Todos os capítulos de RIVAL FOUNDATIONS: Capítulo 1 - Capítulo 10

Damian Cross had been in the building for eleven hours, which by Cross Holdings standards was practically a half day, when his assistant knocked twice and let herself into his office without waiting for an answer. Nadia had worked for him for a year and a half and had stopped asking permission to interrupt him sometime around month three."You need to see this before the board meeting," she said, setting a tablet on his desk. "The Whitmore bid just went public."Damian looked up from the quarterly projections he'd been pretending to read for the last twenty minutes and felt something in his chest do a small, unfamiliar thing. Interest, maybe. He hadn't felt much of that lately, not about anything with the Cross Holdings name attached to it."The theater on Cannon Street," he said."That's the one. City's finally doing the arts district properly. Full restoration, city funded incentives, historic tax credits, the works. It's going to be the most watched project in Ashford for the next

The email from Eleanor Pierce arrived on a Tuesday, three weeks after the presentations, and Sienna read it standing up, coffee forgotten on her desk, because sitting down felt like it would take too long and this felt like news that needed to be received on her feet.Dear Ms. Marlowe, it began, formally, the way Eleanor did everything. Thank you for your firm's presentation on the Whitmore Theater restoration. The Committee was impressed by Marlowe Design's historical expertise and community standing, and equally impressed by Cross Holdings' technical and financial capacity. After extensive review, the Committee has concluded that neither firm, independently, satisfies the full scope of requirements for a project of this magnitude and civic importance.Sienna's stomach dropped, certain the next sentence was a rejection dressed up in careful language, and then she read it again and understood it wasn't a rejection at all. It was worse, in its own particular way.The Committee is prepa

It took Sienna two weeks to work up the nerve to actually pull the riverfront deal's paperwork, and when she finally did, it was almost by accident, a Saturday afternoon spent cleaning out a filing cabinet in the back of the loft that hadn't been touched since her father's funeral. She found the folder near the bottom, unlabeled except for a date, and she sat down on the floor of the storage room and read the whole thing twice before she let herself feel anything about it.The contract was exactly as bad as she remembered, in the ways she remembered, and worse in ways she hadn't fully understood at twenty six, when the whole thing had happened and she'd been too consumed with watching her father unravel to read the fine print herself. The clause on page forty was every bit as buried as family legend had made it, a restructuring provision that transferred design credit and controlling decision rights to Cross Holdings under a set of conditions that, on paper, looked like standard risk

The storm rolled in faster than the forecast had promised, which Sienna would later think was exactly the kind of detail that belonged in a story like this one, the kind her father used to tell about buildings that seemed to have opinions about the people working on them.They were three hours into a site inspection of the Whitmore's upper mezzanine when the first crack of thunder rattled the old windows hard enough that Devon nearly dropped his tablet. Foster's team had already cleared out for the day, citing the forecast, but Sienna and Damian had stayed behind to walk the scaffolding one more time, checking measurements against the restoration plans before the next phase of work began, and by the time they realized how bad the storm had actually gotten, the building's old wiring had already flickered twice in warning."We should head down," Damian said, as the lights flickered a third time and stayed out for a long, uncertain second before stuttering back on.They were halfway down

The email arrived on a Monday morning, forwarded from Eleanor Pierce's office with a subject line that gave Sienna no warning at all about what it contained: URGENT: WHITMORE PROJECT REVIEW REQUEST.She read it standing at her desk, the same way she'd read the original bid notice three months earlier, and felt the floor shift under her in a way that had nothing to do with the loft's slightly uneven hardwood.The Landmark Preservation Committee has received a formal complaint alleging financial irregularities in the original riverfront development deal between Cross Holdings and Marlowe Design Studio, dated three years prior. The complaint suggests these irregularities may be relevant to Cross Holdings' fitness to serve as a partner on a publicly funded restoration project, and requests a formal review before the Whitmore restoration proceeds further. The Committee is obligated to investigate this complaint and will be pausing active work on the joint venture pending review.Sienna cal