A warped, frightened, backward-looking love, but love all the same.

He had bled for that company.

He had put his own house on the line when it was dying, had stayed up the nights, had carried the weight of hundreds of families’ livelihoods on his own shoulders when Ifeoma was still a girl studying fine art.

The company was not an asset to him; it was the great work of his life, the thing he and Amani had built out of nothing, and he had watched Amani die and then watched Amani’s daughter — young, unproven in his eyes, sick — propose to bet the whole enterprise on a satellite scheme he was certain would sink it.

And so the thing that made Obadiah act was not villainy.

It was terror.