I wasn’t about to send anyone off, despite Trey’s tightening expression that betrayed how much the audience annoyed him. Or perhaps because I knew the audience annoyed him.

He stepped closer to me. “I heard you’ve been calling around to investors, without any success.”

“LA didn’t work out. But New York seems interested.”

“I had the agreement drawn up for an early handover. We both know you won’t be able to raise the money. Let’s cut to the chase and take some stress off your shoulders. You must be crazy busy here with the house.”

“Handover?”

“You can’t buy me out, so I’m buying you out. The company itself has value beyond the auction business. It’s a brand associated with politics. I can raise enough money from my family to retool it into a polling agency.” He drew a folder from his bag. “This is the contract.”

“We can look at the papers, but there won’t be a handover.”

Trey’s confident smile never wavered. “You really want to stay in the auction business and run the company alone? Chance having a massive failure attached to your name?”

“Yes.”

“Come on, Emsley. Be sensible.”

He sounded like my mother, and it was the exact worst moment to sound like her.

My mood snapped from irked to angry. “Why do you care?”

“I hate seeing you make a bad business decision.”

“But it’s a good decision to keep Ludington’s for yourself?”

“I have enough sense to take it into a profitable direction.”

“Ludington’s was my idea. I’m not giving it up.”

He glanced at Bram, then Bram Sr., then at Sergei. “Which one of you is going to put up the money to buy me out?” He ignored Strena and Monique.

For a terrible moment, the question hung in the air like the blade of a guillotine after the catch had been released, the weight of the metal just waiting for gravity to bring it down on the victim’s neck.

Then Bram leaned forward in his seat. “I’ll put up a hundred thousand.”

“Same here.” From Bram Sr.

“Me too.” Strena’s cold smile said she didn’t appreciate being discounted.

“I’ll put in two.” Sergei spoke up. “Two hundred thousand.”

“And I can scrape together roughly that much too,” I said.

Trey waited another second, but Monique remained silent. “That’s it?” He laughed at me. “You have half?”

An idea sparked in my brain. I’d been in paring-down mode for the past few days, going through Violet’s belongings, watching everything through the lens of What’s the minimum I absolutely have to keep?

I needed to apply that lens to Ludington’s. I silently ran through a few scenarios in my head, then asked, “How about half?”

“Half is not enough. I want the whole million point two, as specified in our contract. Otherwise, you forfeit.”