A name that had put a hand on her shoulder at her father's funeral and told her the family would get through this together. "That's not possible," she said, though the words came out thin, unconvinced even by herself. "I'm sorry," Dany said. And meant it, and knew it wasn't nearly enough. "I think your uncle just tried to kill you. " Viven didn't cry and didn't shout and didn't do any of the things Dany had half expected.
She set the print out down on the workbench with a steadiness that scared him more than tears would have and reached for her phone. Viven, he caught her wrist gentle before she could dial. If you call him right now and he knows we're on to him, whatever evidence he hasn't already covered his tracks on disappears tonight. So, what do you want me to do? Sit across from him at his own dinner table and pretend I don't know he tried to have me killed in front of 40 investors.
I want you to let me help you build something he can't talk his way out of. His hand was still around her wrist and neither of them moved to end that. I've done this before. Not boardrooms, but building a case nobody can argue with out of nothing but patience and paper. I know how.
She looked at him for a long moment at the flight suit he still hadn't been allowed to change out of. At the steadiness in him that hadn't cracked once since a helicopter nearly killed them both 11 hours ago, and something in her chest, some old instinct that had kept her guarded and alone since the day her father died, loosened just slightly. "Okay," she said. "Show me. " Neither of them noticed in the maintenance bay's far corner that the security camera covering that workbench had gone dark 40 minutes earlier, its feed quietly rerouted by someone who still had administrator access. He was never supposed to keep after his last review someone who was at that exact moment three floors up, watching them through a different lens entirely.
And already dialing a number he'd sworn to himself he wouldn't use again tonight. Marcus let it ring twice before Richard picked up his voice as unhurried as ever, as if it weren't past midnight. As if the woman he'd nearly had killed that afternoon wasn't three floors below him, piecing together exactly who'd done it. They know, Marcus said. Not everything, but enough.
For the first time since Marcus had known him, Richard Callaway didn't answer right away. And in that silence, Marcus heard something he hadn't expected to hear from a man who never once in 10 years had sounded anything less than certain. Then we move up the timeline, Richard said. Finally. Tomorrow.
Before she has time to build a case anyone will believe. Marcus closed his eyes and thought about a paper crown at a Christmas party a decade ago and said, understood and hated himself for how easily the word still came. The company's outside council looked at the printouts for 11 minutes without saying a word, which Vivien had learned in 18 months of running this place was never a good sign. "It's compelling," the lawyer said finally. "It's not enough.
He tried to kill me, Vivien said in front of 40 investors. He tried to kill an aircraft's tailrotor, proving intent, proving it traces to Richard specifically, and not some contractor cutting corners, proving he knew the risk to a passenger versus just the risk to the company's reputation. That's a different case. And right now, you have circumstantial paper and a badge number that leads to a man in Arizona who'll say whatever he's paid to say. The lawyer closed the folder.
If you move on a board member with this much money and this little proof and it doesn't stick, he'll own this company by Christmas and you'll be the CEO who cried wolf at her own uncle. Dany stood by the window, arms crossed, saying nothing. Because it wasn't his fight to argue, and he'd learned a long time ago which battles were his to walk into. So what do we do? Viven said, "Wait for him to try again.
You get him to say it himself," the lawyer said. On the record in a room where it can't be walked back later. Everything else is just paper he can afford to make disappear. Richard Callaway came to the office two days later unannounced the way he always had since Viven was a little girl who used to run down these same halls looking for him instead of her father because her father worked too much. And Richard always had time for her, always had a peppermint in his coat pocket, always made her feel like the smartest person in whatever room she was standing in.
She hated sitting across from him now. How much of that memory still lives somewhere in her chest, tangled up with everything she now knew? "You look tired," he said, settling into the chair across from her desk like he owned it, which in a way that made her stomach turn, he technically half did. "This whole gearbox business. " "Terrible. I've told the board I want a full audit of every maintenance vendor we use.
We should have caught this ourselves years ago. We should have. " Viven agreed, watching him with a stillness she'd practiced in the mirror that morning. How's your pilot, Whitfield? Richard said the name carefully like he was trying it on. Quite a thing what he did up there.
Should have seen it coming. A man with that background. You knew his background. I know everyone who touches an aircraft with my niece's name on the tail, Richard said and smiled. And for one unguarded second, something moved behind his eyes that wasn't warmth at all.
Careful with him, Vivien. Men like that carry things you can't see from the outside. Debts, obligations, old loyalties. You never really know what they're really doing here or why. It took every ounce of control she had not to flinch because she understood in that moment exactly what he was doing.
He wasn't threatening her outright. He was planning a different story. One where Dany was the danger and Richard was the concerned family patriarch, ready and waiting the moment she needed someone steady to lean on. Thank you for your concern," she said. "I'll take it under advisement. " He left a peppermint on her desk on his way out, same as he had since she was 7 years old, and she sat looking at it for a long time after the door closed.
Feeling sick in a way that had nothing to do with Candy. The board meeting that Thursday went worse than she'd expected, though not for any reason, Richard orchestrated directly. A junior board member, one of the few who genuinely liked Viven and had no idea what was actually happening underneath the surface, stood up and suggested gently that perhaps it was time to bring in outside leadership until the safety questions around the fleet were resolved. Someone with more experience managing a crisis of this size. Someone, though nobody said it outright, less likely to have been dating the pilot at the center of the controversy.
I'm not dating him, Viven said too fast and regretted it the second three separate board members exchanged a look that told her the rumor had already made its rounds without her. Whatever the arrangement, the junior member said, not unkindly, optics matter right now. A CEO whose judgment is in question involved personally with an employee at the center of a safety scandal gives the wrong impression at exactly the wrong time. She didn't have Marcus' recorder yet. She didn't have anything but her own word in a stack of paper the lawyers had already told her wasn't enough.
And for the first time since her father died, Vivien Callaway sat in a boardroom full of people deciding her future and felt plainly like she might actually lose. She didn't lose that day. The vote to bring in outside leadership failed narrowly by exactly the margin her father's oldest allies on the board still gave her out of loyalty to him rather than confidence in her. But she walked out of that room understanding with a clarity that scared her. How close it had come and how much closer it would come again if Richard got even one more week to work the room the way only Richard knew how.
She called Dany from the elevator and told him about the vote and about the word arrangement and about how much it had cost her not to defend either of them the way she wanted to in that room. I could stop coming up here, he said quiet after she'd finished. If it makes this easier for you, I'd understand. Don't you dare, she said. Sharper than she meant to.
And then softer. I didn't fight for a week to keep from losing my company just to lose the one thing in it that's actually good. Marcus found Dany in the hanger that night alone, running his hands over the replacement gearbox like he was checking it for lies. The way you'd check a person. I need you to hear something, Marcus said.
I lose my nerve. Danny didn't turn around right away. You've got some nerves showing up here. I know. Marcus' voice had none of its usual polish in it.
3 years ago, I was flying a company plane back from a site inspection in Ohio. Nothing serious, a small charter, but I'd had two drinks at dinner I shouldn't have had. And I clipped a light pole coming into a private strip. Nobody died. A mechanic on the ground broke his arm.