Chapter 4: The Board Meets Early
The call came at six forty-seven the next morning.
Giulietta was already dressed.
She had not slept well, but she had slept — which was more than she had expected.
She answered on the second ring.
"They moved the board meeting up," said the voice on the other end.
Her cousin, Nico.
He had been parked outside Hale Holdings since midnight.
"Seven-thirty.
Emergency session.
Warren called it himself."
"Who's attending?"
"All eight directors.
And someone I didn't recognize — older man, gray suit, came in a car with Connecticut plates."
Giulietta set her coffee down.
"Get me a photograph."
"Already sent."
She opened the message.
The man in the photograph was perhaps seventy.
Upright.
The kind of stillness that came from decades of being the most important person in any room he entered.
She knew him.
"That's Edmund Farris," she said.
Nico was quiet for a moment.
"The Edmund Farris?"
"He was Warren's silent partner on the Brennan contract.
The one that collapsed." She looked at the photograph a moment longer.
"Warren is calling in his last favor."
She hung up and called her father's attorney, a man named Gould, who answered before the first ring finished.
"Farris is at the Hale board meeting," she said.
Gould didn't miss a beat.
"Then they're going to try to restructure the debt before the filing reaches a judge.
If they can get a director vote to reclassify the Aldermoor arrangement as an intercompany loan, they dilute your father's claim significantly."
"Can they do that?"
"Not legally.
But it would take time to untangle, and time is what they want." A pause.
"Giulietta, if Farris is involved, Warren is more frightened than he showed yesterday."
"I know."
"That makes him more dangerous, not less."
She was already reaching for her coat.
"I'll be at your office in twenty minutes."
Gould's office was on the fourteenth floor of a building that smelled of old carpet and serious money.
He had represented her father for thirty years.
He was not a man who used words like *urgent* lightly, and when she walked in and saw two associates already at the conference table with documents spread between them, she understood that last night had not been quiet for anyone.
"Sit," Gould said.
"We have a problem."
"Tell me."
"At eleven-fifteen last night, someone accessed the county records filing system and flagged our breach notice for administrative review.
It's a procedural delay — technically legitimate, but it pushes our court date back by at least three weeks."
Giulietta looked at him.
"Warren's people."
"Almost certainly.
We can challenge it, but not before the board meeting ends." He folded his hands on the table.
"They are buying time to build a counter-position.
If Farris brings outside capital to the table and the board votes to absorb the Aldermoor debt into a new instrument —"
"Then my father's private claim disappears into a corporate structure."
"Yes."
She sat back.
Across the table, one of the associates was watching her carefully, the way young lawyers watch experienced people in a crisis — looking for the moment when composure either holds or doesn't.
It held.
"What do we have that moves faster than a board vote?" she said.
Gould opened a folder.
"The recording."
"I'm not releasing the recording."
"Not publicly.
But if Warren believes you might —" He let the sentence finish itself.
"He already believes that.
It didn't stop him from calling Farris." She stood and walked to the window.
Fourteen floors below, the city was moving at its ordinary pace.
"There's something else.
Something Warren said to Preston after I left the room."
Gould waited.
"He told Preston to find out who else in my family knows about the recording." She turned from the window.
"He's not trying to destroy the recording.
He's trying to find out how contained it is.
Which means he's afraid of something specific on it.
Something beyond the contract conversation."
The room was quiet.
"What else was said in that suite?" Gould asked.
Giulietta thought about the forty-seven minutes.
Most of it she knew.
But there had been a stretch, early on, before she had fully understood where the conversation was going — a stretch where Warren and Preston had spoken to each other in low voices while she was still absorbing what had just happened.
She had been recording.
But she had not yet listened to all of it.
"I need to go back through the full recording," she said.
"Here?"
"Now."
Gould nodded at the associate, who closed the conference room door.
Giulietta set her phone on the table and pressed play.
For the first several minutes, it was exactly as she remembered — Preston's voice, then hers, then Warren's entrance.
But then she reached the stretch she hadn't fully processed.
Warren's voice, lower.
Preston responding.
A third sound she had taken at the time for the building's ventilation system.
She stopped the recording.
"Play that back," Gould said.
She did.
The third sound was not the ventilation system.
It was a second phone.
May you like
Warren's.
And he had been recording too.
