Black Corp occupied the last ten floors of a forty-floor skyscraper.
The floors were divided up amongst the teams and their subsidiaries with the last floor left for the executives. Alisha was currently walking to the conference room on the legal floor.
Her meeting with Manon had gone wonderfully. They had spent the entire day carefully curating her new wardrobe. Manon wanted her to go for fierce, but Alisha still needed to maintain an air of professionality with her fits; she was an executive at a billion-dollar empire.
They had compromised. Manon chose fierce and professional. Ever the businesswoman, Manon suggested that The Leek took paparazzi photos of Manon when she was doing seemingly mundane things like going to work, or shopping, or even the photos shared from internal meetings.
Alisha left Manon’s office with two bags of clothing, with promises to have the rest delivered later when Manon had finished pairing it with the accessories; the bags, shoes and jewelry.
Right now, Alisha was wearing maroon suit pants with a boot cut. Her satin white dress shirt hugged her chest and wavered between provocative and professional. A long coat hung over her shoulders, and it ended mid-shin.
Maroon stilettos decorated her toes, and her hands held an off-white Birkin. If Alisha could say so herself, she looked hot. She looked like she meant business. And as people stopped to watch her pass, she knew she wasn’t the only one who thought so.
It was also going to be a bit strange to them. Alisha was very much a cloth-as-functional type of person. She dressed because she had to, and her outfits were good, but there was nothing memorable about them. Which had been fine.
But now, it simply wasn’t enough for her anymore. She needed to change. She needed to become a new person, and this was the first step to that.
Alisha stepped into the room and found five people sitting. Mina Le, her friend and head of the legal team. Samantha Jim; Jim’s daughter, a black woman with soft features that made her look like she was still stuck in adolescence at her age of twenty-five.
Theresa Aaron, a small Singaporean woman with her hair dyed dark blue; Mahan Matthew, a large white man who stood six feet tall and looked like the suit he wore could barely contain him; and Emmanuel Xhao, a stoic Chinese man who was built like a lean bodybuilder.
“Hey. Good morning, guys.” Alisha sat on the seat positioned at the head of the table and smiled at her team. They were the executives of the legal team, and she had been through hell and back with them. Now, they were about to fight another battle, and she wouldn’t have wanted anyone but them on her side.
“Hey Lish. How are you holding up?” Mina said as Alisha sat down.
“I’ve been good. Have you caught them up to speed?”
“Yeah. Now we just have to rehash how to take Kyle off without it affecting the company.”
“What options do we have open to us?”
Mina tapped her tablet, and a holographic projection of Black Corp’s corporate structure bloomed over the mahogany table. It was a dense web of shell companies, trusts, and holding groups, but at the very center, one name glowed in a soft, golden hue: Alisha.
“It’s cleaner than I expected,” Mina began, her voice dropping into that sharp, analytical tone that had made her the youngest Lead Counsel in the city. “Kyle’s been comfortable. Too comfortable. He’s been operating under the assumption that 'what’s yours is mine,' but on paper, he’s a ghost. Eighty-five percent of the primary holdings—the real estate in London, the tech patents, and the majority stake in the Black Corp subsidiaries—are still tied to your personal estate or the legacy trust.”
Theresa, the small Singaporean woman with the dark blue hair, leaned forward. She didn’t look like a shark, but Alisha knew her mind moved faster than a high-frequency trading bot. “The problem,” Theresa said, “is the Joint Asset Clause under the 2022 amendment. Since he’s a signatory on the Black-Silver account, he has discretionary spending power up to fifty million without board approval. If he smells a rat, he can drain that liquid cash in an hour.”
“Then we cut the nose off the rat,” Alisha said, her voice steady. She set her Birkin on the floor and leaned her elbows on the table. The silk of her shirt shimmered under the fluorescent lights. “I want him frozen out. How do we do it without triggering a red flag at the bank?”
Emmanuel, the stoic builder of a man, spoke up for the first time. His voice was a low rumble. “We don’t freeze him. We reclassify assets. If we move the liquid capital into a ‘Contingent Liability Fund’ for the upcoming merger, his signatory rights won't carry over. It’s a technicality, but it’s legal. To him, it will look like a standard corporate reallocation. By the time he realizes he can’t pull the trigger on a wire transfer, the vault will be empty.”
“And the family resources?” Alisha asked. “The penthouse, the summer estate, the fleet?”
“Those are held under the A.B. Legacy Trust,” Mahan added, his large frame shifting as he adjusted his suit jacket. “As the sole surviving beneficiary and executor, you have the right to appoint a new ‘Asset Manager.’ If you appoint a third-party firm—one we control—they can ‘audit’ the properties. While an audit is in progress, all access is suspended for safety and compliance. We can have the locks changed on the penthouse by 6:00 PM under the guise of a security sweep.”
Alisha felt a cold, sharp sense of satisfaction. It was a surgical strike. No screaming matches, no dramatic confrontations. Just a quiet, systematic erasure of his existence from her world.
“Do it, but leave the penthouse for now,” Alisha said. She looked around the table at her team—her warriors in tailored suits. “Start with the secondary accounts. Freeze the credit lines, revoke the power of attorney he has for the subsidiaries, and move the primary holdings into the new trust structure. I want Kyle to wake up tomorrow morning and realize that while he still has the name, I have the empire.”
Mina smiled, a slow, dangerous expression. “Consider him evicted, Lish.”
Alisha stood up, the long coat swaying at her shins. She felt fierce, just as Manon had intended. This wasn’t just a wardrobe change; it was a total reclamation of power.
“I have a press conference in two hours,” Alisha said, smoothing her maroon suit pants. “Make sure the paperwork is filed before I step in front of the cameras. I want to be able to look at the world and know that everything they see belongs to me, and me alone.”
She turned and walked out of the room, the click of her stilettos echoing against the marble floors like a countdown. Kyle thought he was part of the foundation of Black Corp, but he was about to find out he was just an ornament—and Alisha was done with the decor.