An Understated Dominance novel · Chapter 17 of 24

Chapter 17: Payroll Friday

I drove down the mountain at seventy miles an hour on a road that had been plowed an hour before.

Colter drove behind me, and I could see his headlights in the mirror the whole way.

I made it to the office at ten past nine, with my hair still wet and a stranger's coat over a mountain man's flannel.

Bev was waiting in the atrium.

She looked about a hundred years old.

"I called the bank twice," she said. "I called the lawyer. I called the board."

"Nobody can stop it?"

"The covenant is airtight. The lender can sweep accounts the minute a default letter is sent."

"Which lender?"

"The Merrow Family Trust. It's not a bank. It's a bank-shaped man."

I put my hands over my face.

Then I took them off.

"Call everyone to the atrium," I said. "Noon."

"Thea, what are you going to say?"

"The truth."

"Again?"

"As many times as it takes."

At noon, the atrium was packed from the glass doors to the climbing wall.

I stood on the stool again.

It wobbled worse than before.

"I'm going to be short," I said, "because this is the hard part."

"Friday's payroll is not going to be there."

A sound ran through the crowd, low and frightened.

I let it.

"A lender I never chose took every dollar from our account this morning, because he can."

"That lender is Gilbert Merrow, my husband's father."

"He wants Fieldwell to fail so that my husband will go home, and he has the money to make it happen."

"I am not asking you for anything."

"I'm telling you the truth, because you earned it."

"Here's what I know. Our customers have promised eighteen million dollars."

"The lender can sweep every dollar of it the minute it lands."

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