Chapter Twenty-Six: Thirty Days

The email arrived on a Tuesday morning, forwarded from Priya with nothing but a single line above it. This just moved up. Call me.

Ivy found Damien already reading it when she came downstairs, his jaw set in the particular hard line that meant bad news had arrived before his coffee had, the tablet held slightly too tightly for a man usually so careful about controlling every visible sign of tension.

"What is it," she asked.

"The board's moved the shareholder vote up," Damien said, setting the tablet down harder than necessary. "Thirty days. We had almost double that before this morning."

"Why the change."

"Marcus," Damien said, like the name itself was an explanation. "He's petitioned for an earlier date, framed it as urgency around market conditions, some argument about competitive positioning that's technically defensible and almost certainly just cover for wanting to catch me off balance before I've had time to fully shore up support."

Priya arrived twenty minutes later, considerably less composed than Ivy had ever seen her, a stack of printouts clutched against her chest like armor.

"He's been busy," Priya said, without preamble, spreading the documents across the kitchen counter. "I've been tracking board sentiment for weeks. Foster's still undecided, leaning your way but nervous. Two smaller shareholders who were firmly with you last month have gone quiet, which usually means someone's gotten to them. And Camille's been photographed at two separate events with Marcus in the past week, which I don't think is a coincidence."

"Camille," Ivy repeated, something cold settling in her stomach.

"She's never actually stopped circling," Priya said. "I think she's decided Marcus is the better investment right now. Whatever leverage she thinks she has on either of you, I'd assume she's currently deciding how best to use it."

"What kind of leverage would she even have," Ivy asked, though something in her chest already suspected the answer.

"The engagement itself, most likely," Priya said. "If she's decided to publicly question its legitimacy, right before a vote this close, that's not a scandal Marcus needs to manufacture from scratch. He just needs someone with social standing willing to say it out loud first, and Camille has spent months looking for a reason to be that person."

Damien's jaw tightened further at that, the particular controlled anger Ivy had learned to recognize as far more dangerous than any raised voice.

"She wouldn't," he said, though his tone suggested he wasn't entirely convinced of that himself.

"I wouldn't assume anything about what Camille would or wouldn't do right now," Priya said carefully. "Not with this much at stake for her too."

Damien paced the length of the kitchen, the particular contained energy of a man calculating multiple variables at once.

"Thirty days," he said. "That's not enough time to build the kind of support I'd need to feel secure about this vote. I've been assuming I had until at least the end of the quarter."

"What do you need," Ivy asked.

"Time I don't have," Damien said, frustration bleeding into his voice for the first time in weeks. "Or leverage of my own, which is considerably harder to manufacture in thirty days than it is to simply wait for."

Ivy felt the weight of the folder sitting upstairs pulse against her conscience like something alive, the particular cruelty of holding, in her own hands, information that could theoretically hurt Eleanor badly enough to shift the entire balance of this fight, information she could not use without destroying something else entirely in the process.

"I can help," Priya said, already pulling out her phone, shifting into the brisk efficiency Ivy recognized as her way of managing crisis. "I'll start calling the undecided shareholders directly, see if I can shore up at least a few of them before Marcus gets to everyone first. It's not much, but it's something."

"Thank you," Damien said, something grateful cutting through his frustration. "I mean that."

"Don't thank me yet," Priya said, already halfway to the door. "Thank me if it actually works. Thirty days is not a lot of runway for undoing whatever groundwork Marcus has already laid."

She paused at the threshold, glancing back at both of them with something more serious than her usual brisk efficiency.

"For what it's worth," she said, "whatever either of you is sitting on that could actually change this fight, now might be the time to start thinking harder about when to use it. I'm not asking what it is. I trust you'll both figure that out. I'm only saying thirty days makes everything more urgent than it was yesterday."

Priya left quickly, already dialing before she'd fully cleared the front door, and the kitchen fell quiet again, just the two of them and thirty days that had, apparently, just gotten a great deal more crowded.

"I'm sorry," Ivy said, watching him rub a hand across his face, exhausted in a way that had nothing to do with sleep. "This is a lot to be carrying."

"It's not new," Damien said. "It's just closer than I expected."

He reached for her then, pulling her against him, and Ivy let herself be held, guilt sitting heavy and complicated in her chest, because some small, terrible part of her understood that the truth she was withholding might, if she chose to use it, actually help him win this fight faster than anything Priya's frantic phone calls ever could.

She thought about it clearly, coldly, for the first time letting herself actually examine the thought instead of flinching away from it. If she handed Damien the two documents tonight, if he took them to the board himself, framed correctly, carefully, it could shift the entire narrative overnight, not a scandal about a fake engagement, but a story about a CEO willing to expose his own family's wrongdoing rather than protect it, exactly the kind of integrity a nervous board might actually rally behind instead of running from.

It could work. That was the terrifying part. It could actually work, and using it that way would mean weaponizing her father's death for a corporate proxy fight, turning Manuel Reyes into a strategic asset instead of a man who deserved the truth told for its own sake, not as a convenient tool deployed at the moment it became most useful to someone else's boardroom battle.

She would not do that. She understood, holding onto Damien in a kitchen that suddenly felt too small for everything she was carrying, that there was a version of honesty that was actually just strategy wearing a nobler name, and she refused to let her father's memory become collateral in a fight that was, however entangled now, never actually his to begin with.

She did not say any of that out loud. She simply held on, feeling the clock Marcus had set in motion tick louder now, closer, no longer an abstract pressure sitting somewhere in the future, but a real, narrowing window that would, one way or another, force her hand long before she felt ready to have it forced.