Leo was in a meeting when the call came through.

A good meeting. The kind with glass walls and a long table and eight people whose time was expensive enough that having them all in the same room simultaneously represented a significant investment in expectation. He was mid-sentence when his phone screen lit up on the table beside his notepad.

Seb.

He looked at the name for exactly one second. Then he picked up.

"Excuse me," he said to the table, with the smooth confidence of a man who had learned to make interruptions look like they were everyone else’s good fortune. "I need to take this."

He was out of the room before anyone had time to form an opinion about it.

"I need twenty billion," Seb said.

No greeting. No preamble. No acknowledgment of the meeting Leo had just walked out of or the time of day, or any of the ordinary scaffolding of professional conversation. Just the number, placed down the line like a demand rather than a request.

Leo stood in the corridor outside the glass-walled meeting room. Inside, eight expensive people were checking their phones and pretending not to watch him through the glass.

He almost laughed.

The almost was genuine, the reflex was there, the recognition of the absurdity of the number said that casually, that directly, as if Seb were asking to borrow a car rather than requesting the GDP of a small nation. Twenty billion. Before lunch.

But he kept it contained.

Because Seb had earned, if earn was the right word, if it was a word that could be applied cleanly to what Seb had actually done. Some version of a debt. The Piers gala.

The introduction to Amira at exactly the moment when Leo’s architecture firm was bleeding slowly from the combination of overextension and the particular bad luck of having built relationships with three clients simultaneously who had each, in their own way, let him down.

He had been drowning quietly. And Seb had handed him a rope.

The rope had been Amira. Her eye for the right connections, her access to her family’s network, her genuine appreciation for what Leo was building even when the building was going badly, she had seen what he was doing and had said the right things to the right people and within eighteen months the firm had transformed from a liability into something that appeared, to all external observation, to be exactly what Leo had always claimed it was.

Piers Corporation. Which was doing well. Very well, before going down.

Partly because of what Amira had done. Partly because of Leo’s actual ability, which was real, which had always been real, which had simply needed the right room to be displayed in.

And partly increasingly, quietly, in ways that Leo had become extraordinarily skilled at making look like something other than what they were because of decisions Leo had been making about Piers’ corporation and assets that its board and its stakeholders and the relevant regulatory bodies had not been fully informed about.

Small decisions at first. Adjustments. The kind of thing that existed in the grey area between aggressive asset management and something with a more specific legal name.

Then the larger ones.

Then, in the last eighteen months, decisions that had moved well past the grey area into territory that Leo no longer examined too closely because examination required honesty, and honesty had become professionally inconvenient.

He was bleeding the Piers corporation dry.

He knew this. Had made peace with it the way people made peace with things that were paying for their life by not looking at the full picture at any one time, by keeping his view narrow and his justifications ready and his tracks covered with the meticulous care of someone who understood that the only real crime was being caught.

He was not going to be caught.

He was confident about this.

He had been confident about this for long enough that the confidence had stopped feeling like a decision and had become simply a feature of how he understood the world.

So twenty billion from Piers.

He turned the number over. Assessed what was still liquid, what could be moved, what could be presented as a legitimate restructuring of assets rather than what it actually was. Selling the furniture to pay rent, except the furniture wasn’t his.

He could do it.

Not quickly enough for Seb’s tone, but it could be done.

"That’s a lot of money, Seb," he said. Professional. Measured. Giving the number the respect it deserved without letting the respect become refusal. "But I heard what’s happening with your company." He paused, choosing his words with the care of someone constructing a sentence that needed to carry weight without showing its load. "You’ll need to give me time."

"I don’t have time, Leo."

The words came tight and fast down the line. Not quite panic, Seb was too constructed for panic to show cleanly, but it’s a close relative. The sound of a man who had done the arithmetic and did not like the answer and needed the variable to change before the equation resolved itself into something permanent.

Leo looked through the glass at his waiting meeting.

"Okay," he said. Calm. Decisive. The voice that had charmed rooms and reassured boards and given Piers’ stakeholders the warm, grounded feeling that their assets were in the hands that knew exactly what they were doing. "Okay. I’ll get it. I’ll move what needs moving and let you know the timeline."

"How long?"

"As soon as I can make it happen cleanly." Which meant: as soon as I can strip the next layer without it being immediately visible. "I’ll be in touch."

He ended the call.

Stood in the corridor for a moment.

Twenty billion.

He ran the numbers the way he always ran numbers quickly, cleanly, with the practiced fluency of a man who had spent years learning to make complicated movements look simple. It was possible. Not comfortable, not clean in the way things were clean when you were working with money that was genuinely yours to move, but possible.

He straightened his jacket.

Went back into the meeting room.

"Apologies," he said to the table, reclaiming his seat with the ease of a man who had simply stepped out to handle something ordinary. "Where were we?"