The Billionaire They Buried Alive

The Proxy Fight

The second attack didn't come from the shadows. It came through the front door, dressed up as legitimate business, filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission in broad daylight for anyone to see.

Weston brought the news to Ethan's office personally this time, his expression grim in a way that told Ethan the situation had moved beyond anything a forty-eight hour audit could fix.

"Ashford Holdings has filed for a special shareholder meeting," Weston said, sliding the documents across the desk. "They're calling for a vote of no confidence in your leadership, citing the recent stock volatility and, quote, ongoing questions about the company's governance under untested new management."

Ethan read through the filing carefully, his expression giving nothing away.

"He's using the crisis he manufactured as evidence I'm unfit to lead," Ethan said slowly. "Setting the fire, then pointing at the smoke."

"Essentially, yes. And it's clever, because on paper it looks reasonable. New, inexperienced heir returns after three years, stock drops fourteen percent within his first two weeks, fraud allegations surface, however fabricated. To an outside shareholder who doesn't know the full story, it reads like exactly the kind of instability that justifies a change in leadership."

"How much support does he actually have?"

Weston hesitated. "Ashford holds nine percent of outstanding shares directly. But he's been quietly courting smaller institutional investors for the past week, the kind who don't care about family history or personal vendettas, only quarterly returns. If he can convince enough of them that stability means removing you, he could theoretically assemble a voting bloc large enough to force real change, even without a majority."

"Even though I hold sixty-one percent myself?"

"The vote isn't for full ownership, Ethan. It's a symbolic no-confidence measure, but a strong enough result could pressure the remaining board members into forcing your resignation as CEO, regardless of your ownership stake. It's a reputational weapon, not a legal one. But reputational damage of that scale doesn't just embarrass you. It tanks the stock further, scares off partners, and makes the company considerably easier to acquire piece by piece once confidence collapses entirely."

Ethan sat back in his chair, processing the full shape of the strategy laid out in front of him. Damian wasn't trying to seize the company through brute financial force. He was trying to make the company's own shareholders do the work for him, convince them that Ethan himself was the instability, rather than the man who'd manufactured a fraud allegation against a dead man to create exactly that impression.

It was, Ethan had to admit, a genuinely dangerous move.

"When is the meeting scheduled?"

"Three weeks. Which gives us time, but not much of it."

"Then we use it." Ethan stood, already moving toward the window, his mind working through the problem the way his grandfather had once taught him to, methodically, without panic, looking for the angle nobody else had considered yet. "I want a complete list of every institutional investor Ashford has approached. I want to know exactly what promises Damian has made them, and I want to personally speak with each one before this vote happens."

"That's an aggressive timeline for that many meetings."

"Then I'll need help." Ethan turned back to Weston. "Set up a call with my grandfather's old allies. The families who stood by Carter Global through every downturn for three decades. I want to know who still remembers what loyalty looks like, and I want them standing visibly behind me before this vote takes place."

The personal attack, when it came, arrived two days later, and it was considerably less subtle than the manufactured fraud report.

A gossip column, the kind Ethan had never paid attention to during his years running from this world, published a story quoting an anonymous source close to the Bennett family, detailing the full, humiliating history of Ethan's three years as a live-in mechanic, mocked and belittled by his wife's family, framing him not as a sympathetic figure who'd endured hardship with dignity, but as a man too weak and passive to have commanded respect even within his own household.

"How is a man who couldn't stand up for himself at his own dinner table," the column read, "expected to command the confidence of a multi-billion-dollar shareholder base?"

Ethan read it once, standing in his office with Oliver watching quietly nearby, and felt something tighten in his chest that had nothing to do with business strategy at all.

"Someone in that house is talking to the press," Ethan said quietly.

"Jason Bennett, most likely," Oliver said. "He's been photographed at several events with a woman who works for that same publication over the past few weeks. It wouldn't be difficult to imagine him selling embarrassing details about you for a fee, and considerably easier to imagine Damian Ross paying handsomely to encourage exactly that kind of arrangement."

Ethan set the article down, forcing his expression back into something calm, something his grandfather would have recognized and approved of.

"It doesn't matter," he said finally. "Let them print whatever version of those three years makes for the most entertaining headline. I know what actually happened in that house. So does everyone who was in the boardroom last week when I dismantled Voss and Castellano's fraud in under an hour." He looked up at Oliver. "The people I need voting confidently in three weeks aren't reading gossip columns for their investment decisions. They're reading balance sheets."

But privately, alone that evening in the quiet of the penthouse, Ethan found the article settling into him more deeply than he wanted to admit. Three years of humiliation, reduced to entertainment for strangers who had never once stood in that dining room, never once felt the particular sting of being told to change his shirt in front of people who considered themselves his betters.

He thought of Sophia, somewhere across the city, likely reading the same column, wondering how much of it she'd contributed to simply by staying silent for three years while her family built the very narrative Damian was now weaponizing against him.

His phone buzzed unexpectedly.

A text from an unknown number, though the message made its sender immediately clear.

I didn't authorize this. I'm sorry. Jason's been talking to reporters for money, and my mother knew about it and said nothing. I wanted you to hear that from someone who actually knows the truth, even if it doesn't fix anything.

Ethan read the message twice, something in his chest loosening slightly despite everything, before he set the phone down without responding.

Not yet.

There would be time, eventually, to address whatever remained unresolved between himself and Sophia. But not now, not while a proxy fight loomed three weeks away and a man who had spent his entire adult life quietly building toward this exact moment of vulnerability was watching closely for any sign of weakness he could exploit.

Ethan turned his attention back to the list of institutional investors Weston had compiled, and began, methodically, deliberately, the work of reminding an entire shareholder base exactly why the Carter name had survived for three generations.

Whatever Damian Ross had built out of grief and calculation, Ethan intended to answer with something considerably harder to manufacture.

Trust, earned the old-fashioned way, one relationship at a time.