Justice of the Supreme War God

Chapter 27: Misread PART 1

Chapter 27: Misread

The hospital room had gotten quieter as the afternoon stretched toward evening.

Catherine had stopped arguing an hour ago — not because she had changed her position, but because Diana had stopped responding to it with anything except the flat, impenetrable silence she deployed when a conversation had used up its useful life. Eventually Catherine had gathered her bag and her coat and her unresolved opinions and told Diana she would be back in the morning, and Diana had said nothing, and the door had closed, and the room had returned to the particular, functional quiet of a space where someone is thinking hard.

Diana was thinking hard.

She looked at the ceiling — she had spent a significant portion of the last several hours doing this, which was not typical for her — and turned the numbers over with the clean, methodical efficiency she applied to financial models. One column: what continuing the current arrangement cost. Another column: what alternatives existed.

The columns were not balanced.

Strong Inc was gone. Reynolds had been polite about it but the message had been clear. Lucas Steel had eleven years and a checkbook and a motivated personal interest. The Morrison Group could survive without the contract, but surviving was different from the trajectory she had been building, and the difference between those two things was significant enough that she had spent the last two days not eating because of it.

She reached for her phone.

Ryan's number was in her contacts under his full name — no shorthand, no nickname, the deliberate formality of someone who had wanted to communicate something about the nature of the relationship through the contact label.

She looked at it.

She thought about what Catherine had said.

There's still a way out of this.

She thought about Reynolds. About four months. About Liam sitting in her conference room with his pen out and his father's strategy running perfectly in the background.

She started to dial.

The door opened.

Diana looked up.

Carter Reynolds came through it in his office coat, slightly hurried, with the forward-leaning energy of a man who had come somewhere important and was aware he was delivering something time-sensitive. He had a document folder under his arm and the expression of someone who had spent the last several hours in a state of productive excitement and was still operating at that frequency.

Diana lowered her phone.

"Ms. Morrison." Reynolds stopped at the foot of the bed and looked at her with a directness that was different from every previous interaction they'd had — the straightforward, person-to-person quality of a man who has settled something and arrived to report it. "I apologize for coming to the hospital. Under the circumstances I thought it was better than waiting."

Diana looked at the folder.

"What is that?" she said.

Reynolds set it on the bed beside her and opened it to the relevant page. The Morrison Accounting Group contract — her proposal, the one she had signed four days ago, the one she had watched Reynolds carry out of her conference room in Liam Steel's wake.

"Strong Inc is partnering with your firm," Reynolds said. "Original terms, as proposed." He looked at her steadily. "I'd like you to add your signature to formalize it."

Diana looked at the contract.

She picked it up. Read the first page. Read the terms she had spent four months crafting. Read her own signature on the bottom where she'd signed it the first time, still there, waiting for his to join it.

"What changed?" she said.

Reynolds paused. "An introduction was made on your behalf. By your husband." He chose the next words with the careful precision of someone relaying the nature of a thing without overstating it. "Specifically, to Iron Hands International."

He said it the way people said it — with the slight, involuntary weight that the name produced in rooms where people understood what it meant.

Diana was very still.