The heir they threw away

CHAPTER TEN

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 documentation your CFO sent to the board yesterday. Voss Industrial has a stake in two of the three replacement suppliers you're finalizing." She looked up. "You didn't know that."

"Well, I do now," he said.

"I've known it for six weeks. I've been waiting to see how the succession question resolved before deciding what to do with it." She set down her pen.

"The short version goes this way: if the Harmon Group and Voss Industrial were aligned on pipeline development, the combined leverage in the green energy supply chain would be significant enough to set the terms of the next generation of city infrastructure contracts rather than competing for them. That is worth more than either company can generate independently."

She paused, staring at his impassive eyes, "The reason this conversation hasn't happened before is that my father and your grandmother had a professional relationship that was built on mutual respect and mutual competition, and neither of them wanted to change the architecture of it."

"And you do?" He asked softly.

"I think the architecture is thirty years old and the market it was built for doesn't exist anymore." She held his gaze firmly. "The question is whether you're willing to restructure a legacy relationship or whether you feel obligated to maintain it because it's what your grandmother would have done."

It was a good challenge and she knew it which she delivered it without the performance of someone testing him. He noticed every single thing about her and nodded with a smile.

"My grandmother brought down the ammunition division three years ago," he said. "She did it voluntarily, at significant short-term cost, because it was the right thing to do for the company she was trying to build."

"She maintained a legacy relationship with the Voss family because it was built on genuine mutual respect and she valued that. Those are two different kinds of decisions and I intend to be capable of both." He leaned forward slightly. "What I won't do is restructure a relationship because the market has changed if the relationship is still sound. What I will do is build something new if the new thing is genuinely better. So, go ahead, Show me why it's better."

Reyna looked at him for a moment. Then she opened a second section of her folder and spread three pages across the table between them. It consisted of supply chain projections and market position analyses that were thorough enough. She had been building this presentation for weeks, maybe longer, which meant the call on Tuesday had been the final step in a decision she had been moving toward for some time.

He read the documents the way Douglas had taught him to read documents, not for what they said but for what they assumed. And what these assumed was a Harmon Group that was stable, led with conviction, and willing to move fast when the case was made clearly, which meant Reyna Voss had been watching him since before the reception and had made a bet on what she saw.

They worked through the documents for ninety minutes without stopping. She pushed back on two of his counterpoints  that forced him to reconsider one of them and hold the other. She nodded at both responses without arguing.

At three forty-five she gathered her papers and rose to her feet, then he walked her to the elevator. They stood in an awkward silence for a few seconds, then she said, "I'll have a formal proposal drafted by Monday."

"I'll have our partnership terms drafted by Monday," he replied. "and then we can compare."

She took a long hard look at him, then scoffed, "You're going to be difficult to work with, Mr. Cole."

"Probably," he said with a shrug. "You'll manage."

The elevator arrived. She stepped in and looked into his eyes for a long moment then the doors closed and she was gone.

Ethan was almost at the door when his phone rang with Douglas Hale's number, and something in the timing and urgency of it made him stop moving before he even answered.

"Douglas?" he said.

"Ethan." Douglas replied with a strained tone. "I've been running a background thread on the regulatory filing against me, tracing the origin, and I found what I expected to find. The Marsh Capital connection, but there's a secondary trail that I did not expect, and I think you need to see it before I tell you what it is because I want to be certain before I say it out loud."

Ethan's eyes narrowed slightly and he held the phone tighter "What kind of secondary trail?"

"The kind that comes from inside the building, Ethan." He replied and hesitated before speaking again "I need thirty minutes to confirm it. I'll send you the documentation the moment I have it." He blurted out then hung up.

Ethan frowned as he considered the possibility that the threat he was tracking outside the walls was not the only one he needed to be watching. The person he trusted most in the building since he came back might be the last person he should have trusted at all.

His phone buzzed with a text from an unknown number. It carried three words with no context, and no name attached.

Watch your sister.