It wasn’t a total surprise. Evelyn Hart had floated the idea to me yesterday, in a call that lasted nine minutes and tasted of defeat. But hearing it aloud, in this room, was a new flavor of betrayal. I counted to three before I spoke.
“Is this a joke?” Celia Monroe said, beating me to it. “She’s the only Stillwater left. The name’s on every bottle. You want to hand the keys to an outsider, in front of the whole world?”
“It’s not just the optics, Celia,” said Lila, voice tight. “There’s precedent. When the Koch brothers tried to take Brown-Forman—”
Bennet cut her off. “That was a buyout, not sabotage. You’re mixing apples and oranges.”
I let the argument percolate for a minute, my own pulse thumping loud in my throat. Then I pushed back from the table and stood. It was a petty thing, standing, but I needed every inch of height I could muster. My voice, when it came, was colder than I felt. “Let’s not insult each other’s intelligence. This isn’t about crisis management. It’s about my last name. You want to burn it off the labels and run up the stock price before we ever get to trial.”
Marcus smiled then, but it was all teeth. “Your name is both our greatest asset and—today—our greatest risk. The FBI has already requested a deposition from you. Media requests are flooding our switchboards. As a fiduciary, I have no choice but to recommend your recusal.”
“Fuck your recommendation,” I said, which got a visible jolt from half the room. “I’ve done this job since my father’s last day in the hospital. I signed every batch, tested every bottle, and slept here on a cot during the first recall. If you think I’ll step down because of a few headlines—”
He cut in, voice like a razor. “Not a few. A tidal wave.”
“And I’ll stand against it.” I met his eyes, finally, and saw the real Marcus—the one who’d made his fortune off of other people’s dead companies, who’d slit throats with a handshake and left you smiling while you bled out. “You want to replace me? Put it to a vote.”
Lila, to her credit, didn’t look away. “It’s on the table,” she said. “All in favor of temporary executive suspension, say ‘aye.’”
There was a murmur—no outright support, but no immediate dissent. Evelyn Hart’s hand hovered, as if she might abstain, but Marcus’s presence boxed her in. Two hands went up, then a third. Bennet didn’t move, but Celia slammed her palm on the table.
“Enough. This is goddamn insanity.”
Marcus lifted a finger. “Ms. Stillwater, you may recuse yourself from the vote for objectivity’s sake.”
“I’ll stay,” I said. “And when this is over, I’ll fire every single one of you who voted to replace me.”
There was silence, absolute and total, the kind that makes your ears ring.
I stared at Marcus, daring him to press it. For a second, he looked at me with real curiosity—maybe wondering if I’d break, or cry, or pitch a fit like his last three “recalcitrant” CEOs had done. But I didn’t. I just stood, arms at my sides, as the entire boardroom balanced on the edge of a knife.
Finally, Bennet cleared his throat. “I’m voting against the motion,” he said. “Carrie’s got more bourbon in her blood than any of us. And if she goes, the rest of us are next.”
Celia nodded, her chin high. “Two votes to keep her. Are we really doing this, Marcus?”
He shrugged. “It’s on the record. The motion fails.”
A rustle swept the room, not relief but the twitchy aftershock of a disaster averted by inches. Marcus closed his folder, the smile back but slicker, now. “Very well. The record will show a full and fair process.”
Lila looked like she’d swallowed a live rat. Evelyn Hart stayed stone-faced, but her eyes drifted to me, a flicker of admiration—or fear?—in the glance.
The meeting broke in silence, everyone filing out with the clink of tumblers and the sharp hush of a group that had nearly staged a coup but now had to pretend they were “one big family.” I didn’t sit back down. I left the boardroom last, Marcus’s eyes drilling the base of my skull until I rounded the corner at the end of the hall.
In the corridor, I felt the sweat break, the tremor in my hand finally making its way to the surface. But I kept moving, head high, past the row of family portraits that now looked like a police line-up of ghosts. My father’s eyes followed me the whole way, daring me to flinch. I didn’t.
I made it all the way to my private office before I broke. The outer door clicked behind me with the satisfying finality of a bank vault, and the world outside dissolved to a low-grade hum. The first thing I did was hit the lights, then the second thing, because the way my hands shook made me flip the wrong switch. The third thing was to go straight for the mirror and yank down my collar.
The bite mark Shivs had left at the gala had gone from raw red to a thing of nightmare: a ring of bruised flesh around the base of my throat, outlined with jagged black. Only now it wasn’t a bruise. Not exactly. The skin there had darkened, the color crawling under the surface, vein by vein, until what staredback in the glass was a perfect, undulating circle—a tattoo that shimmered with its own heat.
I touched it, not gently, and the sensation was electric, the pattern throbbing in time with my pulse. For a split second, I thought I saw something move in the lines. It was just blood, I told myself. Just blood and adrenaline and last night’s animal magic.
But it burned. It itched. It called to me like a fucking siren.
I opened the top drawer of my desk and found the little tin of bourbon-infused salve I kept for cracked lips and worse days. I smeared a finger over the mark, half-expecting the cooling tingle to ease the fire. Instead, the skin there hissed, bubbled, and sucked the ointment down like it was starving.
The knock came exactly as the pain peaked. I jerked my shirt closed, winced, and made a show of straightening the bourbon bottles lined up like soldiers on the credenza.
“Come in.”
