When Caleb had told Brad that he’d be coming in early he had absolutely meant it. If the trouble in his company did anything positive, it gave him a renewed sense of duty. It was true that he was independently wealthy and that even a total implosion of his empire wouldn’t do much to hurt his financial situation, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t and shouldn’t still have pride of ownership. His ever-increasing party attitude had dulled that in him, and while he didn’t kid himself that his moment of clarity would be a permanent one, he was grateful for it nevertheless. It was that gratitude he thought about after hanging up with his brother and that gratitude that created such a profound sense of relief in him that he finally slipped into sleep. It was the deepest sleep he’d had in a long, long time and something his body sorely needed. This sleep was so needed, in fact, that his first feeling upon waking was one of profound relief. His body ached, but it was a good ache, the kind of ache that came from sleeping so hard that you hardly even moved. A really good sleep could make a man feel completely new again, and although that wasn’t quite the level Caleb had achieved, he felt more like himself than he could remember feeling in a very long time. It felt like a coming home of sorts, only a coming home to himself instead of to a physical place.

It would have been lovely if that unique brand of satisfaction could have lasted, but like all good things, it came to an end. For Caleb, that end was reached as soon as he looked at the clock beside his bed and realized what it was he’d actually done.

“Shit. Shit! You’ve got to be kidding me!”

Eleven o’clock. He’d told Brad he would be in the office by seven o’clock in the morning, and here it was, almost noon and he was just waking up. It felt like a sick joke. All of this time without being able to get any halfway decent sleep, and the one time it actually happened for him was the one time he’d made a promise about his arrival time in the office. It wasn’t like he had a boss to answer to or anything as specifically bothersome as that, but that didn’t mean that he was alright with totally disregarding the word he’d given. He wanted to maintain at least a marginal level of respect, and sleeping until noon on a Monday was not the way to do that, especially when things were as on edge in the office as they were for him now. His face feeling hot with self-disgust, he hopped out of bed and made a beeline for the bathroom. He rushed through his shower, plagued with the feeling of inability that haunted so many people who needed to move really quickly. He picked out one of his sharper suits, figuring this was not the day to go for casual attire, then stopped to look at himself in the mirror. All in all, it wasn’t half bad. Because he hadn’t spent the night before boozing it up or indulging in any of his other less than savory habits, he looked very much revived. That bloodshot, unshaven man he’d seen so often as of late was gone was replaced by a better-than-average, handsome man with a suit the price of some people’s cars. It wasn’t perfect; there was still some evidence of his poor treatment of his body, as well as a look of painted panic at how God-awful late he was running, but better was better. He would take it. He was actually starting to feel borderline okay, still rattled but okay, when he picked up his phone and gave it a casual glance.

“What the fuck?”

Thirty-two. Just a number, a random number that didn’t necessarily have to mean anything, but in this case, it did, and that something was very far from good. In this case, thirty-two was the number of times his poor, put-upon assistant had called him and gotten no answer. For as long as Brad had been his assistant, which was just under a year, the most times he’d ever called him in a day hovered right around the low teens, and those had been on days when one of their famous clients had gotten himself into a situation that promised to be a total PR nightmare if not handled very delicately. That had been a disaster in the making and had still not garnered the kind of attention Brad had given him this morning. A low, dull fear began to settle into the pit of Caleb’s stomach, and he sprinted for the door of his penthouse loft, a door that also happened to be his own private elevator. It would take him down to his own private level of the parking garage, where his dozen or so fancy cars were housed. He didn’t bother to listen to the voice messages Brad had left, knowing that they would more than likely only make him feel worse. He’d suffered through enough of Brad’s version of a voicemail to know that they never provided any actual information, instead just serving as rambling prophecies of doom and gloom. When he got to his car and noticed that there was a text from Brad as well, however, he opened it, unable to stop himself despite knowing it would only make him feel more desperate. And desperate was the word for it, too, because the text was short, sweet, and to the point: SOS. It was the most succinct Caleb had ever known Brad to be, which created a whole new level of disquiet inside of him. For Brad to have no other words, or no time to use other words, it could mean that things had gotten even worse while he was sleeping away like Snow White waiting for her prince. He was pretty sure that was exactly what it meant, and when he saw the only other text message waiting for him, he was totally sure.

