The meeting with Rowan's legal team lasted three hours and twenty minutes.
It was held in his study, not the office, deliberately. Elara understood the choice: the office was a place where things were managed. The study was a place where things were decided. The distinction mattered to him. She had been learning his distinctions for five months.
There were four of them: Rowan, Elara, his Head of Legal whose name was Patricia Chen and who had the specific energy of a woman who had seen everything and been surprised by nothing for at least a decade, and a junior associate who took notes with the focused terror of someone aware they were in a room where careers were made.
Elara laid everything out. She had been preparing the presentation since two a.m., not slides, not a formal document, j
