“Transfer your twelve percent to your brother Nico.

After the scandal you’ve brought on this family, you’re no longer fit to carry the Rutherford name.”

That twelve percent had been left to Adele by her late grandmother, Georgiana Rutherford, the woman who had founded the company out of nothing.

It was not a decorative family asset.

That equity carried the legal right to demand independent audits, to review corporate contracts, to challenge decisions of the board.

It was, in other words, the one lever in the entire company that Leopold and Nico did not control — and it was the precise reason they had been trying to pry it out of her hands for years.