Gilbert arrived first, letting himself in through the side door the way he’d done since before Arianne had bothered giving him a key, and by the time Julian and Nate followed twenty minutes later, the dining table had turned into the same kind of makeshift war room it became whenever something needed four sets of eyes instead of one.
"Say what you actually think," Arianne told Gilbert, once the twins had been settled upstairs with a movie and Lexx down for his nap. "Not the version you’d give a reporter."
"I think Rafael just did in one board session what most executives spend a decade building toward, and I think that should worry all of us more than it currently does." Gilbert set his tablet down, the article Arianne had already read three times pulled up on the screen. "A unanimous vote doesn’t happen by accident. He had every one of those board members locked down before the meeting even started."
"Locked down how?" Julian pulled out a chair without being offered one, the habit of a man who’d sat at this table often enough to stop waiting for permission. "You don’t get unanimous consent to remove a founding family without something on every single person in that room."
"Or something they each wanted badly enough to trade for." Nate hadn’t sat yet, still standing with his arms crossed near the window, watching the driveway like he expected someone to arrive uninvited. "Leverage or incentive. Either one gets you there if you’ve got years to build it."
"He’s had years." Arianne kept her voice level. "More than any of us realized, apparently."
"What I want to know is why the first thing he did with that power was cut Blackwood loose." Nate finally sat, pulling his phone out and setting it on the table between them. "That’s not the move of a man trying to stay under the radar. That’s a statement. He wanted it public and immediate."
"Maybe he just doesn’t like Dominic." Julian said it without much conviction, the kind of guess offered mostly to see if anyone would take it seriously.
"Maybe." Nate didn’t sound like he believed it either. "Or maybe there’s something in that partnership he wanted gone before anyone could look at it too closely. I’ve been sitting on those five folders since the forum. Something about the accounts under two of those names touched Blackwood-adjacent structures. I hadn’t connected it to Summers Corp before this morning."
Gilbert’s attention sharpened. "You think this is connected to Howard."
"I think it’s odd." Nate held up both hands before anyone read more into it than he meant. "That’s all I’ve got right now. Odd. Not a line, not yet. I need actual time with the account records before I say anything past that, and Rafael just made those records a lot harder to reach by severing the relationship instead of restructuring it without anyone noticing."
"He wanted them gone, not buried," Gilbert said slowly. "There’s a difference."
"There is." Nate’s jaw worked once. "I’ll pull whatever’s still public before it disappears entirely. If there was anything worth finding in that partnership, we’ve got a closing window, not an open one."
"How long do we have?" Julian asked.
"Days. Maybe less, depending on how thorough Rafael wants to be about covering his own tracks." Nate was already scrolling as he spoke, thumb moving fast across the screen. "Companies don’t usually rush to destroy records this publicly unless someone’s worried about what’s in them."
"You think Rafael knows what he cut loose." Gilbert’s tone made it half a question, half a test of his own theory.
"I don’t think he cares what he cut loose. Men like him don’t check the fine print on something they’re already determined to burn." Nate finally looked up. "That’s actually the part that worries me. If he’d been careful about it, I’d assume he knew exactly what he was protecting. This fast and this public, it reads like a man clearing a table without checking what’s underneath it."
"Which means whatever’s there might still be findable," Arianne said.
"Might be. For a few more days, anyway."
Arianne’s phone buzzed against the table, and she let it sit there a beat, half-expecting another Summers Corp executive testing whether her answer had changed in the last hour. It hadn’t, and it wasn’t. Franz’s name sat on the screen instead, and she picked up before the second ring finished.
"Tell me you’re sitting down," he said, no greeting first.
"I’m sitting down. Gilbert, Julian, and Nate are here too."
"I saw it from the hotel lobby television with about six strangers reading the headline over my shoulder." His voice came out tight, three time zones and an ocean between him and a conversation he wanted to be having in person. "Are you all right?"
"I’m fine. It’s not my company to lose sleep over, and I told three different executives exactly that this morning." She glanced at Gilbert, who was watching her with the same attention Lily had given her at breakfast. "Nate’s found something in the Blackwood severance worth pulling on. Nothing solid yet."
"I hate that I’m hearing all of this secondhand." Franz’s frustration came through plain, no attempt to soften it for her benefit. "Two more days and I’m on a flight I don’t care what the studio says about it."
"You’ll do no such thing. This isn’t an emergency, it’s paperwork with better production values." She allowed herself the smallest edge of humor, enough to hear him exhale on the other end. "Finish what you’re there for. I’ll have the rest of this mapped out by the time you’re home, and you’ll walk into a briefing instead of a crisis."
"That’s not the same as being there."
"No," she agreed. "It isn’t. But it’s what we’ve got for two more days, and I’d rather you finish the job properly than come home to a director who resents you for it."
Franz didn’t argue further, though the silence on the line said he wanted to. Across the table, Nate had already pulled up something on his own phone, scrolling fast through records, racing to beat a door he expected to close any minute. Gilbert had gone back to reading the article a fourth time, still hunting for something the first three passes hadn’t given him.
"Call me the second anything changes," Franz said finally.
"The second anything changes," she echoed, and let him go back to a hotel lobby full of strangers discussing a story that had upended her family before most of them had finished their morning coffee.