CASSIAN
The boardroom was silent, the air thick with the residue of a corporate execution. Preston didn't wait for the silence to last before he launched his offensive. He leaned back in his leather chair, his eyes raking over me with a slow, deliberate contempt that he had spent years perfecting.
"You know, if someone walked in off the street," Preston began, his voice a smooth drawl of practiced superiority, "they'd think Father hired a gangster to sit in on the Hendrix crisis. The suit barely helps, Cassian."
He gestured vaguely toward my neck, where the dark ink of my tattoos peeked out above the crisp white line of my collar, and then down toward my hands, where the scars of a dozen street fights and a decade of violence were etched into my skin.
