On the third day, Bram convened a virtual meeting with the board.

Adele joined from her hospital room, Finn asleep against her side.

Leopold joined from his private office, already negotiating.

“Vandergriff, you know as well as I do that a liquidity freeze puts three hundred factory workers on the street,” Leopold argued, reaching, as he always did in the end, for the people beneath him to use as a shield.

“And it is precisely because of those workers,” Bram answered smoothly, “that I am not pulling the credit line.”

Adele watched her father’s face flicker — he had loaded a weapon and found it firing blanks.