Chapter 480: No Clear Look at Him

Foster set the folder on Dominic’s desk without waiting to be asked, and the summary page on top told him most of what he needed before he opened it.

"Just tell me," Dominic said.

"Down thirty-one percent against last quarter." Foster didn’t sit. "The Summers severance cost more than we modeled once you factor in what followed it. Two of the joint venture partners walked within the week. Neither cited Summers Corp directly, but the timing wasn’t subtle."

Dominic didn’t answer right away. Through the window behind his desk, the city looked exactly the same as it had the week Rafael Summers made his first move, which was almost an insult on its own.

"The board wants a recovery plan by Friday," Foster said. "Something that isn’t just absorbing the hit and calling it market conditions."

"I know what they want."

"This is the fourth account we’ve lost since the Mythos rejections went public. People are starting to ask the question out loud instead of just thinking it." Foster set a second sheet on top of the first. "Stock’s down another six points this morning. Two board members called my office directly instead of yours."

"Which two."

"Does it matter?"

It didn’t, and Dominic didn’t ask again. He didn’t need Foster to spell out what the question was. Two failed Mythos Group applications had already cost him credibility he couldn’t buy back with a press release. Losing Summers Corp on top of it wasn’t a wound the company could absorb without the market noticing. It was the kind of number that showed up in headlines, then in ratings downgrades, then in the calls board members made to each other before they called him.

Foster gathered the folder and left him alone with it, and Dominic sat there running the same math he’d been running privately for two years now.

He’d met the man exactly once. A call from a number his own IT team couldn’t trace had led to a single meeting in a hotel suite the man had chosen himself, the lights turned down low enough that Dominic left without ever getting a real look at him, just an outline in a chair and a voice that didn’t waver once through the whole conversation. He’d known things about Blackwood’s exposure that only someone inside the deal should have known, and he’d offered a way to recover the ground Dominic was losing, fast, before the board started asking the kinds of questions that ended careers. A leveraged position, aggressive but calculated, the kind of move that could put Blackwood back on solid footing within two quarters if it landed the way he’d said it would.

Dominic had signed off on it without bringing it to the board. He’d told himself it was temporary, a bridge, something he’d unwind before anyone else had reason to ask about it once the numbers turned.

The numbers hadn’t turned. He’d known that for two weeks now and hadn’t said it out loud to anyone, not even Diana.

His phone rang at eleven, less than an hour after Foster had gone, a blocked number, and he already knew who it was before he picked up.

"You’ve seen the Summers Corp news," he said. No greeting. He never used one.

"I’ve seen it."

"Then you understand the timing isn’t in our favor." His voice stayed level, the same register it always used, whether the news was good or catastrophic. "The position needed the Summers revenue as a hedge. Without it, the exposure widens considerably."

"Widens how much."

"Enough that I’d advise against checking the number before lunch."

Dominic closed his eyes. "I want out. Whatever it costs to unwind this now, I’ll cover it. I’m not riding this down with the rest of the company."

"You can’t unwind it now without realizing the loss in full." His tone didn’t change, flat and unhurried, as if this were a conversation he’d already had once and expected to have again before it was over. "The position only works if it’s allowed to run its course. Pull out today and you lock in the worst version of this. Stay in it, and there’s still a path where it recovers most of the way back."

"You told me two quarters. It’s been two years and we’ve lost Summers Corp."

"I told you the calculation accounted for variables within a reasonable range. Rafael Summers’s board coup wasn’t a variable anyone could have priced in." For the first time, something in his tone sharpened into an edge Dominic hadn’t heard before, gone again before he could name it. "You’re already committed past the point where walking away costs less than staying. I’d have told you that regardless of who called first today."

Dominic sat with the phone against his ear and said nothing for long enough that the man spoke again.

"I’ll send updated figures by end of day. In the meantime, I’d keep this off the board’s agenda a while longer. Panic from that room won’t help either of us."

The line went dead before Dominic could answer that either of them had anything left to be helped.

He put the phone down and stayed at his desk long after the office had emptied out for lunch, running the numbers the man had already run for him, arriving at the same place every time. He was in too deep to leave and too exposed to stay, and the man on the other end of that call held both facts like they cost him nothing.

Diana called around two, asking if he’d be home for Nicholas’s parent conference, and he told her yes before he’d checked whether it was true. She asked if everything was all right at the office. He said it was handled, the same answer he’d been giving her for weeks now, and she didn’t push, the way she’d stopped pushing a long time ago.

The woman he’d humiliated in front of half of Montclair’s elite eight years ago hadn’t left his head all day, not really. He’d been so certain he’d taken her empire apart for good. Hers had rebuilt itself into something untouchable since, while his was coming apart in a phone call from a man whose face he’d never seen. He’d spent eight years believing he’d won something. Sitting alone with the numbers in front of him, long after the office had gone dark around him, he understood for the first time exactly how little he’d actually held onto, and how much of it had never really been his to keep.