Todos los capítulos de RIVAL FOUNDATIONS: Capítulo 11 - Capítulo 13

The Landmark Preservation Committee's review opened on a Thursday, in a hearing room considerably less friendly than the ballroom of the gala had been, all fluorescent lighting and folding chairs and a long table at the front where Eleanor Pierce sat flanked by two committee members Sienna had never met, both of them lawyers by trade, both of them looking at the assembled parties with the careful neutrality of people who had already decided this was going to be an unpleasant few weeks.Sienna sat beside Marcus, a folder of her own documentation squared in front of her, and watched Damian take his seat across the aisle with a legal team of four behind him, Nadia included, all of them dressed like they'd come from a funeral instead of a hearing. He caught her eye once, briefly, before the proceedings started, and something passed between them that wasn't quite reassurance, because neither of them had anything reassuring to offer the other, but wasn't quite despair either."This review e

The story broke two days later, first in a business trade publication and then, within hours, everywhere else, a headline that made Sienna's stomach drop the moment Priya showed it to her on her phone: CROSS HOLDINGS FOUNDER ADMITS TO DELIBERATE CONTRACT MANIPULATION IN EXPLOSIVE PRESERVATION COMMITTEE HEARING."It's not wrong," Priya said, scrolling through the article with a grim expression. "That's the thing. Every word of it is basically accurate. It's just also a nightmare for the Whitmore project."By noon, three more outlets had picked up the story, each one adding its own angle, most of them framing the joint venture itself as compromised, tainted by the very history it was supposed to be moving past. Sienna's phone had buzzed steadily all morning with calls she didn't answer, a reporter, then two, then someone from a local news station requesting comment, and underneath all of it, a growing dread about what this kind of public attention would do to the fragile progress the re