"You own the building?" I ask as we pull into an underground garage.
"I own several buildings. This one just happens to have my office in it." He parks in a spot marked RESERVED - CRAWFORD. "Come on."
The elevator is all mirrors and polished steel. I catch my reflection and barely recognize myself. The dress, the makeup I actually took time with, the woman standing next to a man who looks like he stepped out of a magazine spread.
This isn't me.
Except it is.
The top floor is open concept, all glass and chrome. People who look up when Phoenix walks in. His assistant meets us at the elevator.
"Mr. Crawford, the Bangkok team is in conference room A. They've been waiting for twenty minutes."
"Let them wait another five." Phoenix's hand finds the small of my back, proprietary and warm. "Jade, this is Sarah. Sarah, Jade."
Sarah gives me a polite smile that doesn't quite reach her eyes. "Nice to meet you. Can I get you anything? Coffee? Water?"
"I'm fine, thank you."
Phoenix guides me to his office. Corner space, floor-to-ceiling windows on two sides offering an unobstructed panorama of downtown Los Angeles sprawling below. The kind of view that makes you forget you're in a city at all, that makes everything below seem small and inconsequential. His desk is massive, dark wood, organized in a way that suggests he actually uses it rather than just posing behind it.
"Make yourself comfortable." He gestures to a leather couch that faces the windows. "This shouldn't take long."
"What is 'this'?"
"Business." He's already moving toward the door. "Feel free to look around. Just don't touch anything on my desk."
Then he's gone, disappearing into a conference room with glass walls that let me see everything but hear nothing.
I watch him work.
There are six men in that conference room. All of them older than Phoenix, most of them in expensive suits with the kind of confidence that comes from decades of success.
None of them matter when Phoenix speaks.
I can't hear what he's saying, but I can see the effect. The way the other men lean forward. The way they nod. The way one of them tries to argue and Phoenix shuts him down with a look that makes the man's face go red.
This is power. Real power. Not the kind that comes from money, though Phoenix clearly has that. This is the kind that makes grown men defer to someone half their age because they know he'll destroy them if they don't.
After fifteen minutes, Phoenix stands. The meeting is over. The other men file out looking exhausted. Phoenix looks energized, alive in a way I haven't seen before.
He comes back to the office and closes the door.
"Sorry about that. Hostile takeover. They're fighting it. They'll lose."
He says it so casually. Like crushing a company is just another Tuesday.
"Doesn't that bother you?" I ask. "Destroying something people built?"
"I'm not destroying it. I'm making it better." He loosens his tie, and I force myself not to watch his hands. "They were bleeding money, making bad decisions. We'll fix it."
"And the people who work there?"
"They'll keep their jobs. We're not monsters, Jade. We're just better at this than they are."
The confidence in his voice is absolute. He doesn't doubt himself for a second.
"Is that what you do? Buy companies and fix them?"