I can take whatever I want.

It was all the message said, and it was from a blocked number, a number without any ID. It could have been from anyone, anyone in the entire world. His numbers were all supposed to be blocked and unlisted, but that didn’t mean that they actually were. In this time, when technology reigned supreme, people could find almost anything if they wanted to, provided that they were the right kind of people, with the right kind of skill set. It was always possible that this message was only a terrible coincidence, but Caleb was somehow sure that wasn’t what was happening at all. No, this was all related, and he’d never been more grateful for his own personal Nancy Drew than he was now. He’d also never been more grateful to have a whole fleet of fast cars, and as he got behind the wheel of his Ferrari, he knew that he was going to push the speed limit as far as he could the whole way to the office. Even if he got pulled over, it was unlikely he would get into any kind of trouble. Every year he donated a substantial amount of money to the NYPD, and it usually kept him out of trouble with the law. It wasn’t why he did it, whether people believed it of him or not, but at times like this, it was a perk that definitely came in handy. With this ace in his pocket, he made it to the office in record time, screeching to a halt in his own personal parking spot so quickly he could smell burning rubber when he stepped out of the car. Although he was typically beyond charming with every person he encountered in the building, whether that someone was one of his junior executives or just one of the men who mopped the floor, on this afternoon he barely even looked at the doorman who gave him a wave. Later, when that same doorman went home to his loving wife, he would tell her that he didn’t know what it was, but something was up for sure if the boss man was treating him like that.

“Mr. Grant!”

“Yes, Chloe. I’m here.”

“Oh! Thank God, Mr. Grant. Everyone has been looking for you. We’ve been—”

“Calling, yes, I know. Please just let everyone know I’m in my office. And buzz me before you let anyone back, will you? I don’t want to be bothered every thirty seconds, alright?”

“Alright…but Mr. Grant!”

Caleb turned, doing his best to ignore the feeling of rushing blood pounding in his ears. Chloe was a good receptionist; she had been for a couple of years now. Even after a Christmas party in which they had both become ridiculously inebriated and wound up in bed together, the pretty young girl had remained the perfect picture of professionalism. All in all, she was a hell of a receptionist, and he didn’t want to alienate her or God forbid, make her cry. (He hated it when women cried and had done so ever since he was small and his mother had used crying jags as a way of manipulating him.) Even so, he was finding it very hard to keep his shit together with the way she was going after him. She was now actually up and out from behind her desk, her hands wringing helplessly as she click, click, clicked towards him on heels that looked like torture devices.

“What? What is it, Chloe? Unless it’s really important, unless it’s an actual, honest to God emergency, I don’t want to hear it right now. It’s already been a hell of a day, and I’ve got what promises to be a mess of a migraine creeping up the back of my neck.”

“That’s the thing, Mr. Grant,” she answered in a squeaky voice that reminded him of a mouse, her frightened eyes darting every which way in order to avoid actually having to look at his face. “It is important.”

“What is it then? If it’s so important, tell me what it is so that I can decide for myself whether or not it’s something I actually need to deal with right now.”

“To be honest, I’m not exactly sure what’s going on, but I know that you need to be there for it, whatever it is. Brad’s been by my desk about a million times, and each time he stops by, he looks even more panicked than he did the time before. The last time was about a half hour ago, and I could have sworn he was choking on something. His face was so red. It was almost purple!”

“And did he have anything to say that might clue you into why he needed to see me so badly?”

“He did. He said I was to tell you to join him in conference room number one the moment you stepped out of the elevator.”

“Just him?”

“No, I’m afraid not. He’s got the board with him as well. The whole board, Mr. Grant. They’re all in there waiting for you.”

Caleb thanked her and then, swallowing hard, began what felt like the final walk a man took down death row before going to the chair. That was what he felt like, a dead man walking. It was his own fucking company, and there was no reason for him to feel that way, but it didn’t stop it from being true. Because the board could make trouble. They couldn’t dethrone him, not completely, but they had a large enough stake in the company to make things incredibly difficult for him if they chose. To top it off, the majority of the members of the board weren’t exactly fans of his. They were mostly older gentleman, several of them men who had sat on his father’s board back when he had still been alive, and they were far from approving of the way he led his life. He knew what they thought when they looked at him, or believed he did. They looked at him and wondered what had gone so terribly wrong. They looked at him and remembered what a good man his father had been, and then they looked at his own behavior and wondered how the apple had fallen so fucking far from the tree.

