Chapter 18 What the Lawsuit Says #3
The study in the opera house was on the upper east level, a room that had once been, she suspected, a music room or a library annex — the bookshelves were built into recesses clearly designed for something, the acoustic quality of the space was warmer and more enclosed than the rest of the building, and the desk, which Cassian had sourced within forty-eight hours of their arrival with the practiced efficiency of a man who had relocated his working life multiple times and knew what he needed, faced a window that looked onto the internal courtyard rather than the gardens.
She had asked him once why he'd chosen that orientation instead of the view.
He'd said he found the courtyard more useful — it had no horizon to distract him.
She was three steps from the door when she heard Roland Croft's voice.
She stopped. Roland was Cassian's head of corporate strategy, a sharp, unhurried man in his early fifties who had appeared at the opera house two days ago with a hired car and a leather satchel and the air of someone who had not slept properly since the IPO timeline shifted.
She liked Roland — he was, of all of Cassian's inner circle, the most likely to acknowledge that she was in a room — but his presence here, now, on a morning that was already carrying its full weight, registered as a complication.
She pushed the door open.
Cassian was at the desk, jacket off, the collar of his shirt open at the throat in the particular way that meant he'd been awake for some time and the tie had come off and then the top button and he was now operating on the remaining fumes of having once looked composed.
Roland was beside him, standing rather than sitting, with the posture of a man who had delivered several pieces of news in the last two hours and had not yet delivered the final one.
Two laptops were open, angled toward each other.
A printed spreadsheet lay on the desk between them, A3 or larger, its columns tight with figures.
Cassian looked up when she entered. His expression adjusted, immediately, into something that was not reassurance but was rather closer to honest concern — the version of his face she'd come to trust, the one that appeared when he stopped managing the room and simply saw her.
"How was the call?" he said.
"Thorough," she said. "Harriet thinks she can have it dismissed. Six to eight weeks."
"Good." He held her eyes for a beat longer than the information required, asking the unvoiced question.
"I'm all right," she said. And then, because she had decided to mean things: "I was not all right for about an hour and a half, and then I decided I was done with that."
Roland, with the practiced discretion of a man who had survived sixteen years in Cassian's orbit, found something on his own laptop screen that required his attention.
She crossed to the desk. The spreadsheet was dense — she'd seen IPO documentation often enough now to recognize the column structure — but this one had been annotated by hand, and what her eye went to first was not the columns of figures but the red pen.
Someone had drawn a circle, firm and deliberate, around a name in the third column from the left, midway down the second page.
The name was attached to a percentage figure, and beside the percentage a second, larger figure that represented, she understood after a moment, a combined proxy commitment.
Niles Ashford. The red circle sat around his name like something caught.
Beside his name, the figure was large enough that she understood in the same moment that this was not coincidental timing and not a separate problem.
The lawsuit — vexatious, Harriet had said, almost certainly unwinnable — was not the point.
The lawsuit was the lever. Stall the prospectus, stall the IPO.
Acquire enough proxies in the delay. Apply enough pressure from enough angles at once until something shifted.
Her stomach dropped. Not from fear. From the cold specific clarity of understanding that she had been a variable in a calculation she hadn't known was running.
She looked up at Cassian.
"How long have you known?" she said.
The question was quiet. She had not meant it to be an accusation.
But she felt, with a steady certainty that had been building in her chest since she'd sat on that bench in the garden and looked at a bruised apple still holding its shape, that she was done asking the small version of the question when she meant the large one.
Cassian put his pen down.
"Forty minutes," he said. "Roland brought it this morning."
She looked at the circled name. At the figure beside it. At the precise, deliberate handwriting of the red pen, which was Roland's, not Cassian's.
Cassian's pen, she noticed then, was still uncapped. The Montblanc, dark against the pale spreadsheet. He had been writing something when she walked in — a note in the margin, she could see it now. Her name, above a bracketed calculation she couldn't read from this angle.
She had been part of the equation before he'd had the chance to tell her.
She looked at him, and he looked back, and the study held both of them in its warm acoustic silence while Roland Croft continued, with great professionalism, to find things to read on his laptop screen.
"Tell me all of it," Anya said.