Inside the private executive office on the second floor of the carriage house, the scent was distinct: beeswax polish, five-hundred-dollar-an-ounce Cuban tobacco, aged bourbon, and the faint, sweet chemical ghost of formaldehyde drifting up from the subterranean preparation bays below.
Thaddius Bromel stood behind his twelve-foot desk of hand-carved mahogany, his three-piece charcoal suit unbuttoned, pouring two fingers of Pappy Van Winkle into a crystal tumbler.
Sitting across from him on the green leather chesterfield, her long legs crossed, checking her diamond-encrusted Cartier wristwatch, was Marisol.
Beside her sat Talia Brennan.
Talia was thirty-one, a partner at Brennan & Vance Corporate Law, wearing an ivory silk blouse and a charcoal pencil skirt. Her blond hair was pulled back into a razor-sharp chignon; her manicured fingers rested on an open, four-hundred-page leather litigation brief:
“She signed without asking for an independent valuation, Thad?” Talia asked, her tone skeptical, her gold Montblanc pen hovering over the signature line: “Coraly didn’t even ask for a forty-eight-hour statutory continuance to consult private counsel?”
