The bank of cameras is a living thing. It breathes heat. It waits.
I step up to the lectern with a smile calibrated to calm. My board chairs are arranged behind me like armor. Reporters have their phones up, lenses catching every pin on my lapel, every crease in my suit. The consortium announcement is supposed to be the antidote: oversight, shared governance, transparency. I practiced those words until they tasted like truth.
"Good morning," I begin. My voice is flat, measured. "Thank you for coming on short notice."
Cameras click. A producer in the crowd flicks his wrist. The giant screen behind me snaps to life with a tasteful slide: COVENANT & CHARTER — CORPORATE-GOVERNANCE PARTNERSHIP.
I move through the talking points we designed to be unassailable: escrowed access, dual-authority triggers, neutral trustees, independent audits. I name names, promise timelines, point to the independent oversight board we assembled. I don't mention Lucien's court. I don't have to. The room knows what proximity already implies.
Then the scent arrives like a surf of memory.
Cedar. Salt. Iron.
It's not just recall. The bond is an electric current under my skin. I smell carved wood and sea gusts and him—Lucien’s cologne, impossibly clean and sharp, the scent that always makes my knees remember cliffs. My pulse jumps. For half a second—less—I see him across the room: the tilt of his jaw, the angle of his coat, then a flash of a hand on a steering wheel, rain-slick glass, the bloom of metal and impact.
I blink and the camera zooms in on my face. The anchor’s smile is soft, predatory. "Ms. Park," she says, "will you address the recent allegations tying your consortium to?—"
Someone in the front row throws the question like a stone. "Is the company now under foreign control? Are we selling our infrastructure to an outside power?"
I smile. "This is corporate governance?—"
The giant screen flickers. The room drops a degree.
The video starts.
At first it’s a blur of traffic cam footage: a motorcade moving too fast. Then a flash: a figure overturned, angles cruel and cinematic. The feed jumps—close on a black sedan, the wheel spinning, a gloved hand slamming the horn while someone in the driver's seat scrambles for control. The frame lingers on a crest embossed on the steering wheel: a rearing wolf around a crown.
The sound is a raw, edited composite—shouts, a single gunshot, a voice saying a name. The anchor’s earlier clip bleeds in like venom: "—caught on tape. Security footage shows a vehicle registered to Vale Meridian Trust at the scene."
The room roars.
Board members stiffen. A journalist at my left mutters, "Vale Meridian? But?—"
Lucien.
I should have expected spin. I should have expected everything. Still, my chest tightens as if something inside me is being squeezed.
"That car is registered to Mr. Vale," someone says into the mic. "Is Mr. Vale—Mr. Black—connected to this consortium?"
The bond screams. I taste metal and salt and the bright tang of panic. For a single breath I am somewhere else: an island cliff and a man running, a choice I didn't make. Then I am back—polished teeth, flashbulbs, the lectern under my fingers.
"This consortium is about accountability," I say. "Any suggestion that we condone violence or illegal action is baseless."
A prosecutor's face appears in the corner of the screen. The feed cuts to a close-up of an aide—someone we've seen in charity photos—collapsing. The montage is surgical. It plays to the cameras' hunger. The caption reads: POLITICALLY CONNECTED FIGURE ASSASSINATED. VIDEO: VALE CAR SEEN LEAVING SCENE.
The room splits into two currents: those who will cling to me if I show steadiness, and those who will let us fall because fear tastes sweeter than loyalty.
From the front row a phone lifts, broadcasting the clip to social. Ten thousand viewers in minutes. I can feel my stock feed blinking red on the phone under the lectern—orders, calls, algorithms feeding panic to institutional investors.
"Ms. Park," the anchor presses. "Can you confirm Mr. Vale's involvement with the person in that footage?"
Images ripple through the bond—Lucien's palm, sudden and sure, on a wheel as a crowd surges, his eyes wide and detached. He had told me he would not be here. He had been careful—contingency plans, jurisdictional buffers. We staged this appearance to show combined responsibility and stop panic.
And then the footage appears, with its new calculus.
"I'm not going to speculate on video circulated without full context," I say. "What I will do is?—"
A shout cuts me off. "Is this why you signed the Memorandum, Ms. Park? To shield him? To sell us out?"
