Chapter 2 — The Arithmetic of Grief

The first lawyer I called laughed at me.

Not cruelly, not dismissively—he laughed the way you laugh at a toddler who insists the moon is made of cheese, and then he explained, very gently, that I was the cheese.

"Ms. Mercer," said Jared Olmstead, whose billboard was on every highway between San Jose and San Francisco, "you signed a binding IP assignment. The company owns the patent. You were an employee of your own company. It's not theft. It's... structure."

"Structure," I said. "He took my code, my patent, my title, and my boyfriend, and you're calling it structure."

"I'm calling it a very well-drafted structure." He paused. I heard him typing. "Have you considered a settlement? Honestly, Ms. Mercer, the optics are terrible. You're about to be the face of a very public—"

"Thanks, Jared." I hung up on him and called the next name on my list.

Twenty-seven calls. That was how many it took before I understood the shape of the thing I was fighting.

Twenty-seven lawyers, from the mega-firms with the marble lobbies to the solo practitioners who answered their own phones. Twenty-six of them said some version of "I can't take this case." The twenty-seventh, a woman named Erin O'Donnell, said something different.

"I read your patent," Erin said. "I read your employment agreement. I read the equity schedule. And I read the forty-one-page email you forwarded to my paralegal at 3 a.m." A pause. "Did you know the IP assignment you signed has a severability clause that, if litigated properly, could gut the entire—"

"Are you taking the case?"

"No," she said. "I'm advising you. Because if you fight this the normal way, you lose. Not because you're wrong—because they've built the maze so you get lost in it. Equity was diluted through a Delaware LLC that you never saw. The patent was filed with a 'company inventor' list that conveniently includes Dylan and excludes you. The press cycle is already running. You don't need a lawyer, Sloane. You need an army."

"Then give me the army."

"I can't." Her voice softened, just a fraction. "I'm tangled in a conflict of interest—the firm I work with defends half the funds in this valley. I lost a client everything—her company, her house, her name—and I lost it because I didn't have the resources to fight the resources. They buried her in motions until she ran out of money and hope." She took a breath. "But I'll tell you one thing. There's one person in this valley who owns an army like that. And he never, ever uses it for anyone."

"Who?"

"Adrian Vale." The name landed like a coin in a fountain. "Obsidian Capital. Top of the food chain. He doesn't do personal grudges, doesn't do rescue missions, doesn't do anything that isn't a return on capital. But if you can get a meeting with him, and if—and this is a big if—you can make him want the meeting, you'll have your army."

"And how do I make him want it?"

Erin laughed, and it was the first honest sound I'd heard all day. "I don't know. Nobody knows. That's the point. He's been untouchable for twenty years. Ask the other twenty-six lawyers—half of them are probably on his payroll."

I hung up, opened my laptop, and typed three words into the search bar.

Adrian. Vale. Obsidian.

The first result was a photo. It looked like it had been taken in 1997 and never updated: a man in a dark suit, silver hair at the temples, gray-blue eyes that seemed to be looking through the camera at something behind it. No smile. No bio beneath the photo, just a title: Founder, Obsidian Capital.

The second result was a list of his investments. I scrolled past the unicorns—the fintech, the biotech, the AI everything—until I hit the bottom of the page, where the list went strange.

Obsidian Capital holds a minority position in: a centuries-old private bank in Geneva. A vineyard in Tuscany that has been in the same family since 1400. A data-archival company that digitizes, among other things, pre-1900 corporate records.

I stared at that last line for a long time.

A man who archived pre-1900 corporate records. A man who invested in vineyards older than America. A man who'd been "untouchable for twenty years" but looked, in every photo, exactly the same age.

I didn't know yet that I was hunting a vampire. I just knew that something about Adrian Vale didn't add up—and I'd made a career out of numbers that didn't add up refusing to stay broken.

I added him to my list.

Target one: take back my patent.

Target two: burn Dylan and Vanessa's house down, legally, with receipts.

Target three: find out what the hell Adrian Vale actually is.

The list felt good. The list felt like a plan. The list was, I'd later learn, wildly, hilariously incomplete.