this for longer than the last five minutes, "Steel Holdings will match it. Double the service capacity. Half the management f*e." He spread his hands. "Same work, better infrastructure, established international relationships in every port your company operates through."

Reynolds looked at Liam.

Then at the contract.

Then at Diana.

The conference room was very quiet.

Diana looked at Liam Steel sitting in her conference room in her building, in a chair he hadn't been invited to sit in, dismantling four months of careful work with the cheerful impunity of someone who had never once in his life experienced a consequence he couldn't buy his way out of.

And for the first time since the entire arrangement began, a thought crossed her mind that she had been actively resisting.

She thought about Marcus Hayes.