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The Pocket Watch
Tanggal publikasi:
2026-09-20 17:40:04
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RIVAL FOUNDATIONS The Pocket Watch
The wedding planning resumed in earnest the following week, Halloran's defeat freeing up a mental and emotional bandwidth that both of them threw gratefully back into flowers and seating charts and the dozens of smaller decisions still waiting to be finalized before the ceremony, now scheduled for the second Saturday in June, chosen specifically for the particular quality of evening light that fell through the Whitmore's restored windows that time of year.Vivian became a regular presence during this stretch, driving in from her studio most weekends to help with details that required an outside eye, and Sienna found herself genuinely looking forward to these visits, the easy, unhurried company of a woman who had, over the past several months, become something closer to a mother figure than she'd expected, given how carefully she'd once approached anything connected to the Cross name."Your mother's coming to the fitting next week," Vivian said, one Saturday afternoon, the two of them
RIVAL FOUNDATIONS The Proxy Fight
Halloran's next move arrived without warning, delivered through a filing with the state's business registry rather than a board memo, a formal notice that he intended to nominate an alternate slate of directors at the company's upcoming annual shareholder meeting, a maneuver Nadia explained to Damian with the particular grimness of someone delivering genuinely bad news."It's a proxy fight," she said, laying the filing out on his desk. "He's not trying to remove you through a board vote this time. He's trying to go around the board entirely, appeal directly to shareholders, and replace enough seats to control the company outright.""Can he actually pull that off?""Depends on how many shareholders he can convince. His twelve percent plus your father's old stake gives him a meaningful base. If he can rally enough of the smaller institutional holders, especially the ones who've been quietly nervous about the company's direction since the hearing, he might have a real shot at this."Dami
RIVAL FOUNDATIONS The Guest List
Wedding planning, Sienna quickly discovered, involved a volume of decisions she hadn't fully anticipated, an endless cascade of choices about flowers and seating charts and catering menus that felt, some days, almost comically small compared to the crises she'd spent the last year navigating, and on other days felt surprisingly weighty in their own right, each decision a small brick laid toward the life she and Damian were building together."I never thought I'd miss arguing about structural budgets," she told Priya one evening, surrounded by a spread of catering samples across the loft's largest table, each one labeled with increasingly elaborate descriptions that had started to blur together after the fourth hour of tasting. "At least with budgets I know what I'm fighting for.""You're fighting for delicious food at your own wedding," Priya said. "I'd say the stakes are comparable, honestly, given how much you care about things being done properly."The Whitmore had proven, as Priya
RIVAL FOUNDATIONS Governance Concerns
The engagement announcement broke publicly within days, first through a modest press release Nadia drafted with careful, understated language, and then, inevitably, through the same web of business gossip that had carried the news of their relationship months earlier, until by the following week it seemed like every publication that had covered the Whitmore's saga had also weighed in on what several outlets were calling, with varying degrees of tastefulness, the city's most improbable love story.Sienna found most of the coverage warm, even generous, the public having apparently decided, sometime over the past year, to root for the two of them rather than treat their relationship as a scandal, though she suspected that goodwill had less to do with romance and more to do with the very public reckoning both families had gone through to arrive here.Halloran's response arrived through considerably less public channels, a formal letter to the Cross Holdings board requesting an emergency s
RIVAL FOUNDATIONS The Rooftop
Sienna knew something was happening the moment Marcus insisted on personally driving her to Cross Holdings instead of letting her take her own car, inventing a story about a surprise walkthrough of a rooftop garden Damian was supposedly considering for a community event, a story that fell apart almost immediately under the weight of Marcus's obvious discomfort with lying to her."You're a terrible liar," she told him, in the elevator, watching the floor numbers climb past the building's upper offices toward a rooftop she'd never actually visited despite months of coming and going from Damian's office below."I've never claimed otherwise," Marcus said, not quite meeting her eyes, a small, betraying smile tugging at the corner of his mouth that told her everything his careful non answer wouldn't.The elevator doors opened onto a narrow stairwell, the final flight leading up to a rooftop door propped open just enough to let the evening's cold air spill down toward them, and Sienna felt h
RIVAL FOUNDATIONS The Ring
Damian had negotiated multibillion dollar acquisitions without breaking a sweat, had sat across from hostile board members plotting his removal and kept his hands perfectly steady the entire time, and yet standing in a jewelry shop on a Tuesday afternoon, three weeks after promising Sienna a proposal was coming, he found his palms damp enough that he wiped them on his trousers twice before the jeweler noticed."Take your time," said the woman behind the counter, a jeweler named Odalys whom Nadia had recommended with the specific instruction that she was discreet, talented, and entirely unimpressed by the Cross name, which Damian had decided was exactly the combination he needed. "This isn't a decision to rush.""I've rushed bigger decisions than this," Damian admitted. "None of them mattered nearly as much."He spent nearly two hours in the shop, going back to the same tray of rings three separate times before finally settling on something that reminded him, in its quiet, unshowy way,
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