Bound By Blackmail

Chapter 3: The Numbers Don't Lie

Another 40 minutes passed before the bank opened, but Clara had already called twice, left one voicemail that started professional and ended somewhere closer to furious, and had pulled every invoice Montgomery & Associates had issued in the last six months across her kitchen table like evidence at a trial. She worked the way her father had taught her to work a structural failure: start at the point of collapse and trace backward, sentence by sentence, until you find the exact beam that failed. In six months of conscientious and proper and timely invoicing, someone had set a fraud flag on her account, and she was going to know who had done it and what it meant for her.

By 6 a.m. she had a working theory and no proof, which was, she thought grimly, the story of the last 11 months of her work life. The scandal that drove off her clients had never had proof behind it either, just a rumor, timed too well to be accidental, that Montgomery & Associates had cut corners on a permit for a downtown renovation. She had fought that rumor with statistics, with inspection reports, with every good tool available to her, and watched it cost her three contracts anyway. Though she wasn't going to let this new flag cost her a fourth, and she was absolutely not going to let it cost her the meeting at 10 o'clock, whatever that meeting turned out to actually be.

Over one shoulder she carried her laptop bag and a straight spine that she inherited from a father who'd walk into a construction site one day when it had a lot of guys twice his size up to his neck, and calmly told them that their scaffolding was going to kill somebody. It had. Two weeks later they ignored him. She had lived by tales like this, that being right was no guarantee to protection, that you had to be right and loud and willing to be disliked for it, and she had spent her whole career trying to be all three at once without becoming her father's ghost.

Across town, Julian was already three hours into his own morning, most of it spent undoing a public relations disaster his father had started before sunrise. Marcus had given a quote to a financial paper off the record, except nothing involving Marcus Vance ever stayed off the record for long suggesting the marriage clause was "a formality, easily arranged," language that made Julian sound less like a man in crisis and more like a man shopping for accessories. Julian had spent the last two hours on calls with the board's more skeptical members, using the specific, measured charm that had gotten him through a hundred hostile negotiations: warm enough to disarm, precise enough that no one mistook the warmth for softness.

It was a skill his father had never attempted to develop, mostly because Marcus had never needed anyone to like him, because he'd rather be feared than liked, and Julian had decided early that he intended to need less fear and more leverage of his own kind. He was really, really good, the kind of good that came from paying closer attention to people than they expected a man like him to pay. It was, he privately suspected, the only part of himself his father had never managed to touch, and he protected it accordingly, the way you protect the one load-bearing wall nobody else knows is holding up the house.

He checked the time. Nine-forty. A woman he had spoken to for just a few minutes was about to enter his building to either save his family's company or in a nice or not so nice manner tell him to suck it up. In the end, after 15 years of doing everything right in advance of any deal to prevent it from backfiring, he realized he had no idea and didn't know what to expect, and that the lack of knowledge, not the challenge, had indeed kept him quite alert since he hung up the phone the previous night

His assistant knocked once and let herself in without waiting for an answer, which meant it was bad. "Sir. There's a situation with Ms. Montgomery's meeting."

"She cancelled?" He asked.

"No." His assistant hesitated in a way that told him this was worse than a cancellation. "Her bank flagged her business account for fraud review an hour ago. It's frozen pending investigation. If she's coming here to discuss a financial arrangement, Legal is going to want eyes on this before you sign anything. The timing alone is going to draw attention if the press connects the dots."

Julian went very still, the particular quietness of a man recalculating a variable he hadn't accounted for. Fraud flags on a firm already fighting off one manufactured scandal did not happen by accident, not this close to a nineteen-day deadline that only a handful of people even knew existed. Someone was moving faster than he'd expected, and moving specifically against the one person he'd already decided, with a certainty that unsettled him, that he needed on his side of the table.

"Get me everything on that flag," he said. "Who filed it, when, and why. And do not let Legal near this meeting. I want her walking in here believing this is still a clean negotiation, not a crime scene."

"And if it isn't clean?"

Julian looked out at the harbor, at the skyline his family had spent three generations arguing into existence, and thought about how quickly a single planted rumor could bring down something that had taken decades to build a lesson, apparently, someone else in this city had learned just as well as he had.

"Then I want to know who's targeting her before she walks through that door," he said. "Because if this is connected to the takeover, Ms. Montgomery didn't just get unlucky. She got chosen."

The outer office was indicated by the elevator chime. Nine fifty-eight.