Lucas couldn't have been more impressed with Jayden if he'd tried. As they made their way through the vast, echoing lobby of the company Jayden mostly owned but had no say in the running of, he looked cool as a cucumber, like this was just another day at the office.

Like they weren't there to try and find out who was trying to kill him.

The team surrounded them both. Marcus took point. Jayden was wired up and transmitting like a radio. All Lucas had to do was be silent and observe.

He was good at both those things.

Jo-Ann was there to collect them, and they breezed through the building like visiting dignitaries from another world. She led them as though she hadn't ever met them before in her life, and they took stairs rather than the glass elevators which rendered everyone inside a sitting duck.

Jo-Ann paused at the door to one room whose blinds were all closed. "Can you wait here a moment?"

"Sure," Jayden said.

Lucas let his gaze roam across the open-plan office as Jo-Ann disappeared through the door. There were around fifty employees on this floor, all with their own little low-cut cubicles. At least forty of them were making surreptitious glances toward Jayden and his entourage. Lucas saw curiosity, perhaps even some scandal, but he also saw a surprising amount of hope.

Some of these people wanted Jayden here.

He turned his attention to the door when Jo-Ann opened it and beckoned for Jayden to enter.

Marcus went ahead, scouting the room before he gave Jayden the all-clear. Then Jayden strode in, Lucas on his heels.

Lucas did a swift headcount. Seven men sat at a table big enough for twice that number. All of them white, all of them over sixty years of age, only one of them mildly overweight with the rest still pretty trim. Every single one of them matched the briefing Jayden had run through with the team earlier in the week. Nobody was missing.

Jo-Ann left quietly and closed the door. Marcus took up position by the windows, and Jayden grabbed the seat at the end of the table so that he was facing down the entire board at once.

It was as though the head of the table had suddenly switched ends.

"Well I suppose we can all be grateful that you bothered to turn up on time," declared one of the board, a lean gentleman whose hair was white as a glacier and whose skin was heavily lined. According to Jayden's briefing, this was the Chief Finance Officer, Walton Cooke.

"I'm never late, Walton," Jayden countered as he placed his hands on the table. "I want to take a moment to thank you all for coming today. I realize you all have other things to do than humor shareholders."

"Why are we here?" The demand came from the original head of the table, the Chief Operations Officer, Dr. Mathis Stanhope. He was the portliest man here, his cheeks and nose flush with the telltale red of long-term alcohol abuse.

"I had this idea," Jayden said cheerfully. "You know how sometimes couples go in for a divorce, and lawyers get involved, and everyone gets angry and upset and it just goes on and on and blows out of all proportion-"

"Like this speech," Walton muttered.

"And I thought," Jayden continued, talking over Walton, "what if we just tried mediation instead?" He spread his hands and smiled just as widely. "Why don't we sit down and talk like adults, and hammer out what it is we all want, and maybe we can just get this done with?"

A ripple of derision circled the table like a highly muted stadium wave.

"Is this a joke?"

"This is a waste of time."

"Who let this faggot in here?"

Lucas let his gaze settle on that one while he dredged up the briefing. That gem of a remark had come from the board's Chair, Foster Cox, a sharp-eyed man and the youngest board member at the spry age of 62. If Cox were at all aware that Lucas was looking at him, he didn't show it.

Jayden shrugged. "Look at it this way. Fighting me is going to cost this company money. You're gonna hire the best lawyers, you're gonna be paying the in-house legal team, and it's going to cost you a fortune. Whereas I have a lawyer who is giving me his lowest rate, he's young and tenacious, and I can literally keep selling shares to pay for him if I need to, which puts ownership of this company at even greater risk. You think answering to me is bad enough, but what about when ten people own my shares and like to argue with each other about the way the current board pissed their profits down the drain fighting a lengthy and unnecessary legal battle?"

Lucas began to tune it out. He wasn't here to listen to the ins and outs of Jayden's cover story, he was here to watch the board.

Cox's body language was pure antagonism. It didn't take an expert to see that. Everything in his posture came out of his mouth, too, like there were no filters whatsoever in him. Lucas considered it very unlikely that Cox was capable of hiring a killer or sending death threats and keeping his mouth shut about either. The guy was definitely a gloater.

One down, six to go.

He let his gaze wander to the rest of the board. There was the freshly-appointed new CEO, Orson Westwood. Orson was one of those guys who racked up CEO positions and netted himself a tidy income, so he had no specific loyalty to Deus Pharmaceuticals. He was effectively an outside director, and was most likely only an interim appointment. The guy's resume was littered with one year long positions as he stepped in, got paid half a million dollars, then swooped away again. Westwood had little reason to care about Jayden's shares, his potential for re-entering the company, or even his sexuality, but that wasn't enough to strike him off the list.

