The heir they threw away

CHAPTER NINE

Jordan Marsh sat in the back of his car on the morning after the reception and did something he almost never did: he let himself be still.

He took a deep breath and tried to make his mind go numb for a few minutes before plotting his next move.

The facts, assembled cleanly in his head: Ethan Cole was the heir to the Harmon Group, a detail that had been hidden from Jordan's research for two years by the combined effect of Ethan's deliberate anonymity and the Harmon Group's extraordinary discretion around its own succession question.

That gap in his intelligence was the single most expensive mistake Jordan had made in his professional life, because every move he had made in the last four months had been predicated on the assumption that Harmon Group that did not have a sitting heir ready to return.

He had used Simone Cole to get close to a company whose heir he had not known existed. He had taken the Calloway contract to build infrastructure leverage he now did not need in the way he had imagined needing it. He had spent four months and considerable resources building toward a partnership position that had evaporated in the blink of an eye.

He frowned as he stared down at his phone, which showed fourteen missed calls. Six from board members he had been bulding. Three from the Arden Walsh's office. Two from his attorney and one from Simone, which he did not intend to return. Simone had served her purpose already and was now a liability he simply didn't give a fuck about.

One call, the one that actually mattered, was from a number he recognized, belonging to a man named Garrett, who handled the kinds of problems that could not be handled through attorneys.

He called Garrett back immediately.

"The Douglas Hale situation is going to collapse," Jordan said when Garrett answered. "Cole was up at two in the morning reading annual reports. He'll have traced the regulatory filing back to our connection within the week."

"Do you want me to deepen the trail?" Garrett asked. "Make it harder to follow."

"No, deepening it now just gives him more to find later, so let it go. The Hale play was a delay tactic and the delay is done." He looked out the window at the city. "I need you to pull everything you can find on the Cole family's internal structure. Not the company, Garret, but the family.

His frown deepened, "I want more information on the sister specifically. Nora Cole has been running day-to-day operations for two years and she's just had the ground shift under her significantly. I want to know what she stands to lose with Ethan in charge, and I want to know more than enogh so that I can have a useful conversation with her."

A pause on the line. "You think she'll move against him?"

"I think she's been the most important person in that building for two years and she watched her brother walk into a room last night and take all of it back without asking her permission." He replied. "Find out what she wants that Ethan won't give her. People who want things they can't get through legitimate means are always open to a conversation."

He hung up and looked at his phone for a moment, at Simone's missed call sitting unanswered on the screen, and he thought briefly about the expression on her face at the reception when Nora had said Ethan's name into the microphone. She had been filled with so much regret and must despise him now.

He put the phone away, looked out at the city and began and began to build his next twelve moves around the new shape of the board.

He had been outmaneuvered once and he did not intend to be outmaneuvered twice.

- - - - - 

Across the city, in a glass tower on the business district's north side, Nora Cole sat at the desk that had been hers for two years. It was the desk that looked out over the same city from a floor below the one where Ethan now worked.

She read the board confirmation document that had arrived in her email at seven that morning and felt something she had not anticipated, something that surprised her with its intensity because she had told herself for months that she was prepared for this moment, that she had accepted the possibility, and that the work she had done in her brother's absence had been done for the company and not for herself.

The document told her she had been lying to herself.

She had actually done it for herself. She had walked into this building every morning for two years with the quiet, building certainty that she was the most important person in it, and the work had been real and the competence had been genuine.

But underneath both of those things had been the slow, building growth of an expectation she had never admitted to anyone, including herself, and now the document was in her inbox and the expectation had been taken from her without ceremony. She was sitting at her desk feeling the particular grief of losing something she had never been permitted to officially have.

Her phone suddenly lit up with a number she did not recognize.

She looked at it for a long moment, then she answered.

"Ms. Cole," said a voice that was smooth and tried to be charming. "My name is Jordan Marsh. I believe we have something to discuss."

Nora looked out the window at the city her grandmother had built and her brother had just inherited, and she said nothing for a long moment, and the silence stretched between them for a long moment, then she said:

 "Tell me what you have in mind."