They cut the trip short by four days, and Ivy watched something familiar settle back into Sterling's shoulders the moment they landed, the careful, controlled tension of a man bracing for a fight neither of them had asked for.

"Walk me through it," Sterling said, the moment they were seated across from Reagan and the company's lead attorney, the island's warm ease already feeling like a memory from another life entirely.

"Thirty years ago, when your father dissolved his partnership with Aurora Bennett, the agreement included a reversion clause," the attorney explained, spreading old, yellowed documents across the table with careful precision. "Standard practice at the time for certain kinds...