The Chief Scientific Officer, Director of Research and Development, was Dr. Carter Rutherford. Rutherford was a quiet man, sixty five years old, whose white hair was little more than a ring around the back of his head. Pattern baldness had taken away the rest. His lined features were sharp, his suit impeccable, and he observed everything while saying very little.

Lucas put Rutherford in the keep net, and moved on to examine the Chief Technical Officer, Director of Information Technology, Dr. Caspian Beckett. The guy had a math doctorate, which was how people used to wind up in IT before specific IT degrees came along, and he looked every inch the kind of guy with a doctorate in math. His white hair was grey at the roots, and completely wild, melting at one point into an equally wild beard. While he did wear a suit, it wasn't an expensive one, and Lucas wouldn't be surprised if under the table Beckett wore sneakers instead of polished leather shoes. Either way, he was also in Lucas' keep net.

And finally, the Vice President, Dr. Brock Covington. Covington was the longest-standing employee of Deus Pharmaceuticals in this room. He'd been there almost at the start, when Jayden's father founded the business almost fifty years ago. Only a year older than Cox, and with deep, dark brown eyes that were stark against his paper-white face, he seemed pretty agitated by whatever Jayden was currently saying, so Lucas tuned back in to the argument.

"You really think that our customers care whether or not the company has a gay man on the board?" Jayden slammed his hand against the desk as he launched to his feet.

Lucas followed his line of sight back to Cox. Why was he not surprised that Cox was the source of Jayden's ire?

"Of course they will," Cox snorted. "They won't even accept a blood transfusion off a fairy, why should they take your medicines?"

Lucas glanced to the rest of the table.

"I'm not sure that'd really be the problem," Beckett cut in. "Ultimately people get the medication their doctor prescribes for them."

"And controlling that choice in prescription is the Marketing team's job," Westwood agreed. "So long as you keep pumping out advertisements telling consumers to pressure their doctor into prescribing your drugs, that pipeline stays intact."

Lucas felt his jaw flex at Westwood's words. People like Tamsin and Lottie were just part of the whole money pipeline so far as he was concerned, but Lucas had to quash that before it turned to anger, because he needed to stay focused.

"But what about when our erstwhile prodigal son starts taking his staff out on dates?" Rutherford finally spoke, his voice calm and soft. "You know that doesn't fly in this day and age. It'll cause scandal, and scandal always impacts share prices."

Lucas looked to Rutherford in time to catch the doctor making direct eye contact with him. There was a deep intellect behind those eyes, but Lucas saw only cold logic at the surface.

"I won't," Jayden snorted. "Why would I do that?"

"Your current example suggests you are more than willing to fraternize with your staff," Rutherford countered, his gaze leaving Lucas and returning to Jayden.

"That's specious logic and you know it," Jayden retaliated. "Is that why you sent me those death threats?"

Rutherford blinked slowly, but Lucas' attention darted around the table instead. He took in the shifts in posture, the narrowing of eyes, the parting of lips, and immediately discounted Beckett, Stanhope, and Cooke.

Covington was the only one who remained utterly still but for the brief gleam in his eye.

"The what?" Rutherford sounded bored. "You think I have time to send stupid notes like this is fifth grade?"

"Death threats?" Cox spat out. "What death threats?"

"You never watch the news, do you, Foster?" Beckett snorted.

The board bickered for a couple of minutes while Jayden walked away from his chair to go get a cup of water from the cooler. He downed it in three gulps, dropped the cup into the trash, then returned to stand behind his chair with his hands on it. "Look. I came here to negotiate with you. I figured we could find a way around this whole legal melodrama you guys seem to insist on, but apparently - despite Carter's insistence - you are all gonna act like a bunch of fifth graders. I think you need to remember that as the sole majority shareholder I can call a shareholders meeting and we get to vote on your jobs. I could fire you all like that!" He snapped his fingers to demonstrate, and the click reverberated around the boardroom. "I'm doing this through legal means right now, but I could just walk back in here tomorrow and hire outside directors to fill all your positions. And you know it. So either you sit down and start negotiating, or I start playing hardball."

There was deathly silence around the table. Lucas could almost feel the rage rolling toward him like an avalanche, thundering in the distance as it gathered speed and mass and became unstoppable.

And then it broke

The room burst into uproar. Grown men were shouting over one-another. Cox, Cooke, Stanhope and Beckett were the most vocal, but even Rutherford and Westwood chipped in.

Covington's features, though, were a mask of hatred, shot directly at Jayden.

Lucas leaned in to murmur into Jayden's ear. "Congratulations. Now they all wanna kill you."

Jayden snorted at him and turned on his heel. "Right. But I'm betting that was enough to tell you who's already tried?"

"Oh yeah." Lucas fell in beside Jayden as they headed for the door. "I'm a hundred percent on this."

He could almost feel Covington's eyes burning into his back as he and Marcus escorted Jayden from the room.