By the next morning, while Adele dozed and fed Finn in thirty-minute windows, the board of Rutherford Packaging had suspended Leopold, frozen Nico’s accounts, and revoked access for the three fraudulent vendors.

The forensic team was granted unrestricted access to every corporate server.

But there was one piece of leverage Leopold had never seen coming, because it lived in a part of the company he’d stopped paying attention to.

He had assumed Bram Vandergriff could not touch Rutherford Packaging without buying it outright, and no one was buying.

What Leopold had failed to notice was that for two years, the company had been running on a forty-five-million-dollar syndicated credit line to keep its supply chain moving — the ordinary financial oxygen of a business that size.

And Bram’s private investment firm held the controlling interest in forty-one percent of that debt.