Chapter 4: The Vulture's Price

Chapter 4: The Vulture's Price

The silence in the boardroom stretched, no longer cold but humming with a new, volatile energy. Isla Vance held the court filing as if it were a religious artifact, her knuckles white against the paper. The shock on her face had melted away, replaced by a complex brew of alarm, respect, and something that looked dangerously like excitement.

“That was,” she said, her voice a low murmur, “the most reckless, insubordinate, and brilliant thing I have ever seen an attorney do.”

“Recklessness is a matter of perspective, Ms. Vance,” Kaelen replied, taking a seat opposite her, uninvited. The gesture was a power play, closing the vast distance between them, claiming the table as a shared space. “I don’t gamble. I only engage in contests where I have already determined the outcome.”

Isla slid the document back across the granite, her eyes never leaving his. “You could have been disbarred.”

“And Aethelred could have lost a quarter of a billion dollars. One of those outcomes was an acceptable business risk. The other was not.” He leaned forward, the predatory calm in his eyes replaced by a focused, intense fire. He was no longer the man on trial; he was the general assuming command.

“Now that we have their attention,” he began, his voice dropping into a conspiratorial tone that pulled her in, “Apex Indemnity will assume this is a standard filing. They will assign junior counsel. They will file a motion to dismiss based on trivialities to draw things out. They will be wrong.”

Isla found herself leaning forward as well, caught in his gravitational pull. The part of her brain that had been screaming about protocol and ethics went quiet, silenced by the sheer, exhilarating competence radiating from him. “What’s your strategy?”

“Their strategy was to bleed us on the clock. Our strategy is to bleed them on the balance sheet,” Kaelen said, a cold smile touching his lips. “We’re not just suing for the two-fifty million. Tomorrow morning, I’m filing for an additional hundred million in punitive damages, citing bad faith insurance practices. The evidence? Frank Mercer’s stonewalling, which we will argue was implicitly encouraged by their refusal to engage.”

Isla’s legal mind raced. “They’ll fight that. It’s a weak claim.”

“Of course it is,” Kaelen agreed smoothly. “But fighting it is expensive. The claim gives us discovery on their internal communications. We’ll subpoena every executive who touched this file. We’ll depose their claims adjusters, their managers, their VPs. We’ll ask for every email they ever sent regarding Aethelred. We will bury them in motions and document requests. Their legal department’s budget for the next fiscal year will look like a rounding error. They wanted to save money by playing tough? We will make this the single most expensive business decision their CEO has ever made. Eventually, someone in their accounting department will inform someone on their board that the cheapest option is to give us everything we want.”

He laid it out not as a legal argument, but as a military campaign. It was brutal, aggressive, and utterly ruthless. It was designed not just to win, but to punish, to make an example of Apex Indemnity. It was, Isla realized with a shiver, exactly what she would have done, if she’d had the nerve.

A faint smile touched her own lips. “You really are a vulture, aren’t you?” she said, the name no longer feeling like an insult.

“I ensure my clients get their pound of flesh,” he corrected. “And I don’t mind carving it myself.”

The professional chemistry between them crackled in the air. It was a meeting of two sharp, predatory minds, a sudden and thrilling alignment of purpose. For the first time since joining her family’s company, Isla felt she had met a true peer, an equal in intelligence and ambition, even if his methods came from the dark side of the law.

“Your price for this… masterpiece of foresight?” she asked, gesturing vaguely toward the court filing. “I assume it’s gone up.”

“My fee is my fee,” Kaelen said dismissively. “The price was ensuring my reputation remained pristine. Frank Mercer attempted to tarnish it. That was his mistake.”

At the mention of the name, Isla’s expression shifted. The momentary alliance in her eyes was tinged with a clinical curiosity. “I saw him, you know. From this window.” She gestured to the panoramic view. “They walked him out past the main plaza. He was carrying one of those sad little cardboard boxes with a dying plant and a framed picture of his family. Every head in the lobby turned to watch. Then they turned away just as quickly. It was… efficient.”

She was testing him, Isla knew. Probing for a reaction. A flicker of remorse? A hint of triumph? Anything human.

Kaelen’s expression did not change. He gazed out the window, picturing the scene without an ounce of emotion. “He wasn’t a person in that moment. He was a liability. He threatened a catastrophic loss and then tried to commit fraud to cover his tracks. The company identified the liability and removed it. You don’t feel pity when a surgeon removes a cancerous tumor, do you? You feel relief that the body is saved.”

The coldness of it was absolute. It wasn't malice; it was a complete and total detachment. Frank Mercer, the man with his dying plant and family photo, wasn’t a defeated rival to Kaelen; he was a resolved variable in a complex equation. An obstacle that had been cleared.

A knot of something complex and unsettling tightened in Isla’s stomach. This was the man who had just saved her company. This was the man whose brilliance was a shield protecting her family’s legacy. And this was the man who could describe the utter ruin of another human being’s life with the dispassionate air of a mechanic discussing a faulty engine part.

The awe she felt for his intellect was now irrevocably mixed with a deep, chilling fear. He wasn’t just a lawyer; he was a force of nature, and she was standing at the very eye of the storm. She was fascinated by his power, by the raw, unapologetic competence that he wielded like a weapon. But she was also terrified of what it meant to stand beside him, to condone his methods, to want him to win.

“So the walk of shame… the public humiliation… that was part of the price too,” she stated, her voice barely a whisper.

Kaelen finally turned his gaze from the window back to her. His dark eyes held hers, and for the first time, she felt he was seeing past the heiress, past the head of legal, and into the part of her that understood the necessity of what he’d done.

“Mercer chose the venue for his own execution, Ms. Vance,” he said, his voice soft but unyielding. “I simply provided the eulogy.”