He called an emergency meeting of the Ravenscroft Group board, in the glass boardroom at the top of the company’s tower, and he arrived armed.

He came with two psychiatrists whose good opinion he had purchased, and with a thick sheaf of medical logs — a decade of them, forged and backdated and impressively detailed.

He intended to invoke an old incapacity clause buried in the company’s charter, a provision that would strip Cosima of her voting rights and her inheritance both, and declare her husband an unfit trustee in the same motion.

“My daughter is not well,” Alaric told the assembled board, his voice heavy with a father’s practiced sorrow.

“She never has been.

And in her condition she has become the instrument of a man who married her for her fortune — Caspian Ashmoor, who is even now siphoning what he can before the courts can stop him.