Bound By Contract

Nadia Pov "Before you say anything," my father said, "I need you to remember that I did everything I could." I frowned…Dad, what’s going on? I took a seat across from his desk and waited. He was standing at the window with his back turned to me, which he never did. Marcus Voss believed in eye contact the way other men believed in contracts. You looked away, you lost the room. He had told me that so many times it had become reflex. He was looking away now. "You are scaring me Dad, Just tell me what happened ," I said. He turned around. "The company is gone, Nadia." What!... I screamed "The investments I restructured eighteen months ago didn't hold. The debt compounded faster than I projected, I had to use the asset pool to cover the gaps and by the time I realized it wasn't going to be enough, there was no clean way out." He said. "The creditor holding the majority position has called it." "Who." He paused. "Dad. Who holds the debt." "Ethan Cole." I heard the name and felt something go still in my chest. I had grown up hearing it like a warning. Everyone knew how ruthless he could be if you messed up his investment. Halden Group was his last scapegoat. I was still a teenager when it happened, but I remember it clearly. It was the first time my dad called me into his study to warn me about him. I came back from school and met Maxwell Jonas, my dad’s best friend who is also the director of Halden Group, in the living room. Their expressions showed they were in a bad situation. I later got to know that Maxwell Jonas had been caught in a serious scandal, suspected to have been orchestrated by a rival company. It happened the same week they launched NovaCore, a product meant to generate multimillion profits. Instead, everything went wrong. Investors started pulling out. Their stocks dropped rapidly, and the company was on the verge of bankruptcy. Ethan Cole was the major investor, and when things collapsed, he pulled out his money, enforced the debt terms, and took over the company’s remaining assets. And now, we’re next in line. We need to figure this out before he makes his move. "How much does he hold?" I asked. He told me the number. I ran it in my head against everything I knew. The contracts, the receivables, the property. I ran it twice. "The Gramercy apartment," I said. "Is it in the asset pool?" He didn't answer fast enough. "Is it in the pool Dad?" "Yes." I stood up. Sitting still with that number and that answer in the same room felt physically impossible. I moved to the window he had vacated and pressed one hand against the glass and looked at the street below and thought about Leo's name on that lease. I thought about forty-three people who had shown up to work this morning not knowing. I thought about two years of my life spent inside a company that was apparently already on fire when I walked in every day. "There's a meeting," he said behind me. "Cole's office reached out." "What kind of meeting?" "He wants to discuss terms." "What terms?" "I don't have the specifics yet." I turned around. "You don't have them, or you won't say them." He looked at the desk. "Set it up," I said. "I'll go." "Nadia, you don't have to be the…" "I'll go, Dad." I picked up my bag and walked out. The assistant at the front desk glanced up and immediately back down, which told me she already knew, it also meant that other people had known before I did, which was the part that bothered the most on the elevator ride down. The lobby was empty when I reached it. I pushed through the front doors into the cold and stood on the sidewalk and just breathed for a second. Then I walked to my car, sat down, and called my assistant. She picked up on the second ring. "Mara," I said. "I need everything you can find on Ethan Cole. Company history, reputation, anything that didn't come from my father." A short pause. "How soon?" "Tonight." Another pause, longer this time. "Nadia. What happened?" I looked through the windshield at the parking structure wall in front of me and thought about the name—Ethan Cole again. "Just get me the file," I said. I hung up and sat in the quiet of the car, staring at nothing. My dad might be worried about me handling this, but I know he’s counting on me. He started grooming me for the business when I was twelve. This felt like a test I couldn’t afford to fail. If I did, everything he built would go down with it. But something didn’t sit right. Ethan Cole wasn’t the type to sit down and discuss terms. So what was he planning? My phone buzzed. Mara. One text. Four words. "You need to see this.”