The Vote

The emergency board meeting was called for a Thursday, which should have been Corwin's first warning — Voss Holding never did anything on a Thursday by accident.

He walked in expecting a hostile bid he could vote down easily; between his shares and Rutger's, they controlled fifty-four percent. Untouchable. He'd said so at breakfast that morning, and Rutger had nodded and said nothing else, which Corwin would replay in his head for years afterward and still not understand how he'd missed it.

The chairman of the board — a Voss appointee from two years back, nobody had thought much of it at the time — opened with a single sentence.

"I'd like to note for the record a change in beneficial ownership, filed and confirmed last week."

Corwin didn't understand yet. He looked at Rutger for the translation Rutger always gave him in meetings like this, the quiet aside that meant don't worry, I've got this.

Rutger was looking at the table.

"Mr. Bayne's twenty-two percent stake," the chairman continued, "was transferred to Voss Holding Group nine months ago, per the attached agreement."

The room went very quiet in the specific way rooms go quiet when everyone already knows something one person doesn't.

"That's not possible," Corwin said. "We'd control forty-two percent between us. That's—" He stopped. Did the math again, out loud this time, because his own voice was the only thing keeping the floor from tilting. "That's not possible."

"Rutger," he said.

Rutger didn't look up.

"Rutger, tell them that's not possible."

Nothing. Not a word, not a glance, six years of two names on one door reduced to a man studying the grain of a conference table like it owed him an answer.

The vote took four minutes. Corwin was out of his own company before lunch, escorted from a building with his name on the original patents and nowhere on the new letterhead, and the last thing he saw before security closed the elevator doors was Rutger, finally looking up — not at the board, not at Anya Voss standing calm and satisfied by the window — but straight at Corwin, mouthing something the closing doors cut off before a single sound reached him.