Damien
Termination hadn't stripped me of everything. That was the miscalculation Adrian had made, assuming that cutting off my title and my office and my seat on the board meant cutting off my capacity to still be dangerous. He'd forgotten, conveniently, that I'd spent six years building relationships that existed independent of my formal position, favors owed by people who didn't particularly care whether my name still appeared on Blackwood Dynamics letterhead.
Rachel had taken the fall harder than I had, her own termination costing her considerably more given her lack of family name to fall back on, and our engagement had ended within days of the story breaking, her fury at discovering exactly how expendable she'd been in my larger calculations entirely understandable, if inconvenient.
