Lucia's conversation with her husband apparently accomplished exactly nothing, because two weeks later, Halloway Maritime Holdings formally crossed the disclosure threshold and requested, through legal channels, a seat on the Cole Industries board.
"He's not backing down," Nadia reported, sliding the letter across the conference table. "If anything, going public with the request suggests he's decided subtlety wasn't getting him anywhere."
"Or Lucia's conversation made him feel cornered," Elena said, "and cornered men escalate instead of retreat."
The board meeting called to address the request was, by any measure, a spectacle Elena hadn't fully prepared herself for.
She'd attended enough of Marcus's old strategic reviews to know how these rooms worked in theory, but sitting at the tab
