“Wasn’t it?” Her aunt tilted her head, the gesture achingly familiar—her father had done the same thing when he was being deliberately obtuse. “Sweeping in with your accusations,your mysterious protector lurking in the shadows… It was very theatrical. Your mother would have been proud.”
The mention of her mother stung, as it was meant to. She let the pain wash through her and pass.
“We both know what you did, Aunt Marina.”
“Do we?” Marina’s brows rose in perfect arcs. “I’m afraid you’ll have to be more specific. I’ve done a great many things over the years—most of them in service to this family and this company.”
She sighed and finally moved around the desk to the chair that had been her father’s. Marina had had it removed, of course, but it had been returned during the board meeting. The leather was soft, worn to a particular shape by years of use—not her shape, not yet, but it would be. She touched the control panel embedded in the armrest, and the office’s smart glass shifted from transparent to opaque, cutting them off from the view and any prying eyes.
“The authorization code,” she said quietly. “Code Delta-Victor-7743-Marina.It was logged in the ship’s emergency backup before the fire destroyed the primary systems. That code is registered to exactly one person in this company.”
For just a moment—a heartbeat, no more—something flickered across Marina’s composed features. Then it was gone, replaced by wounded confusion.
“Ember, darling, I don’t know what you think you’ve found, but I can assure you?—”
“The code was used to override the fire suppression system. To lock out manual controls. To disable the emergency beacon.” She kept her voice steady, though her heart was hammeringagainst her ribs. “Someone wanted that ship to burn with me inside it. Someone wanted my body lost in the wreckage, unrecoverable, so there would be no questions about the cause of death.”
“That’s absurd.” Marina’s laugh was brittle. “Why would I?—”
“Because I was about to turn twenty-one. Because once I reached my majority, the guardianship provisions in Father’s will would expire and full control of the company would transfer to me. Because you’ve spent the last year positioning yourself to take permanent control, and I was the only thing standing in your way.”
Silence stretched between them. The climate control hummed softly, a counterpoint to the tension that thickened the air.
Marina’s mask slipped. Not entirely—she was too careful for that—but enough. The warmth drained from her eyes, leaving something cold and calculating in its place.
“You always were too clever for your own good,” she said softly. “Just like your father.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment.”
“It wasn’t meant as one.” Marina uncrossed her ankles and leaned forward, the pretense of maternal concern evaporating like morning mist. “Alexander was brilliant, but he was also naive. He believed in people. Trusted them. Look where it got him—dead at sixty-two, leaving his empire to a slip of a girl who’d never so much as balanced her own accounts.”
“He trusted you.”
“Yes, he did. His mistake.” Marina’s smile turned sharp and predatory. “I spent thirty years building this company alongsidehim. Thirty years of watching him make decisions based on sentiment rather than strategy. Thirty years of being overlooked, undervalued, and treated as the lesser sibling simply because I had the misfortune to be born female and second.”
“So you decided to take what you felt you deserved.”
“I decided to protect what I’d helped create.” Marina’s voice hardened. “You have no idea what it takes to run an enterprise of this scale. The compromises. The sacrifices. You’ve spent your whole life wrapped in cotton wool, protected from every harsh reality, and now you think you can waltz in and take over?”
Something shifted inside her—not anger, exactly, but a cold clarity that settled over her like armor.
“You tried to kill me.”
“I tried to ensure the company’s survival.” Marina didn’t flinch from the accusation. “You’re soft, Ember. Gentle. Those are lovely qualities in a daughter or a wife, but they’re fatal weaknesses in a leader. I was doing what needed to be done.”
“By murdering your brother’s only child.”
“By removing an obstacle.” Marina’s gaze was flat and unyielding. “It wasn’t personal.”
The words hung in the air between them, obscene in their casualness. She thought of the flames licking through the ship’s corridors, the smoke that had burned her lungs, the desperate scramble for the escape pod. The three people who had died. Not personal. Just business.
She would have watched them scatter my ashes,she realized.She would have wept at my memorial and thanked the boardfor their confidence in her leadership. And she would never have lost a moment’s sleep.
“You’re right about one thing,” she said, surprised by the steadiness of her own voice. “I am soft. I do care about people—their lives, their wellbeing, their futures. I consider that a strength, not a weakness. But I’m not naive, and I know far more about how this company works than you realize.”
She touched the desk’s control panel again, and a holographic display flickered to life between them—documents, authorization logs, transfer records. All of it damning.
“I have copies of everything. The override codes. The financial records showing the shell companies and kickbacks. The communications you thought were encrypted.” She watched her aunt’s face as each piece of evidence materialized. “Enough to have you prosecuted for attempted murder, fraud, and embezzlement. Enough to ensure you never see the outside of a prison cell.”
