They come in together just after eight in the evening. Damon hears them before the door opens. Voices in the corridor outside, and then Selene’s laugh, the real one, the quiet unguarded version that bypasses whatever composure she normally maintains. And then Leon’s voice, low, saying something Damon cannot make out through the door, and her laugh again, slightly different the second time, the kind that means something landed exactly right. The door opens. They come into the entrance hall still carrying the conversation with them. Selene is looking at Leon with the particular expression of someone genuinely pleased to be in the company they are in. She sees Damon in the living room and the expression adjusts. Not harshly. Just adjusts. Selene is already moving toward the study to get the files. “Leon, I’ll grab the documents from yesterday. The auditor’s breakdown is in the blue folder.” “Take your time,” Leon says, setting his briefcase on the dining table and opening it w

Victor Hale was the last to leave. He was sixty-three and had been on the board since the company’s third year, a nervous, careful man who wore his conscience visibly and had never quite managed to hide it. He had voted yes on the restructuring. She had noted that too. He waited until Leon had stepped to the far end of the room to take a call, and then he came to Selene’s side of the table and stood close and spoke quietly. “I need to tell you something,” he said. She looked at him. “Go ahead, Victor.” He glanced toward the door, which was closed. He said, “Lucien called me four days ago. He called Marsh too, and I believe he called Fennick, though Fennick won’t say.” He paused. He was looking at his hands. “He told us that anyone who supports your restructuring plan, who sides with you publicly or on the record, will find their other business interests becoming very difficult. He was specific about it. He named things.” He finally looked at her. “He said he would destroy anyon

The monitoring system was built into the wheelchair’s frame in the left armrest, embedded so precisely that a standard security sweep would identify only the chair’s medical telemetry functions and nothing else.Damon had designed it himself, two years ago, as a passive listener: it did not broadcast, did not transmit, only received and logged, and it was keyed to flag specific signature patterns from intelligence networks he had encountered during the war.He was in the hallway of the estate when it vibrated once, discreetly, against his forearm.He stopped. He waited until he was certain the corridor was empty and then he opened the hidden interface in the armrest’s inner panel and read the metadata that had come through.It was a Greymark data ping, a passive inquiry signal that Holt’s network used to initiate background searches on named targets. He had seen Holt’s signature pattern before, during the war, when Greymark was selling intelligence to three different factions simultan

The question was general enough that it could have meant the preparations, the timeline, the intelligence on Greymark. But it did not mean any of those things, and they both knew it.“The preparations are solid,” Damon said, deliberately misreading it.Dimitri let that sit for a moment. Then he said, “I meant with Selene.”Damon looked at the desk where the map had been. He was quiet for a few seconds. Then he said, “Not good.”Dimitri nodded once.“She had Leon pick her up this morning,” Damon said. “She walked past me in the hall yesterday without speaking. She makes her coffee and she makes one cup.” He paused. “She is not unkind about it. She is simply somewhere else. Like I’m furniture she’s learned the position of.”Dimitri said nothing.“I heard her laugh last night,” Damon said. “In the dining room. With Hart. The real one.” He stopped. He put his hand on the armrest and looked at it. “I haven’t heard her laugh like that in this house in longer than I can calculate.”The study

The restaurant Leon chose was quiet and well-lit and did not try to be impressive, which she appreciated. The kind of place that understood its own purpose and did not overreach it. The lighting was low without being theatrical about it. The tables were far enough apart that conversation did not carry.She was tired. It was the specific tiredness that followed a high-concentration morning: the kind where the body has been held in a particular alertness for several hours and releases it all at once when the pressure drops. She felt it in her shoulders when she sat down, in the way she set her bag beside her chair without her usual efficiency.She had not been able to keep her walls fully up since the courthouse steps. She was not certain she was trying.Leon ordered without looking at the menu, which told her he had been here before or had looked it up before arriving. She ordered and the waiter left and the restaurant continued its quiet business around them.“Speiss will file on the