“We’re going to the board.

At eight.

And you’re going to tell them the truth — all of it, including your part.”

There was a bitter symmetry in it that she appreciated even through her exhaustion.

Dorian’s whole plan had depended on her title being empty — on the CFO role being a courtesy, a line on a charter that meant nothing because everyone had long since stopped thinking of Linnea as anyone who might actually use it.

He had spent years hollowing it out precisely so that it could never threaten him, encouraging the board to route around her, encouraging her to think of herself as retired, building a consensus so thorough that the authority still technically hers had come to feel like a fiction.