Page 94 of The Spare
I was a board member now since my grandfather’s passing, which meant I would have the second largest stake in the company. My yes-vote made four.
There were four swing votes. Three that were probably no-votes. And one I didn’t know anything about. Marie Therese Anderson.
The original acquisition papers stated it was the board seat added by the Ellory acquisition, but I tried to find something, anything about a woman by that name in the industry, and nothing. She presumably had a stake in the company prior to the acquisition, but all I could find was her name on papers and no evidence of her.
Something didn’t fit.
It was a French name, which was odd given that Ellory was based in the United States. Thinking harder, I searched my mind for any other way that name was familiar. I was randomly reminded of the Bourbon line.
The French royal house.
Louis, Philippe, Marie Therese. All legitimate heirs of Louis the Fourteenth, the Bourbon French king who built Versailles and adorned it with the coat of arms and the fleur-de-lys.
My heart beat loudly in my ears.
My mind raced.
Xander’s middle name was Phillipe.
Marcus’s was Louis.
Their mother was a French history scholar, and half the reason I knew so much about it was her.
It couldn’t be.
Marcus having a proxy board seat didn’t make sense. My hands began to tremble as I scanned the kitchen and came upon his laptop sitting on the couch.
I stopped for a moment, frozen in fear. It couldn’t be him. I was being paranoid and not thinking clearly out of grief. Why would he want a secret seat on the board?
I knew the reason but refused to believe it. Not the man who said he loved me, the one I’d practically been living with for months. He wouldn’t keep something like that from me. A fog of hurt and betrayal hung over me.
My legs and arms moved of their own accord. I opened his laptop to the password screen before I realized I had done it. I stared at the screen and knew it had to be related. The Sutton brothers hardly ever talked about their parents to anyone other than Henry or me. The connection to French history was something I overlooked a million times when I reviewed the board names. It was the perfect password.
It clicked. With trembling hands, I typed “Clovis.”
As the legend went, he was the King of the Franks when the fleur-de-lys symbol became an established symbol of the monarchy. It was a fact I only knew because of their mother.
Another ten-character code followed. It would be something nobody would assume. No names or places. Something he hid but could never forget. Not his parents, that was still publicly available information. Not Xander, his only remaining family, that could be guessed.
A sharp pain pierced my chest, and I typed inmyphone number.
I was in.
Almost like it was waiting for me, the Amari Global board list was open. I scanned through a few files to confirm what I feared. Ellory was a smokescreen; it was a shell company. The entire acquisition was for the board seat. The one Marcus now had control over.
He had stake in the company, a seat on the board, a list of the members he’d need to sway.
My stomach hollowed, and something caustic filled it.
No.
What I thought couldn’t possibly be true. He couldn’t be trying to take over.
So dizzy at the revelation, I didn’t hear the shower turn off, the footsteps down the stairs, or even him when he called my name the first time.
“Sloan?”
I was caught reading confidential material on his computer, not that I was the one who had any explaining to do.
