The Bloomberg alert came through at 8:47 AM.
I was reviewing the Chase term sheet for the third time — not because I doubted it, but because a term sheet is only as good as the details you've verified, and I verified details — when my phone buzzed on the desk with the particular persistent urgency of a push notification that believed in itself.
SEC Receives Complaint Against TechVista Inc. — Accounting Practices Under Review.
I stared at it for two seconds.
Then I pulled up Bloomberg on my laptop and found the full story.
And directly below it, loading as I watched: Gillis Industries Faces Similar Regulatory Complaint — Source Unnamed.
Simultaneous. Both companies. Filed this morning, probably within the same hour, probably from the same source through different channels to maintain the fiction of independence.
He knew.
Somehow, Forstman had found out about the coordinated defense, and his response was not to retreat — it was to flip the board.
TechVista's stock dropped 6% while I was reading. I watched it move in the corner of my screen. By the time I picked up the phone to call Harvey, it was at 7%.
Harvey picked up before the second ring.
"I saw it." His voice had the flat quality it got when he was past surprise and into operational mode. "Gillis is down 5.4%."
"He knows we're working together."
"Obviously. The question is the how." A brief pause — Harvey thinking in real-time, which was faster than most people's thinking at any speed. "We deal with the how later. We respond now."
"Agreed." I pulled up the TechVista financials on my second monitor. "The accounting complaint is baseless — their revenue recognition is clean. Three consecutive clean audits."
"Gillis is the same. Deloitte signed off on their statements in February."
"So we don't just rebut — we expose the pattern. Seven previous Forstman raids, same tactic when the financial attack gets blocked. We make the filing tell that story."
A pause. "You want to show the jury Forstman's history."
"The SEC is our jury right now. Yes."
"That's good." Harvey said it the way he said things that he'd arrived at himself but was conceding had come from elsewhere. "Give me forty minutes. I'll draft Gillis's rebuttal with the pattern appendix. You draft TechVista's. We coordinate on the narrative frame."
"Conference call in forty. I'll set it up."
Amanda Cross — TechVista offices, 9:22 AM
She'd been in a board call when the Bloomberg alert hit her CFO's phone and he'd mouthed Forstman across the table and she'd ended the call in thirty seconds flat.
Now she was in her office with the door closed and the stock ticker on her secondary monitor and Scott Roden on the phone.
"It's baseless," Roden said. "Your revenue recognition is clean. We have three clean audits, your controller's certifications, and your external auditor's sign-off. This complaint has no factual foundation."
"That's not the point." Amanda kept her voice even. She'd spent twenty years in technology, which meant she'd spent twenty years watching companies get destroyed not by truth but by perception. "The stock is down seven percent on a baseless complaint. My government contract pipeline has a clause about material adverse regulatory developments. If this complaint triggers that clause—"
"It won't. I've already reviewed the contract language with Zane. A preliminary SEC inquiry doesn't constitute a material adverse regulatory development under your specific contract definitions." A pause. "Amanda, the complaint is a weapon. Not a legal weapon — a reputational one. Forstman is trying to create board panic before our refinancing completes."
"How close is the refinancing?"
"Chase closes in nine days."
"Can we accelerate?"
"I'll call the commercial lending head today. We may be able to get it to seven."
She looked at the stock ticker. Seven-point-two percent down now.
"What are we doing to fight back?"
"I'm building a response filing right now. By end of day, Bloomberg will have a different story — two companies filing joint rebuttals with a complete history of Forstman's previous regulatory weaponization. We're going to make the complaint look like what it is."
"And what is it?"
"A man with three billion dollars and a playbook he's used seven times before, pulling the only lever he has left because the financial ones aren't working." A pause. "We're going to show the SEC his entire history. They'll open an inquiry into him before they get to page four of our filing."
Amanda looked at her window. The Manhattan skyline, indifferent to her stock price.
"Do it," she said. "Scott — I want his head on a wall."
"We're working on the wall," he said.
The filings went to the SEC at 2:47 PM and to the financial press simultaneously.
Harvey's draft for Gillis and my draft for TechVista had been built using the same seven-page pattern appendix — Forstman's prior raids, each one following identical steps, each one terminating in a regulatory complaint when the financial attack was blocked. We'd coordinated the narrative frame in a thirty-minute conference call that would have been unthinkable three months ago: two competing New York firms drafting parallel public filings with unified messaging.
The Bloomberg update came through at 4:15:
TechVista and Gillis Industries File Joint Rebuttal — Allege Coordinated Attack by Forstman Fund.
By 4:30, the story had legs. The legal press picked it up. Two law firms from different buildings publicly coordinating a joint defense against a known corporate raider was unusual enough to be news in its own right.
