He believed his authority was his own creation, earned and therefore owned.

And in that one motion, Fiona holding open a folder, he was made to see the truth he had spent six years refusing: that his power had never been his.

It had been lent to him.

Every corner office and every deference and every introduction as the man who ran Vance Global had been a loan, extended by a dead man through a living daughter, secured against a trust and a bloodline he had married into and mistaken for something he had built.

He had strutted through borrowed rooms calling them his.