Dominic read the notice three times before he let himself react to it, a habit left over from years of reading contracts for the clause that would eventually ruin someone. This one didn’t hide its clause. Summers Corporation had terminated every account, every vendor agreement, every shared line of credit with Blackwood Holdings, effective immediately, no explanation offered beyond a single line about "strategic realignment under new leadership."
There had been no warning call and no draft circulated for comment beforehand, only a courier at nine in the morning and a signature line that didn’t require his.
"Get me the accounting team." He said it to the empty office before he remembered his assistant had already gone to fetch them, the request anticipated before he’d finished making it. That was the one advantage of having burned through half his staff twice already — the ones who remained knew exactly how fast he needed things done.
By ten, three people sat across from him with laptops open and numbers already assembling into the shape of a problem. "The Summers account was eleven percent of quarterly revenue," his CFO said, flat, the kind of flat that came from delivering bad news for a living. "Losing it outright, with no transition period, puts us under our covenant thresholds on the Ashcroft loan by next quarter."
"Then we renegotiate the covenant."
"Ashcroft’s not going to renegotiate anything for us right now. Not after the last two headlines." His CFO didn’t say the words Mythos Group, didn’t need to. Everyone in the room had lived through both rejections already, watched him submit two separate proposals to a firm that had turned him down without explanation either time, each failure making the next lender a little less patient than the last.
"Draft a statement," Dominic said. "Something about diversifying our client base being part of the long-term strategy. Make it sound like we saw this coming."
"We didn’t see this coming."
"I’m aware. Make it sound like we did anyway."
His head of communications left to draft it, and Dominic sat alone with the remaining two long enough to run the numbers three more ways, each version landing somewhere between difficult and untenable. He’d built Blackwood back from nothing once already, after the loss that had made him desperate enough to accept a stranger’s shell company and a scheme he’d never fully understood the shape of. He’d told himself, after Arianne’s humiliation had bought him nothing but her family’s contempt and his own conscience keeping him up most nights since, that he was done being anyone’s instrument. He’d rebuilt slower, cleaner, without the anonymous benefactor who’d vanished the same year everything fell apart, without ever telling Dominic a name or a reason.
He still didn’t know who that had been. Some nights that bothered him more than the failures did.
His phone buzzed with an investor’s name he’d been avoiding since Tuesday, and he let it ring out twice before answering on the third pass, steadying his voice before he picked up.
"Robert. I was about to call you."
"I doubt that, Dominic." Robert Ashcroft’s voice stayed patient, unhurried, a man who’d already decided the outcome of the call before he’d dialed. "Tell me what’s happening with Summers Corp."
"A client relationship ended. It happens in this business."
"Eleven percent of your quarterly revenue evaporating overnight isn’t a client relationship ending. That’s a company losing its footing in public, for the second time this year, after a Mythos Group rejection that half of Montclair still talks about at dinner parties." A pause, papers shifting on Robert’s end. "I need to know if this loan is still serviceable, or if I need to start protecting my own position."
"It’s serviceable." Dominic said it with more certainty than the numbers actually supported, the figures from an hour ago still sitting open on his screen, none of them agreeing with him. "Give me thirty days. I’ll have a plan that satisfies the covenant."
"You have fourteen. Not because I want to be difficult. Because that’s as long as my own board will let me carry this quietly." Robert didn’t wait for a response before ending the call, and Dominic sat with the dial tone a moment longer than the silence required.
There was, briefly and without much conviction, the question of who else might take his call if he asked. Gilbert wouldn’t. Had made that plain years ago, before the wedding, before any of this, a door shut so firmly Dominic had stopped testing it. Julian wouldn’t either, and Nate had never had a reason to in the first place. There was no version of reaching toward that group that ended anywhere but a longer silence than Robert’s dial tone, and Dominic didn’t waste the energy imagining otherwise. Whatever bridge had existed there had burned a long time before Rafael Summers ever entered the picture.
His mind went, instead, to the one name that kept surfacing uninvited whenever Mythos Group came up. Arianne had met with two of their executives months ago, a lunch reported in passing by a financial columnist who hadn’t made much of it at the time. That single lunch was the only piece he had, and he’d turned it over more than once, unable to prove it explained why his own proposals had died so cleanly, so procedurally, without a single personal word attached to either rejection. Only the shape of a coincidence that refused to let go of him, the same way the unnamed benefactor from eight years ago kept surfacing on nights like this one, a debt he’d never been allowed to properly understand, let alone repay.
His assistant knocked once and stepped in without waiting for an answer. "The statement’s ready for your review."
"Send it." Dominic didn’t look up from the numbers. "And get legal on the line. I want to know exactly how much room we have before the covenant breach becomes public."
He worked past nine that night, alone in an office that had emptied out floor by floor around him, the city outside going dark in stages while he stayed lit up like the last honest thing left in the building. Nobody called to check on him. Nobody had, in longer than he wanted to count, and by the time he finally shut the laptop and reached for his coat, he’d stopped expecting that anyone would.