The Injunction
Chapter 08 - The Injunction
The papers arrived by courier on a Tuesday morning, thick as a phone book and twice as heavy in what they meant.
Grant's legal team was filing to dispute the validity of Kayla's share purchase, arguing Denny Okafor lacked full capacity to sell given "documented psychological distress" at the time of transfer.
Kayla read the phrase twice before the anger caught up to her.
"They're using the blackmail against him," she said, slamming the folder down on Priya's desk. "The same thing that scared him into needing to sell fast, they're twisting into proof he wasn't fit to sell at all."
"It's clever," Priya said, grim. "If a judge buys it, even temporarily, they can freeze your voting shares pending review. Which means Marcus is back to being outvoted by Grant's allies on the board."
"Can they win that."
"Not on the merits," Priya said. "But they don't need to win. They need thirty days of delay while the board makes decisions you can't stop."
Kayla thought of the audit, the fifteen aircraft, the drawer that kept getting heavier every week. Thirty days was enough time to bury a lot of paperwork.
"We fight it," she said.
"We fight it," Priya agreed, "but we also need Denny willing to testify to his own competency, on record, which means dragging a scared retired man back into exactly the kind of spotlight he sold his shares to avoid."
Kayla called him that night. He didn't hesitate as long as she expected.
"I already told you the truth once," Denny said. "I can tell a judge the same thing."
"They'll come after you," Kayla warned. "Publicly. They'll paint you as unstable."
"Let them," Denny said, and there was something steadier in his voice than she'd heard at the cabin. "I spent a year being quiet because I was scared. I'm tired of being scared, Kayla. Being scared didn't protect anybody. It just gave them time."
The hearing was set for three weeks out. In the meantime, Grant requested, and the board granted, a temporary operational review committee, with himself as an advisory member given his majority stake in charter revenue.
It put him inside the building again. Inside meetings Kayla wasn't invited to. Inside rooms where decisions about her own company were being made without her.
She watched him walk the hangar floor that Thursday like he already owned it, stopping to chat with staff, asking Ortiz how his kid's soccer season was going, playing the part of a reasonable man wronged by an overzealous mechanic with a grudge.
Some of the staff were starting to believe it. She could see it in the way a few of them looked at her now, not with the open avoidance from before, but with something worse. Uncertainty.
Dale found her in the parts room that afternoon, voice low.
"He asked me today if I remembered anything unusual about the maintenance schedule," Dale said. "Fishing. He's trying to find out how much we know."
"What'd you tell him."
"Nothing," Dale said. "I told him I just fix what I'm told to fix."
Kayla nodded, but something cold settled in her stomach.
"If he's fishing," she said, "it means he's worried. Which means we're closer than we think."
"Or it means he already knows exactly how much we have," Dale said, "and he's checking to see if we know he knows."
Kayla looked out at Grant, laughing at something Ortiz had said, hand resting easy on the kid's shoulder like they were old friends.
May you like
*You put your hands on the wrong person once already,* she thought. *Don't think I've forgotten what that felt like when the roles are reversed.*
She just had three weeks to make sure the reversal stuck.
