“What — what happens now?”

Sebastian answered, smoothly, in the even voice of a man reading a verdict.

“Now,” he said, “Iris exercises the immediate default clauses that your son triggered through his criminal misconduct.

It’s all quite standard.

He wrote the trigger himself, every time he moved that money.”

Because that was the elegant heart of it, the part Preston had never seen coming.

Under the emergency financing agreement I had signed three years earlier — the agreement that saved his company, the one he never read — I controlled fifty-one percent of the board’s voting rights in the event that corporate fraud occurred.