He looked at the numbers. Then, at the shareholding register that his assistant had already pulled and placed in his email.

Nine percent now. The quiet five percent that had become nine in the space of a morning. Seb leaned back in his chair. It was not fine. It had never been fine. It had been patient.

Seb looked at his phone. At the unanswered calls. At the messages stacking from board members and advisors, and the two financial journalists who had somehow already found his personal number and were being very professional about requesting comment on a story that was going to run, regardless of whether a comment was provided.

He looked at the city through the floor-to-ceiling windows of his office. His city. His building. His view.

Creedfly was gone. He knew it with the particular certainty of a man who had done this himself enough times to recognise the anatomy of it from the inside.

The rumours were too precise, the timing too surgical, the shareholder too prepared. This was not a stumble. This was a demolition carried out by someone who had studied the blueprint long enough to know exactly which wall to touch first.

And Creed Tech. He looked at the shareholding register again. Nine percent. Climbing.

He had cash flow problems, board members who were nervous, a company that was haemorrhaging confidence by the hour, and somewhere the man who had done this was waiting to see what fell next.

Seb put his phone face down on the desk. Pressed his hands flat against the surface.

He thought about the nursery. About the fourteen minutes. About what had been done in those fourteen minutes and what it was going to cost and whether it was going to be enough, whether any of it was going to be enough to get him what he needed before Julian finished what he had started.

He thought about the baby girl sleeping in a VIP nursery crib. Divina, he thought. Divina Creed.

He had said it out loud in that room. Had planted it deliberately. Had wanted Julian to hear it and feel it the way a man felt something he could not immediately remove.

But sitting here now, with nine percent climbing toward ten and Creedfly in freefall and his cash flow a locked door he did not currently have the key to, sitting here with the quiet of a man who had just walked into a room confident and was now doing the mathematics of how badly he had misread it.

"Did you find out who that Elav guy is?"

Seb’s voice hit the office like something thrown. Not loud exactly too tight for loud, too controlled, but with the particular velocity of a man whose composure had been load-bearing and was now showing the first real cracks.

Demian looked up from the screen.

He had been sitting in the corner of Seb’s office for the last forty minutes doing what he had been doing for the last several years, being the person in the room who saw everything clearly and said most of it quietly and watched Seb do what Seb did anyway.

He had a particular face for this. Not quite resigned. Not quite angry. The face of a man who had been right too many times to feel satisfaction in it anymore.

"No," Demian said.

"What do you mean no.."

"I mean no. Elav is a holding structure. Layered. Three jurisdictions, two of which have disclosure protections that would take months to challenge legally." He paused. "Whoever set it up knew what they were doing. This wasn’t assembled quickly."

Seb stared at him.

"It was already there," Demian continued. Flat. Informational. Giving Seb the facts the way a doctor gave a diagnosis, not cruelly, but without the softening that would make it feel like something other than what it was.

"AP enterprise has been a shareholder, I’m looking at the register now. Sitting at five percent. Not moving. Not speaking. Not attending votes by proxy or otherwise." He looked up. "Just there."

Seb turned away. He went to the window.

Below him, the city moved. His city. Except today it felt less like his than it had yesterday, less than the day before, the ownership of it receding by increments too small to point at individually but collectively unmistakably, undeniably significant.

"Stupid," he said. To the window. To himself. To the register and the holding structure and the four hours that had turned a morning of supposed victory into this. "Useless."

He pressed his knuckles against the glass.

"I can’t lose everything." He said it quietly. Almost to himself. Like he was testing whether the sentence was true by saying it out loud. "I have Seren. I have... I have a baby. I have Amara to..."

"You don’t have Amara." Demian’s voice. Quiet. Not unkind in its delivery but completely without cushion in its content.

Seb turned.

"I need to call Leo," he said, already moving away from the window, already reaching for his phone, the mind pivoting the way desperate minds pivoted to the next thing, the possible thing, the avenue not yet closed. "Or Amira. One of them. They owe me. I helped them, both of them, when they needed it, they have to.."

"Seb."

"Lend me capital. Just enough to buy back the..."

"Seb." Something in Demian’s voice made him stop. He looked at his best friend.

Demian was standing now. He had put the laptop down on the chair behind him and he was standing in the middle of the office with his hands loose at his sides and his face carrying something that Seb had not seen on it very often.

Not in all the years. Not in the building of the company or the loss of money or the making of it back or any of the countless rooms they had navigated together.

This. Whatever this was.

"I told you," Demian said. "I told you. I sat in this office and I told you to be careful and you looked at me the way you always looked at me when you had already decided and were simply waiting for me to finish speaking."

Seb opened his mouth.

Demian kept going.

"And now.." he gestured, one hand moving toward the screen, toward the register, toward the window and the city and the invisible architecture of everything currently coming apart.