The Threat Behind the Glass

She didn't go to the two o'clock meeting.

Instead she sat in a coffee shop across from Voss Dynamics' glass tower with Corwin's business card, eleven unsent letters, and a stock transfer agreement spread on the table between two lukewarm coffees, while Corwin — closed sign still up on Miller Street, first time in six years he'd shut the shop on a weekday — read through the company's public filings on her laptop with the concentration of a man relearning a language he used to speak fluently.

"The annual shareholder meeting's Friday," he said. "Public, open floor, question period at the end. It's the one room in that building where Rutger can't have you quietly walked out."

"You want me to stand up in a room full of investors and accuse the chairman of fraud."

"I want you to hand them documents and let the documents do it." He slid the laptop toward her, a page of shareholder bylaws highlighted. "Any shareholder of record can raise a floor motion. I still hold four shares. Never sold them. Couldn't bring myself to."

Across the tower's plaza, unseen by either of them, Rutger Bayne stood at his office window fifty-one floors up, phone pressed to his ear, knuckles white around the frame.

"She was seen going into a repair shop on Miller Street," Anya Voss's voice said, flat and unhurried, the same voice that had once signed his shares away in a hotel suite twenty-two years earlier. "Your intern. With Hale."

"I'll handle it."

"You've had twenty-two years to handle it, Rutger." A pause, thin and precise as a blade. "Friday's meeting goes exactly the way it's supposed to go. Or the next name in that archive box that comes out isn't yours."

The line went dead. Rutger stood alone at the window a long moment, looking down at a plaza full of people who had no idea that somewhere below them, three blocks north, a girl he'd never met was rebuilding, letter by letter, the worst thing he'd ever done — and that the woman who'd made him do it had just threatened him with something worse.