44. Dominic
Dominic
“Gentlemen. Thank you for coming on short notice. I’ve provided you each with a deck.”
“A deck,” Caleb repeats, from the far end of my conference table, his tone incredulous.
The deck is eleven slides, printed and bound, because some part of me apparently believed that if I formatted my own disappearance properly, the four men across the table from me would treat it like business.
Bennett hasn’t touched his copy. David is reading with his brows pinched tight.
Logan turned to the financials page ninety seconds ago and hasn’t moved, which from Logan means the numbers are clean and he hates them.
And Caleb is just staring at me with his mouth open.
Nine days since a courier drove what was left of my marriage to Queens in a cargo van, five days since the official end of our sixty-day trial.
I’ve stopped drinking, started running again, and discovered that a man can be technically functional in the way a building with the power cut is technically standing.
Roz met me in my office this morning with a look I haven’t had the courage to interpret.
The proposal on the table is the first piece of business I’ve put together since the gala.
It’s good work. That’s the horror of it. It might be the best structuring of my career.
“Slide one,” I say, clicking the PowerPoint so it comes to life on the screen behind me.
“Cruz Financial merges into Mercer Capital. Full integration—my book, my team, my carry. Bennett’s shop absorbs everything at a friends-and-family valuation your board will frame and hang.
Slide four covers retention packages for my people; nobody so much as loses a parking spot.
Slide seven, transition timeline: thirty days, during which I hand off every relationship I have.
” I click through the slides, noting they’re not turning pages with me.
“And slide nine. On close, I step down. Full exit. Non-compete, advisory title if the optics need it, but I’m out—of the firm, and of Chicago. ”
The silence that follows is heavy enough to buckle the floorboards. I set the clicker on the boardroom table, making sure the plastic aligns perfectly with the wood grain. It’s a small, necessary anchor.
Caleb is the first to break. “You’re liquidating yourself.”
“I’m executing a strategic merger,” I correct smoothly. “It’s a natural consolidation of assets.”
“It’s a distress sale,” Logan says. He finally looks up from the financials, pushing his glasses up his nose.
“You’ve undervalued your own book by at least forty percent.
Factoring in market share and projected yields, you’re essentially handing Bennett the keys to a kingdom for pennies. Logically, it makes no sense.”
“The valuation reflects the accelerated transition timeline,” I reply, my voice perfectly calibrated. Not a single tremor. “I want a clean break, Logan. Clean breaks cost money.”
David flips a page over, smoothing the edge of the deck with his thumb.
“And the non-compete? You’ve structured this so tightly you couldn’t trade a municipal bond in this zip code for five years.
You’ve built a legal cage, locked yourself inside, and handed Bennett the key.
” He looks up, his gaze pinning me. “I read hostile discovery for a living, Dominic. Usually, the hostility is aimed at the other party. Not yourself.”
I hold my ground, clasping my hands behind my back so they don’t see them shake. “The legal architecture is sound. If your firm wants to bill me for a second opinion, send the invoice.”
I turn to the only man who hasn’t spoken. Bennett is staring at the closed cover of his deck. He still hasn’t flipped a single page. He hasn’t even touched it. He just sits there in his tailored charcoal suit, radiating absolute, immovable authority.
“Bennett,” I say, shifting into the pitch tone I’m trained for. “Your infrastructure can absorb my team in thirty days. We eliminate redundancies, you take the AUM, and Mercer Capital instantly corners the remaining sector market share. It’s the easiest acquisition of your career.”
Bennett slowly lifts his gaze. His steel-blue eyes are frighteningly calm, assessing the wreckage beneath my suit.
“I’m not buying your firm, Dominic.”
“Bennett—”
“And I’m certainly not accepting your professional suicide note masquerading as an M he’s looking directly at me.
“You are unilaterally restructuring her environment without her consent. You are anticipating a need she hasn’t articulated, executing a solution she didn’t approve, and framing it as a sacrifice.
On top of that, your model has an unsupported assumption. ”
“Which one?”
“That Jenna’s location is causally dependent on yours. She never said she would return to Chicago if you left. You invented that outcome because it makes the sacrifice feel functional.”
“I know her.”
“You always know,” he says. “It’s how you predict the needs of everyone around you. But might I point out that you predicted what she needed at the gala too. That knowing is your hubris. Most of the time it’s right. But sometimes . . . it isn’t.”
I close my eyes. “Jesus Christ, Logan.”
“He’s right,” Bennett says, standing up.
“Jenna is not a rescue operation. She doesn’t need you to clear the territory so she can timidly return to Mercer Capital.