“Nancy Drew, where are you when a guy needs you?”

He whispered the words to himself, joking of course, but was surprised by the weight of the idea as it took hold in his mind. For some inexplicable reason, some reason that was surely moronic given his present circumstances, Caleb couldn’t seem to get Elsie Morrow out of his head. Sometimes while he’d slept, he seemed to have turned her from something very close to a joke to some kind of a talisman. He had a gut feeling that she was going to be more than a little difficult to work with, something he had intuited from the fiery look in her eyes and her ill-concealed contempt for him, but that didn’t really trouble him. He’d thought it funny, a kind of a challenge, which was something he looked forward to in a world where things were too often handed to him on a silver platter without him having to do anything real to earn them. That was how he’d felt before, but now that he was walking towards a conference room filled with board members—he was gripped by the strange idea that if Elsie were here, she would know exactly how to handle the situation. She seemed like a woman who knew how to handle almost every situation, and he was filled with a sudden desire to track her down and haul her into the conference room along with him. He wouldn’t, of course, that would make him look even weaker than he already felt, but he was surprised by how badly he wanted to.

“Jesus, Mr. Grant! I thought you were dead or something! I swear to God, I thought you got off the phone, got into a car, and rolled yourself into a ditch! Christ, Caleb, you could have given me a heart attack! I’m almost sure I was on the verge of going to the hospital.”

“Brad, calm down, will you? I’m sorry I was later than what I said I would be. Something came up that couldn’t be avoided.”

“Alright, but did Chloe catch you up? Did she tell you what’s happened?”

“No, not really. She told me that the board is here. That’s about it.”

Brad, who must have been straining his ears from conference room one with almost supernatural power, had come hurrying down the hallway before Caleb was even half of the way down it. He looked like a panicky little bird, his tall, thin frame twitching and jumping in all sorts of bizarre ways that he didn’t look like he had any kind of control over whatsoever. His thick blonde hair was disheveled. Caleb watched he ran his shaky hand through it, messing it up further.

“Well, here’s the thing. Everyone on the board got an email, and it has them all kinds of pissed off.”

“Pissed off? Over an email?”

“Well, yes, because it wasn’t just any old email. It was an email of...of warning, I suppose you could say.”

“Warning? Warning about what?”

“About you. It painted a pretty unflattering picture of who you are and the sorts of things you’ve been up to.”

“Is that really so bad? It’s not like rumors mean a whole hell of a lot. That’s the sort of thing we deal with on a daily basis, at least on the PR side of things. What does it really matter if one disgruntled individual has it out for me?”

“It doesn’t really, at least it doesn’t have to, only there was something funny about this email. Each board member received one at seven o’clock in the morning. In the bottom half of the content, it asked if any of them knew where their ‘fearless leader’ was at the moment? It suggested a surprise meeting at nine o’clock sharp, stating that you would be nowhere to be found.”

“So…let me get this straight. These morons get an anonymous email bashing me and saying I wasn’t going to be in the office so they should be, and they all just jumped to attention and did it? Have they any idea how silly that sounds?”

“Right, it definitely would have been silly, except that you weren’t here. The email said you wouldn’t be, and you weren’t. There are some of them on the board that aren’t exactly happy with the way you run things—”

“Sure, the dinosaurs. They won’t be happy with anything I do, not ever.”

“That may be true, but they came in here with axes to grind, and you showing up so late only added fuel to their fire. They aren’t happy, Mr. Grant. Really, I don’t think it’s going to be easy to talk them down off the ledge.”

“We might as well get it over with, then. Try to remember, Brad, dealing with unhappy people is part of what I do best. I’ve built my entire empire around it.”

