Page 88 of Hostile

“How soon?”

“Monday.” I was already reaching for my phone. “We can’t give her another trading day. The market opens Monday at nine-thirty—the board convenes at nine. Every session the price sits where she’s engineered it, she adds to the position.” I looked at him. “Can Marcus call an emergency session?”

“For cause, yes.” He was already pulling out his own phone. “What’s the cause?”

“Fiduciary breach. Active self-dealing by a family shareholder using material non-public information.” I held his gaze. “That’s not about the advisory arrangement or the consulting fees. That’s about the trading. That’s the BCA-4 vehicle buying Aldridge shares while she had access to non-public information about the company’s financial position.” I paused. “That’s a securities violation.”

Something shifted in his expression. Not surprise—he’d known this was what the documentation would eventually produce. The weight of a man arriving at a moment he’d been building toward, only to find it heavier than he’d expected.

“She’s my sister,” he said, quietly. Not as an objection—as an acknowledgment. The plain, specific grief of it.

“I understand," I said, meeting his eyes. “I’m not asking you to destroy her, Wyatt. I just want you to stop her.” I paused briefly. “There’s a difference.”

He looked at me for a long moment, then at his phone.

“I’ll call Marcus,” he said.

Marcus answered on the first ring, which meant he’d been awake and waiting, which meant he already knew or suspected something was moving.

“Monday morning,” I said. “Emergency session. Full board.”

He took only a moment to respond. “I’ll make the calls.” Another careful pause followed. “Wyatt, is there something I should know before I walk into that room?”

“There’s a new trading vehicle,” I said. “BCA-4. Eight weeks of accumulation, six percent of the outstanding shares. Blair’s been buying since the acquisition pressure began.”

Marcus’s silence had a distinctive quality. “She’s been using the hostile takeover as cover,” he said at last.

“Yes. The takeover gave everyone something obvious to watch.”

“That’s a securities violation.”

“The board is about to discover it. The regulators will eventually discover it. And my sister, who has spent years presenting herself as the adult in the room, apparently believed no one would ever connect the dots.”

Another silence. Then he resolved the conflict in his mind. “I’ll call the board. I’ll also call our outside counsel, Wyatt. I’m sorry. I know this isn’t—” He stopped. “I’ll make the calls.”

He hung up.

I set the phone down on the conference table and looked at the trading data still displayed on Megan’s monitor. At the clean, careful pattern of it—the same architecture Blair had always used, patient, methodical, and invisible until it wasn’t.

She was nineteen when she paid Billy Brown forty thousand dollars. So was I—nineteen, asleep two doors down in the same house, unaware of anything.

She was twenty-six when she’d begun the consulting arrangements.

She was thirty when she’d watched me take over the company and had begun buying shares at a discount, using the hostile acquisition my actions had enabled as the cover story.

She’d been orchestrating my demise for eleven years.

The grief of that was its own distinct thing—different from anger, different from betrayal, something that lived in the place where you kept the people you’d grown up alongside and had believed, despite evidence, would always be something other than what they’d shown themselves to be.

She was my twin sister. We’d shared everything from the start—the same parents, the same house, and the same grandfather’s stories about how he’d built something from nothing with two properties and a handshake. I’d believed she loved that story as much as I did.

She had loved it. I was still certain of that. She’d loved it so completely and possessively that she’d decided the story was hers—that the name was hers, the company was hers, the future of the story was hers—and had spent eleven years building the architecture to make it true.

She’d been wrong about the method, not about the love.

That was the thing I was going to have to figure out how to carry, and I wasn’t going to be able to do it today.

“Hey.” Megan’s voice was quiet from across the table.