If she wants her job back, she is perfectly capable of walking into my office and taking it.
If she wants Chicago, she’ll conquer it with you in it—she’s that bold. ”
“She doesn’t want me in it,” I bite out. The polished exterior finally shatters. The raw, bleeding truth spills out onto the table, staining the perfectly bound decks. “She packed her bags. She asked for the out. I signed the annulment papers, David. They’re in her hands. It’s done.”
David doesn’t flinch. “I know. Logan told me.”
“Then you know this is the only play I have left.” My chest heaves.
The air in the room suddenly feels too thin to breathe in.
“I have to leave. Because if I stay in this city, if I operate in the same zip code, I will spend every waking second trying to win her back. I will tear down every boundary she sets. I will suffocate her. I cannot be near her and not fight for her.”
I look down at the clicker, my small, pathetic anchor.
“And I can’t stay here, knowing my actions drove her back into the house she spent eighteen years fighting to escape.”
The silence in the conference room is no longer heavy. It’s devastating. I drop into my leather chair, burying my face in my hands. I am completely, utterly out of moves.
“You’re an idiot,” Caleb says softly. It isn’t a taunt. It’s a diagnosis.
“You’re not leaving,” Bennett states, his voice leaving absolutely no room for negotiation. “I’m rejecting the merger. Caleb and David will refuse to draft the legal transition.”
“And if you attempt to hire outside counsel,” David adds, crossing his arms and leaning back, “Caleb and I will personally bury the proceedings with every legal tactic at our disposal until we’re all drawing pensions.”
I drag my hands down my face, exhausted to my very bones. Waiting is not in my DNA. I am built for action, for leverage, for finding the pressure point in a room and pressing until the deal closes.
“Then somebody tell me what the alternative is,” I say.
“Because from where I sit, the alternative is I keep my company and my city and my friends, and she spends the next thirty years in exile from her own life so I can keep mine. I’ve run it every way.
This is the only structure where she gets everything back. ”
“Except you,” David says. “She doesn’t get you back.”
“She doesn’t want me back, David.” It’s the first time I’ve said it out loud, and the room flinches like I hit it. “She asked for the eraser. I gave it to her. This is just the cleanup.”
“And what happens when she finds out you did this?”
“We’ve established that—she comes home.”
“No. She learns you dismantled your company, abandoned your friends, and left the city because she asked you for space. You think she’ll feel free? She’ll spend the rest of her life believing her pain destroys everything it touches.”
I go still.
“You want to prove she isn’t a project?” he says. “Then stop making her responsible for what you do to yourself.”
Bennett walks to the window with his hands in his pockets and looks at the skyline he owns a respectable percentage of, and when he turns around, he’s not the wartime general. He’s the guy who taught me how to tie a bow tie in a Harvard bathroom.
“I’m not signing it,” he says. “Mercer won’t take your book.
Not at that valuation, not at any valuation.
If you want to dissolve your life’s work, you’ll have to find a buyer who doesn’t love you, and I’ll poison the well with every one of them, and you know I can.
” He nods at David. “And your lawyer won’t draft it. ”
“Conflict of interest,” David says. “The conflict being that I’m interested in you not doing this. And honestly, if you leave, it’ll break Michaela’s heart. She’s not losing one of her uncles. She’s lost enough.”
I stare at David, the sheer emotional extortion of bringing his daughter into a corporate buyout leaving me temporarily speechless.
“That’s a dirty play, Kingsley,” I say, my voice rough.
“It’s effective,” Caleb counters smoothly, a small, victorious smile touching the corner of his mouth. “And he’s right. You’re stuck with us, Dom. The exile is canceled.”
Logan taps the table. “Statistically, without Mercer Capital as a buyer, and with Bennett actively sabotaging secondary markets, your firm’s valuation will enter a forced stasis. You are effectively grounded. It is financially impossible for you to run away.”
I look at the four of them. The titans of Chicago. The men who know exactly how to corner a market, now cornering me to save my own life. I built an airtight legal cage to lock myself out of the city, and they just dismantled it in ten minutes flat.
“So what do I do?” I ask, the fight finally bleeding out of me. I let my head drop back against the leather chair, staring at the ceiling. “I can’t just sit here in a mansion while she rots in Queens.”
Bennett walks back to the table and picks up my clicker. He tosses it to me, and I catch it on reflex.
“You wait,” Bennett says softly. “You give her a minute to realize she’s the one who holds the keys. She’s Jenna. She’s brilliant. And she’ll figure it out.”