Brad laughed, and Caleb could see a large portion of the tension and stress melt out of his body. His shoulders relaxed, his face lost the worry lines that were creasing his forehead, and he reached up to smooth his hair back into something resembling professionalism. He headed back towards the conference room, a spring in his step that hadn’t been there before, and Caleb marveled at how little it took to calm the boy down. Only seconds before, he had closely resembled a Pomeranian with an anxiety problem, but after a lukewarm pep talk from good ole Caleb Grant, he looked ready to take on the world. Caleb envied him and wished he felt half as confident as he had made himself out to be and had convinced Brad that he was. He thought again about how much he wished Elsie was with him, Elsie with her fuck-off expressions and her quick wit and questioning mind. He was walking into the lion’s den, he knew that, and for some crazy reason, he wanted this girl he didn’t know from Adam to walk inside of it with him.

“Look at what the cat dragged in.”

“Good of you to join us, Mr. Grant. We were beginning to think that you might not be gracing us with your presence at all on this fine day.”

Those were the first two greetings he received from his board. There were several others, all of them equally sarcastic and less than pleased to see him despite the fact that he was the one they had all been waiting for. Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on the way you were inclined to look at it), Caleb didn’t hear any of the rest of it. It all sounded like a mess of muffled, unintelligible noise to him because the only thing he could see was the fact that his brother was sitting at the board table right beside the seat that was meant to be his own. His brother, who had been given some bullshit title in the company years ago just for the sake of preserving family solidarity but whom Caleb was quite sure had never actually stepped foot inside of the building before. He was dressed in a swanky suit, another thing Caleb had never seen him do, and he was acting like he had every right in the world to be there. When Caleb turned to look at Brad with a “what the fuck is this shit?” look on his face, his assistant could only shrug, his own face turning a dark and dangerous shade of red. Caleb sat down and made a point of not looking at his brother. He tried not even to breathe the same air as him, as he faced his board.

Brad had, of course, been totally correct in his description of the general state of emotions of his board. They were unhappy about many things and saw no problem with using this impromptu meeting, a meeting Caleb had had nothing at all to do with planning, to air each and every grievance. He wasn’t spending enough time at work. He was spending too much time at work but wasn’t getting enough done. He was spending too much time out on the town with too many different women and needed to find a nice, respectable girl to settle down with. He needed to stay away from women in general and basically adopt a monk’s lifestyle until people felt that they could trust him and take him seriously again. The list of things he needed to do and was currently doing badly grew and grew until Caleb was entirely sure there wasn’t one thing he was doing that anyone in the room approved of.

He kept glancing at his brother out of the corner of his eye, half-expecting him to jump in and say something in his defense, but Marlin stayed completely silent. Sometimes he even nodded his agreement, sucking up to the board like he was vying for some kind of position in their ranks. The more the board members talked and the more his brother nodded, the angrier he got. After about thirty minutes, he couldn’t even see straight. His head was pounding with a full-blown migraine, and he could actually feel his blood pressure rising. It got to the point where he knew that listening to much more of their complaining was going to end poorly for all of them. With only that knowledge and the picture of Elsie he couldn’t for the life of him get out of his head, Caleb stood abruptly. The movement was so unexpected that several of the members of his large board actually stood along with him, glancing around to see if it was the right thing to do before sitting back down again with flushed faces.

“Mr. Grant? Are we keeping you from something?” One of the senior members of the board asked in a raspy, warbly voice that made Caleb think he’d done just a little bit too much whiskey drinking and cigar smoking in his day.

“No. Or rather, yes, I’m afraid you are. I’ve got someone meeting me in my office and I can’t keep her waiting.”

He saw the raised eyebrows at the mention of a she, and then he bolted from the room. He did his best to make the exit look dignified, but he suspected very much that he hadn’t pulled it off. He slammed his door shut then leaned against it, breathing heavily and appalled by the fact that he was even sweating a little. After he’d calmed down enough to be sure that he wasn’t going to pass out or anything pathetic like that, he walked to his desk and sat heavily, putting his head in his hands. When he heard the door open and close again, he knew who had entered without having to look up. There was only one person who would be so brazen as to waltz into his office without bothering to knock. Even jumpy Brad wouldn’t do a thing like that.

“Marlin. What is it? What do you want?”

“What do I want? That’s all you have to say after a stunt like that?”

“It’s all I’m willing to say, and believe me, you’re lucky for it. What are you doing here, Marlin?”

“I’m here to keep an eye out. I came to make sure you weren’t completely losing it and from the looks of it, I might have been a little bit too late.”