Corbin turned on his attorney.

“Is that how you handled her claim?” “It was a standard corporate settlement discussion,” Marshall said smoothly, “to protect the firm from prolonged litigation.” “There was nothing standard,” Lianna said, staring him down, “about pressuring a grieving widow carrying a baby whose father your company killed.” And Corbin, standing in that small room between his own attorney and the woman who cleaned his house, understood that he was looking at the actual machinery of the fortune he had inherited — not the espresso and the market analysis and the contracts, but this: a man in an expensive suit arriving at a pregnant widow’s door with a small check and a stack of waivers and a warning about how the powerful grind down anyone who fights them, timed for the exact moment she was too frightened and too alone to refuse.

And the timing, Corbin understood, had not been carelessness or coincidence.

It had been the strategy.