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Wait, what?
Alistair is blinking like he’s trying to process what Drazen’s just said as the Serbian strokes his jaw.
“One of your competitors is about to make a play for your firm.”
My head whips to stare at Alistair just as his yanks to mine.
“And given that I’m your biggest client in billable hours,” Drazen growls quietly. “I was hoping we could talk about that.”
Holy fuck.
4
TAYLOR
“This is fucking insane!” Fumi spits viciously, shaking her head and taking a hefty gulp of her cocktail.
Eloise nods. “How in the hell did Drazen Krylov know before you or Alistair and Gabriel?” she mutters in her musical, French-accented voice.
I shake my head. “He just mentioned ‘connections’. I don’t think we need to pry too hard into that. Anyway, he’s not wrong.”
I take a big swig of wine and then chew on my lip.
The details are still coming in. But the quick version is that Fairchild, Bristol, and Lowe, a huge firm based out of Chicago with branches in London and San Francisco, is making a play for a takeover of Crown and Black.
An exceptionally hostile one, at that.
It’s not the first time Roger Fairchild has tried to sweep our firm under his umbrella. Part of his animosity stems from how fast Crown and Black took over New York. It could also be that the three of us are young. But a huge part of his beef with us is that Crown and Black’s rise in the New York scene effectively blocked his attempt to open a branch here.
The clients we took with us from our respective firms when we set up shop were all clients he was actively hunting. The office space we bought was the same spot he was eyeing. None of this was deliberate, of course. It’s just the way it happened. But Roger is a petty little shit, and when his board vetoed branching into New York because of the business Crown and Black was doing, it sat badly with him.
Since then, he’s made a half dozen attempts to try and bully us into selling to him or working under him as a subsidiary firm.
Both are a hard no.
The brothers and I have worked way too hard to give that asshole a chunk. Besides, we don’t need him. We thought he’d backed off in the last year. But it turns out, he just decided instead to play dirty.
A few months ago, the three of us decided we wanted a branch in Chicago. The market was right; we have New York clients that have a presence there; it just made sense. But instead of opening a whole new office, we went shopping for firms who were looking to sell.
That’s how we found Poulter and Lenz: a once great firm that was on the decline. Their founding partner had recently passed, and a lot of their core clients were jumping ship. They needed cash; we needed a foothold in Chicago. So three months ago, we bought them out, with the stipulation that their employees would all keep their jobs, and we’d get their clients. Win-win, right?
Or so we thought until Drazen’s bombshell earlier tonight. Because now it would appear we’ve walked into a trap. And Roger Fairchild is the prick who set it up.
“How the fuck did they hide that kind of debt?!” Fumi mutters.
“C’mon,” I hiss quietly, bringing a finger to my lips and glancing around. “Not here.”
I mean, it’s a busy bar, and it’s loud. But who knows who’s listening. The only reason I’m even talking about it to either of them despite them not being managing partners is that they happen to be married to the other two managing partners.
“Sorry,” Fumi huffs.
I shake my head and take another big gulp of Cabernet.
It was a two-step trap. Step one was to lure us into buying Poulter and Lenz. On the books, they looked good: decent client base, just falling revenue. And their asking price, given that we’d keep all their employees, was extremely reasonable.
What we just found out is that they were secretly had a lot of debt on the books. Think four hundred million dollars’ worth.
It’s bad enough that the firm we bought is basically a cement ball on a chain bound to our ankles, and the tide is rising. But to make it even worse, step two of the trap just kicked in:
