What saved me was not that I was cleverer than his other targets.

It was that I had spent three years watching how power actually moves inside a company — watching people disguise a grab for control as an efficiency, a courtesy, a favor — and somewhere in the second month of Konstantin’s tender concern, a small trained part of me had recognized the pattern.

It looked exactly like a hostile acquisition dressed up as a merger.

So while he thought he was courting a naive foster girl, I was, very quietly, doing due diligence.

And due diligence on Konstantin Rasmussen returned everything my father had feared and more.

I looked at the pen.