[Theo’s POV]
Reed Capital's acquisition map glows across both monitors like a patient's chart in a hospital where I'm the disease. Eighteen percent ownership, accumulated over fourteen months of quiet trades and the kind of strategic patience Colin calls "obsessive vendetta behavior."
"Q3 is a graveyard." Colin swipes through the earnings breakdown, each slide uglier than the last. "Southeast Asia thesis collapsed—regulatory exposure wiped forty percent of projected returns. His strategy team lost three senior analysts last month."
"Who's left?" I lean back, arms crossed, watching the numbers confirm what my gut has been whispering for years. The grim vindication of being right about Jake Reed sits in my chest like a meal I ordered but can't enjoy.
"People who can't get hired elsewhere and people too scared to leave." Colin pulls up the org chart—half the senior positions are vacant or filled with names I don't recognize. "Whatever Reed Capital was running on, it stopped. The whole machine is seizing."
My jaw works around the answer I won't give him. A woman with dark curly hair walked out of that penthouse with two suitcases, and the billion-dollar brain behind Jake Reed's empire walked out with her.
Every idiotic risk he's taken since, every hemorrhaging deal, every analyst bolting for the exits—that's a man trying to drive a car whose engine packed up and left him idling in the breakdown lane.
"The board's getting twitchy?" I ask, though the answer is already written across every red number on the screen.
"Three members have taken calls from our intermediary." Colin sets his tablet down with the deliberate placement that means a lecture is coming. "They're watching their equity evaporate while Jake doubles down on a Latin American infrastructure play that makes zero strategic sense."
"Because it doesn't have Annie's fingerprints on it." The words escape before I can cage them, and Colin's eyebrows climb half an inch. Five years of tracing her strategic DNA across Jake's deals, and I still can't keep her name out of my mouth.
"Keep acquiring." I redirect before he can pull that thread. "Target the board-adjacent shareholders—the ones watching their retirement accounts shrink. Below the disclosure threshold, same pace."
Colin makes a note, then sets the pen down with a deliberateness that means he's about to say something I don't want to hear. "How far are you taking this?"
"All the way." No hesitation. The words taste like something I've been chewing for years, and they come out sharp.
"All the way." He repeats it back, testing the weight, his eyes not leaving mine. "Theo—is this still business, or has it become personal?"
The monitors hum. Jake Reed's collapsing empire glows in red and amber, and I stare at the data without answering because every honest response would confirm what Colin already suspects. The silence stretches until he nods once—slowly, the way a doctor accepts a patient's refusal of treatment.
"How's Annie?" He shifts topics with an ease of managing me for a decade. "She's been walking through this office like somebody hollowed her out with a melon baller."
"She's dealing with something." My fingers drum the desk once, then stop. "She won't let me anywhere near it, and my default approach of throwing resources at a problem until it surrenders isn't exactly working."
"Shocking—a woman you hired three weeks ago won't bare her soul to the CEO who also happens to be her college rival." Colin's voice is bone-dry. "Have you tried not being terrifying?"
"I'm not terrifying." The protest sounds unconvincing even inside my own mouth, and Colin's face confirms it without moving a single muscle.
"You made a VP cry during a revenue review by raising one eyebrow." He stands, gathering his tablet. "But sure—warm and approachable. That's the Theo Barnes brand."
My phone buzzes against the desk. Caroline's name—venue tasting for the engagement party, the caterer needs a headcount, and apparently I have opinions about peonies now. I type confirmed and set the phone face-down with more force than glass deserves.
Colin watches the entire exchange—the name, the one-word reply, the facedown burial. His mouth opens, closes, opens again before he buttons his jacket and heads for the door. Six months of biting his tongue about Caroline, and the restraint is costing him a stomach ulcer.
"Colin." He stops, one hand on the frame. "The Latin American play Jake's running—pull the full prospectus. I want to see how bad his judgment gets without a safety net."
"You want to watch him fail in real time." Not a question—a diagnosis from a man who's known me long enough to stop pretending.
"I want documentation." My voice stays level—a man running a thesis, not nursing a grudge. Colin nods once and closes the door, and the office settles into the particular quiet of a room that knows you're lying to yourself.
The dragon-cat drawing pinned to my desk lamp catches the overhead light. Colin asked about it that Monday—I told him it was very important, which is what Sarah told me, and she wasn't wrong.
I pull up the HR portal. Not Annie's résumé—I've memorized that down to the font, which is either thorough or pathological depending on who you ask. The emergency contact form, the kind of bureaucratic mundanity that shouldn't make my hands go still over the keyboard.
Emergency Contact: Lena Murphy (Mother). Secondary Contact for Dependent: Sarah Reed. Date of birth, typed by someone in HR who had no idea they were handing me a grenade with the pin already pulled. May to February—nine months, clean, undeniable arithmetic I've run fourteen times.
My daughter's name on a form I access because I sign her mother's paychecks. The absurdity should be funny—billionaire discovers fatherhood through an HR portal, a scenario no Wharton coursework prepares you for.
But my throat is doing something that has nothing to do with humor, and I close the file before the screen starts swimming beneath my fingers.
Sparkle Inferno is still pinned to my desk lamp—a dragon-cat breathing fire and glitter simultaneously, drawn by a girl with my eyes who I've held exactly zero times.
She handed me that drawing like a knighthood being bestowed, entirely serious, and the weight of it has sat on my chest every day since. A stone I don't want to put down, even when it makes breathing harder.
The desk phone rings—hard line, not the cell—and reception's voice comes through careful and measured. "Mr. Barnes, Annie Murphy is downstairs—it's her day off, but she looks upset and is asking to see you immediately."
My hand is reaching for my jacket before the sentence ends, which tells me everything I need to know about my own objectivity. "Send her up."
I stand at the window—Manhattan stretched below in glass and steel—and wait for a woman who won't let me in to walk through my door asking for something she'll hate herself for needing.