Chapter 1

The air in the Kentucky Bourbon Festival gala was thick with the smell of money and expensive perfume, a scent I never got used to. I stood in the back of the crowd, invisible, while my wife, Nicole Hewitt, was on stage, bathing in the glow of the spotlights.

She held up a massive, oversized check, the kind you only see in bad movies.

"This bonus, a symbol of our immense gratitude, goes to a true visionary, our new Brand Ambassador, Ryan Blakely!"

The crowd roared. Ryan, Nicole's college ex-boyfriend, stepped forward, all white teeth and Napa Valley charm. He took the check and hugged Nicole, a little too long for a business associate.

Nicole beamed at him. "Ryan's genius secured us a monumental distribution deal with a luxury hotel chain in Japan. This is the future of Hewitt Distilleries!"

I clutched a crumpled piece of paper in my pocket. It was the new mash bill, a recipe I' d spent six months perfecting, the one that would have made the Japanese deal a legend. But I wasn't on stage. I wasn't even supposed to be here.

An hour ago, Nicole had called me in a panic. "Ethan, there's an urgent barrel leak at the rickhouse! One of the top-tier barrels! You have to go now, nobody else knows how to handle it."

So I drove forty-five minutes out to the remote aging warehouse, my heart pounding, only to find everything perfectly fine. No leak. No emergency. Just silence.

By the time I drove back, the ceremony was in full swing. I saw the check, the hug, the lie. It wasn't a mistake. It was a setup to exclude me, to give my victory, my work, to him.

For ten years, I was the ghost in the machine of Hewitt Distilleries. I took their failing, mediocre bourbon and resurrected it with my family's secret, a wild yeast strain passed down through generations in my Appalachian hollow. I developed a proprietary "flash aging" technique that gave our whiskey its signature smoothness, the very thing the critics raved about.

When the company was on the verge of bankruptcy, I convinced my own parents to mortgage their small farm, the only thing they had, to give the Hewitts the capital they needed.

In return, they "allowed" me to marry their daughter. But I was never family. I was the head distiller, the hired help, the "backwoods hillbilly" who married above his station. Mr. Hewitt, Nicole' s father and the company chairman, never missed a chance to remind me of it.

Now, watching Nicole praise Ryan, I felt the last bit of love I had for her curdle and die. It was a ten-year-long slow death, but the final blow was swift and clean.

She was walking off the stage with her father and Ryan, a triumphant little group. They saw me. Nicole' s smile tightened.

"Ethan, what are you doing here? I thought you were handling the warehouse."

Her father sneered. "Probably got it fixed with some duct tape and spit. What do you expect from a backwoods distiller?"

Ryan just smirked, looking me up and down like I was something he' d scraped off his shoe. "Don't be so hard on him, sir. Not everyone can keep up with the pace of a global brand."

Nicole nodded, her voice turning cold and authoritative. "Ryan is right. Ethan, you're too slow, too... un-ambitious. You're holding the company back. I'm putting Ryan in charge of the entire Japanese expansion. You will hand over all your proprietary aging schedules to him tomorrow morning."

This was it. The final humiliation. They weren't just taking the credit; they were taking my family's legacy.

I looked at Nicole, at her arrogant face, and saw a stranger. A decade of disrespect, of being treated like a stepping stone, crystallized into a single moment of clarity.

A strange calm washed over me.

"Okay," I said.

They all stared, surprised by my lack of a fight.

"In fact," I continued, my voice even, "you can have more than that. Ryan, you're clearly the genius here. You should have the title to go with it." I looked directly at him. "As of this moment, you are the Master Distiller of Hewitt Distilleries."

Nicole and her father exchanged a smug, triumphant look. Ryan' s smirk widened. They thought they had won. They thought they controlled everything.

They were fools.

They had no idea that the complex temperature and humidity cycles for my aging process were locked on an encrypted hard drive in my pocket. They had no idea that the wild yeast culture, the very soul of our bourbon, was a living thing that only I knew how to cultivate and maintain.

Without me, the next batch they sent to Japan wouldn't be award-winning Hewitt Reserve. It would be harsh, unpalatable moonshine.

That multi-million-dollar deal wasn't a victory. It was a ticking time bomb. And I had just handed them the detonator.