MARRIED TO MY GREATEST ENEMY.

The number on the screen didn't change no matter how long I stared at it. Negative $2.3 million. I'd been staring for eleven minutes. I knew because the clock on Daniel Mercer's wall ticked with the particular cruelty of clocks in rooms where bad news lives loud, unhurried, indifferent to the fact that my entire life was quietly detonating in front of a man who smelled like sandalwood and regret. "Sophia." Daniel folded his hands on the desk. He had the voice of someone who'd delivered verdicts like this before and had learned to soften the edges. "I want you to understand that First Capital values its relationship with Calloway and Co. This isn't" "How long?" I said. A pause. "Ninety days. After which the bank will be compelled to" "How did this happen?" The question came out quieter than I intended. Quieter than I felt. Daniel shifted in his chair. "The Hartwell contract falling through created a gap that your Q3 projections couldn't absorb. Combined with the delayed Series B and the Meridian partnership dissolving." "I know what happened." I did. I'd watched each piece fall like dominoes in slow motion for six months, scrambling to prop one up while another tipped. "I'm asking how we got here when three months ago you told me we had a runway until Q2 next year." Something crossed his face. Fast, and then gone. "Markets move quickly." I looked at him. Really looked. He didn't meet my eyes. I'd known Daniel Mercer for four years. He'd attended my father's funeral. He'd shaken my hand when I took over the company at twenty-three with nothing but a death certificate and a balance sheet that looked like a crime scene. He'd called me brave, which was what people said when they meant foolish. "Daniel." My voice was very careful. "Did someone contact you?" "I don't know what you" "Did someone contact First Capital about our account?" The clock ticked. Once. Twice. "I think," he said, finally, "that you should consider all your options. Including acquisition offers." My stomach turned to stone. "There's been an expression of interest," he continued, reaching for a folder with the particular slowness of a man who knows exactly what he's handing over. "A very generous one, given the current." I took the folder. I opened it. Victor Hale. Hale Consolidated. I closed it. "No," I said. "Sophia, the offer is" "I said no." I stood. My legs were steadier than they had any right to be. "Victor Hale has been trying to get his hands on my father's company for a decade. He'll get it in six months and sell the software to the highest bidder. I won't sign over my father's life's work to the man who" I stopped. Breathed. "No." Daniel stood too. "Then I strongly encourage you to find alternative financing within sixty days. Realistically sixty, not ninety to allow time for processing. If you can't" "I will." I picked up my bag. My hands didn't shake until I was in the elevator. The city looked the same. That was the obscene part. I stood on the sidewalk outside First Capital's glass tower and the city just continued. Taxis and pigeons and a woman arguing on her phone about something that sounded genuinely trivial. The sky was the flat, indifferent gray of early November. I had sixty days to save my father's company. I pulled out my phone and called Lena. She picked up on the first ring, which meant she'd been waiting. Lena Park had been my best friend since college and my COO for two years, and she had an almost supernatural ability to sense incoming disasters. "How bad?" she said, skipping hello entirely. "Bad." "Scale of one to we're moving-to-Bali." "Somewhere around we're considering our options." A sharp intake of breath. "Daniel sold us out?" "He didn't say that." "He didn't have to. Sophia" "Hale made an offer." I started walking. Moving helped. "Through the bank, which means he's been applying pressure for months, which means every door we try to open is probably already closed." I knew something was wrong. I'd felt it the way the Hartwell deal unraveled too cleanly, the way the Series B investor went silent overnight after what had seemed like a done deal. I'd told myself I was being paranoid. I hated being right. "I need you to run the list. Every investor, every potential partner, every avenue. Anyone with the capital and the industry reach to counter a Hale acquisition." "I already ran it." A pause that told me everything before she said the next part. "There's one name." I stopped walking. Around me, the city kept moving. "Lena." "I know." "Tell me it's not." "Knight Enterprises has the capital, the infrastructure, the fashion-tech portfolio, and the specific interest in exactly the kind of software Calloway holds." Her voice was gentle in the way that people were gentle when they were about to say something unkind. "Adrian Knight is the only person in this industry with both the power and the motive to block a Hale acquisition. He's done it to two other companies in the last three years." A beat, "said Sophia. He's the only door that isn't closed." I stood on a Manhattan sidewalk in November and thought about a microphone in my hand and two hundred faces turning toward a stage and my own voice, clear and furious and wrong, filling a ballroom five years ago. I thought about the way Adrian Knight had looked at me afterward. Not angry. Something worse. Unsurprised. Like he'd been waiting for the world to show him, once again, exactly what it was made of. "There has to be someone else," I said. "There isn't." I closed my eyes. My father had built Calloway from a spare bedroom and twenty years of eighteen-hour days. He'd died at his desk, still working, still believing. I had spent four years bleeding for this company because it was the last thing he'd left me. The last real thing. I wasn't going to hand it to Victor Hale. Even if the alternative was walking into Adrian Knight's office and asking for his help. Even then. "Set up the meeting," I said. Silence. Then: "Sophia, he's never going to be just." "Set it up, Lena." I hung up before she could say what we were both thinking. I'd humiliated him in front of everyone who mattered in this industry. I never apologized. And now I was going to walk into his office with my company bleeding out and ask him to save it. The question wasn't whether Adrian Knight would make me pay for what I'd done. The question was what, exactly, his price was going to be. My phone buzzed in my hand. A message from an unknown number. No name. No introduction. I've been expecting your call, Ms. Calloway. My assistant will send you a time. Come alone. He was already expecting me. Which meant he'd known this was coming before I did. Which meant the question I should have been asking wasn't what his price was. It was how long he'd been the one closing the doors.