Trusting the Billionaire

Chapter Eighteen: Angry Halden

Across town, in an office that overlooked the river from a floor high enough to make the boats look like toys, Halden Cross stood at the window with his phone pressed to his ear.

"I wanted to believe it was a rumor," he said, his voice low and dangerous. "But my internal sources have confirmed it. Kings Capital did not buy Bellamy Trust. They invested enough to pull it out of calamity."

On the other end of the line, Tom, the head of his legal team, went quiet for a beat too long.

Halden was furious. Not the loud, red faced kind of furious that men in movies displayed, throwing things and shouting obscenities. His was the quiet kind. The kind that settled into his chest like a stone and stayed there, cold and heavy, while his voice remained level enough to be mistaken for calm.

He had wanted Bellamy Trust. Not as a trophy, not as a headline, but as a foundation stone. A bank with old money history and a name still respected in certain circles, folded into his portfolio of profitable ventures. Something he could point to when the Federal Finance Agency sat down to choose which private capital partners it would trust with the new public private lending framework. He had run the numbers a dozen times. Bellamy Trust, under his banner, would have been the difference between being invited to that table and being left outside it entirely.

Now he had not just lost the deal. He had lost it to Marshall King who is already on the list.

"What happened?" he barked into the phone.

"Please calm down, sir," Tom said, remorse thick in his voice, even though none of this was his doing.

"I tried. I drafted the contract exactly the way you wanted it, sir. Juicy terms, above market valuation, board seats, the works. We spoke to her people two days before she signed with Kings Capital. She told us herself she was still deciding, that she'd pick a date for the signing soon." Tom exhaled. "I am as shocked as you are, sir."

"I am sorry, sir."

"Sorry does not fix things." Halden's jaw tightened. "I need solutions."

He hung up before Tom could offer another apology, tossing the phone onto his desk with enough force that it skidded and nearly went over the edge.

He turned back to the window, hands braced on the sill, and let himself feel the full weight of it for exactly thirty seconds. That was the rule he had set for himself years ago. Thirty seconds to feel whatever he needed to feel, and then it was time to think.

King. Of course it was King.

It was not the first time. It would not, he suspected, be the last. Every time Halden positioned himself for something worth having, Marshall King seemed to materialize a half step ahead of him, as if he had some private line into Halden's own strategy sessions. The construction bids two years ago. The logistics acquisition last spring, the one Halden had spent eight months quietly assembling before King swept in with an offer nobody in the room had seen coming. And now this. A struggling bank with a dead founder and a daughter running the show, a deal Halden had considered practically won, gone in the space of one week.

He thought of Joan Flakes, the central bank contact who had passed the warning along in the first place, who had also relayed his offer to buy the bank outright. She had seemed genuinely surprised he hadn't gotten a yes. He believed her. Joan had no reason to sabotage him, she simply believed Audrey Bellamy deserved options, and had presented his offer as one of them. It wasn't Joan's fault that Audrey chose to keep her name on the door instead of selling it outright to the highest bidder.

That detail nagged at him now more than anything else. He had offered to buy the bank clean, no strings, a number generous enough that most owners would have signed without blinking. King, according to what his sources were telling him, had not bought anything. He had invested. He had left Audrey Bellamy sitting exactly where she'd always sat, at the head of her own company, only now propped up by King Capital money instead of drowning under it.

It was, Halden had to admit even as it turned his stomach, the smarter play. A woman who had spent two years fighting to keep her father's legacy alive was never going to sell it to a stranger for a check, no matter how large. But a partner who let her keep her name on the door while quietly becoming a major shareholder? That was a story she could live with. Family bank saved by discreet, personal investment. It practically wrote its own headline.

And it would look exactly like family, exactly like personal conviction, to the Federal Finance Agency committee that decides who gets a seat at that table.

Halden's hand curled into a fist against the windowsill.

He needed to know the terms of the contract between Bellamy Trust and Kings Capital, he could have Tom's team pull the filings for that soon. How had King known to move before the bank's troubles were even public? How had he gotten close enough to Audrey Bellamy that she trusted him with something this personal? Halden had built his reputation on being the man who moved first, who read the market before anyone else even opened their terminals. To be beaten by this particular punch, by Kinga, sat wrong in a way that had nothing to do with money.

He picked his phone back up and called his assistant instead of Tom this time.

"Get me everything public on the Bellamy Trust and Kings Capital deal. Every filing, every statement, every photograph. And find out if there's been any personal angle reported. Anything about King and the Bellamy woman beyond the business."

He wasn't sure yet what he was looking for. But something about the timing, the speed, the way King had managed to make a hostile opportunity look like a rescue, told him there was more to this than a well drafted term sheet. Men like King did not usually bother making things look gentle unless gentle served a purpose.

If there was a personal angle, a crack somewhere in how convenient this all appeared, Halden intended to find it. He had lost the deal. He was not yet ready to concede the war for the federal partnership, and he was certainly not ready to hand Marshall King an uncontested path onto that shortlist.

There was still a way to remedy this. There was always a way, if a man was patient enough and ruthless enough to look for it.

He sat down at his desk, opened his laptop, and began making a list of everyone who might know something about how a bank manager with a reputation for keeping her head down had suddenly become close enough to Marshall King to hand him her family's legacy on quiet, personal terms.

Somewhere in that list, he was certain, was the thread that would let him pull the whole thing apart.