Chapter 11. The Reclamation Vote

“If they don’t let you build the table, tip it over. Then sell the wood.”

Power was supposed to feel cleaner than this.

Instead, Harper Quinn sat alone in the Strategy Deck—two floors beneath Van Hollen’s East Library—where the walls glowed with fiber-optic constellations and the air carried that crisp, clinical chill of executive war rooms and cryogenic ambition.

No one had dismissed her.

No one told her why she was summoned.

Which, of course, meant she already knew.

She adjusted her white blazer—high-collared, no scuff, sharp enough to slice a rumor in half—and tapped the surface of the chair’s armrest once. Calm. Controlled. Done waiting.

Across from her, Bryce Mallory scrolled through projections on his sleek tablet. The motion was deliberate. Designed to keep her waiting two beats too long. Her name sat quietly at the top of the Midterm Auction rankings like it had been carved there by accident.

It hadn’t.

Still, he hadn’t l