And that same hollowing-out was now his undoing, because a title does not stop being real just because everyone has agreed to ignore it.

The charter still said what it said.

The bylaws still gave the sitting CFO the power to freeze a suspect transfer and demand an audit.

Dorian had made her powerless in every way except the one that was written down, and he had grown so confident in the powerlessness he’d manufactured that he had forgotten to remove the one weapon he could not talk away.

She was going to walk into that boardroom and pick up the authority he’d left lying on the floor, the authority he’d been too arrogant to imagine she would ever use again, and she was going to use it to freeze eight million dollars in mid-flight.

The decorative wife was about to become the CFO of record at 8:22 in the morning, and there was nothing in his elaborate machine designed to stop her, because his machine had been built on the assumption that she would never stand up.