[ Win Rate Calculator: Public battle assessment. Joint filing creates narrative advantage — companies as victims of known predator vs. companies under legitimate regulatory scrutiny. Jury: financial press, institutional investors, SEC staff. Probability of favorable narrative shift: 73%. ]
I was reading the Bloomberg coverage when Zane appeared in my doorway.
He looked at me for a moment.
"You just publicly allied with Harvey Specter," he said.
"The math demanded it."
"You've said that several times now about decisions that required significantly more than math." He came in and sat down. "You understand what this means for the firm's positioning."
"It means we're the firm that cooperated with its biggest rival to protect our client from a coordinated attack. That's not bad positioning."
"No," Zane said slowly. "It's not." He was quiet for a moment. "It's actually very good positioning. If you win this, you've demonstrated that Zane & Roden operates beyond conventional competitive boundaries when client service demands it." He studied me. "You thought that through."
"Not entirely. Some of it was the math."
Zane made a sound that was not quite a laugh.
Harvey called at 8:47 PM. My desk was covered in Forstman documents. I'd eaten half a sandwich at lunch and nothing since, and I'd been aware of this fact for about three hours without doing anything about it.
"He's going to escalate," Harvey said.
"I know."
"This is what he does. I've gone back through every one of the seven cases in our appendix. When the first retaliation doesn't produce capitulation, he goes harder. New vector, new pressure point, something unexpected." A pause. "He's going to come for us next. Not the clients. Us."
"The attorneys."
"That's his model. Find the weak point in the lawyer-client relationship. Something in the attorney's past, the firm's finances, anything that creates doubt in the client's mind." Harvey paused. "He's going to research us both."
[ Blackmail Archive: Forstman threat assessment. Research into opposing counsel: consistent with Pattern Stage 3, Pre-incarceration record. Post-conviction methodology unknown. High-probability threat vector. ]
"Let him research me," I said. "I'd be curious what he finds."
"I'm not worried about you. I'm less confident about certain aspects of my firm's situation that are..." Harvey paused in a way that was not Harvey's usual pause. "Complex."
There was a weight in that sentence that I didn't probe. Harvey's firm's complex situations were his to manage. I knew what the most complex one was. I couldn't help with it.
"We need to find out how he learned about the coordination," I said. "He moved too fast for it to be external observation. Someone or something gave him access to our defensive posture."
"I've been thinking the same thing. Could be a contact at Chase. Could be a shared consultant—"
"I'm cross-referencing vendor lists tomorrow. Anything TechVista and Gillis share that could have exposure."
"Same on my end. Gillis is a meticulous record-keeper — their CFO will have the vendor list by morning." Harvey exhaled. "This became a war faster than I planned."
"Wars usually do."
"Roden."
"Yeah."
"You were right about the defensive sequencing. Keating timing, the phased approach — if we'd gone on offense first, we wouldn't have had the wall built when he retaliated." A pause. "I'm not going to say that again."
"I know you're not."
He hung up.
My phone buzzed twenty minutes later. Louis.
"I heard about the Bloomberg story." His voice was not the Louis of spreadsheets and string quartets. This was the Louis who stayed up late when something mattered. "Are you okay?"
"Not indicted. Not bankrupt. Still getting married in October."
A brief laugh — relieved, genuine. "Good. That covers the baseline." A pause, and then the register shifted. "Scott, I need to tell you something. I've been reviewing PSL's vendor expenditure for the quarterly report. I found something that you need to know about. Can we meet tomorrow? Not at either firm."
Something in his voice. Careful. Specific. The tone Louis used when he'd found something he'd have preferred not to find.
"Tomorrow. Name the place."
"The diner on 53rd. The one with the coffee that tastes like ambition and disappointment."
"Seven AM."
"Seven AM." A pause. "Scott. It's important."
"I know," I said. "I'll be there."
I set the phone down and looked at the half-eaten sandwich on the corner of my desk.
The leak. Forstman's retaliation. Louis's discovery. Three separate threads pulling tight at the same time.
I ate the other half of the sandwich standing up and opened the vendor cross-reference spreadsheet. Sleep could wait another hour.
A LOT More chapters reign FREE upon unwrittenrealm.com.
• Normal | $8 — 15 chapters ahead
• Advanced | $11 — 20 chapters ahead
• Overlord | $19 — 25 chapters ahead, plus request a refinement (plot, character, system) on any of my novels
patreon.com/TheFinex5
▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰
― DECREE ―
More chapters reign FREE upon unwrittenrealm.com.
The throne acknowledges.
▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