Read Chapter 2: Partners in Distrust

The video call timer blinked 09:59. Camille had set it two minutes early, a habit born of childhood piano recitals when her mother would say, *"Better to arrive before they expect you than after they forgive you."* The waiting screen showed the AlgoSens logo—their bubbly lowercase "a" that Antoine had called "charming, but perhaps too friendly for an enterprise product."

She did not mention that he had called it "charming."

Antoine sat across from her in the glass-walled conference room, his laptop angled toward the camera like a news anchor preparing for broadcast. He'd worn a navy blazer over a black turtleneck, which made him look like a tech bro attempting French cinema. She'd worn her standard demo armor: charcoal blazer, white shirt, no jewelry except her grandmother's thin gold chain.

"Slide order," she said, not looking up from her notes. "Metrics first, then the infrastructure stability report, then Q&A. No mention of the UX overhaul."

"Camille." He said her name with the patience of a man explaining something to a child. "The investors don't want to see a stable ship. They want to see a ship that knows where it's sailing."

"Our ship is sailing to a Series A. That's the destination."

"The destination is the same. The route—" He clicked his trackpad, and her carefully arranged slide deck on the shared screen flickered to a new ordering. "—is what they're investing in."

She felt the familiar heat behind her sternum. Not anger. Fear. The fear that he was right, and that his being right meant she was wrong, and that being wrong after seven years of building meant—

"Antoine." She forced her voice level. "I built this product. I know what it can sell itself as. You've been here for two weeks."

"Two weeks is enough time to see what a product can't become if its lead is too attached to it."

The screen flickered. Éléonore Roche, the venture partner from Meridian Capital, appeared on the display, her face framed by the brutalist concrete of what must have been her Lisbon office. Behind her, two junior analysts hovered with the eager stillness of interns who'd been told this startup was one to watch.

"Camille. And you must be Antoine." Éléonore's smile was professional, which in VC terms meant she had already formed her opinion and was simply waiting to confirm it. "Forgive me for stealing your Thursday. Given the market chatter about consolidation in the AI sector, we thought it prudent to check in before the seed round closes."

Market chatter. Camille's stomach tightened. There was no chatter. There was only the whisper network of investors who smelled blood in the water—or rather, smelled increased cloud costs on a startup's term sheet.

"We're thrilled to give you a status update," Camille said, sliding into her practiced warmth. It tasted like saccharine but it always worked. "I'll walk you through our retention metrics first. We've seen a twelve percent month-over-month increase in DAU since the last reporting period, with churn down to—"

"If I may." Antoine cut across her, smoothly, as if he'd rehearsed it. Which he had. She could tell by the way his hands didn't flinch. "Those metrics are real, but they're measuring the past. What Meridian should care about is the next iteration of Sentio—the one that turns passive data listening into active recommendation."

Camille's jaw tightened. They had agreed. He had *agreed* not to bring up the overhaul.

"The current version already does recommendation," she said, too quickly.

"The current version recommends sentiment shifts in customer emails. That's novel. That's interesting. It's not enough." Antoine turned to face the camera directly, his profile perfectly lit. "Sentio should be predicting sentiment shifts before they happen. An anticipatory layer that flags a contract churn risk six weeks before a client knows they're unhappy."

Éléonore leaned forward. "That's a different product."

"It's the same backbone. A sharper edge on the same blade." He glanced at Camille, and for a moment she caught something in his eyes that wasn't competitive. It was almost—respect? Or pity. She couldn't tell which was worse. "Camille built the infrastructure to support it. She just hasn't been given the room to envision it. I'm here to give her that room."

The bastard. He was praising her while simultaneously implying she lacked vision. And worse—it was working. Éléonore's eyebrows had risen half a centimeter.

"I'd be happy to discuss the technical feasibility," Camille said, scrambling to regain footing. "But more pressing than the roadmap is our infrastructure cost projection, which I've prepared a slide on. If you look at slide four—"

She clicked her remote. The slide deck changed.

But not to slide four.

The screen displayed a document titled *Project PASSAGE: Internal Roadmap — Confidential*. It listed the planned features for the next eighteen months: the sentiment prediction layer Antoine had just pitched (of course he'd already documented it), a voice-tone analyzer, a partnership pipeline with three European telecoms—names she hadn't seen before. Names Antoine had apparently negotiated without her input.

And below that, in bold red font, a line item: *Escalation Plan: If GPU pricing holds at 214% increase, shift to tiered infrastructure. Priority clients: [REDACTED]. Consult legal on breach of existing SLAs.*

The room went silent. On the video call, one of the junior analysts dropped a pen.

Éléonore's face shifted from curiosity to something more dangerous: calculation.

"Camille." Her voice was carefully flat. "Is this document cleared for external viewing?"

"No." The word came out strangled. "No, this is—this was never meant to—the slide ordering must have corrupted when we merged the decks remotely—"

"Merged decks." Éléonore nodded slowly. "That's unfortunate. Especially the SLA line. I wasn't aware AlgoSens was considering renegotiating existing client agreements."

"We're not," Camille said, at the exact same moment Antoine said, "It's a contingency."

Éléonore smiled. It didn't reach her eyes. "Well. Contingencies are healthy to plan for, but investors prefer to hear about them prepandemic, not in the middle of it. Why don't we take a ten-minute pause—gentlemen, if you'll leave us—" Camille, female, stayed on screen. "—Camille and I will discuss the deck structure."

The call split. Antoine stood, and as he passed her chair, he leaned down, his voice low enough that the microphone—still live—couldn't catch it. "I flagged that document's access controls three days ago. Your second-in-command never actioned it."

Then he was gone, the glass door swinging shut behind him.

Camille stared at the doorway. Théo. The infrastructure intern she'd trusted with the sensitive folder, the one she'd texted about server costs. The one who'd sent back a thumbs-up emoji and nothing else.

The seed round was dying on the vine in front of her. And the knife wasn't in Antoine's hand.

It was pointing inward from her own team.

She turned back to the screen, where Éléonore was waiting with the patient, hungry look of a woman who'd just found something she could use. "Camille. Let's talk about what you're really building."