"Five hundred is the floor," Voren said. No posturing in it at all. "I'm not going lower."
Seraphine was quiet for a moment, looking at him the way you look at something you need to think about from more than one angle.
"MindNest is stable," she said finally. "I have plans for other companies eventually. But there's something else I'm focused on, and that's finding my daughter. And when I do, she becomes everything. The business, the city, all of it drops to second place."
She held his gaze. "That's why Corvine has the CEO title. He can carry it without me with all the human resource we have put in place together. So I'm asking you honestly, knowing I could leave the country and not look back, do you still want to put five hundred billion into something I might walk away from?"
