Dawn arrived stitched with unread messages. The ransom clip waited in my inbox like a boulder. My stomach dropped through the floor. I breathed through it. I had learned to breathe through worse.
We mobilized. Tactical teams pinged locations. Shifter trackers—lucid, old, and terrifyingly effective—scanned scentscapes. Forensic engineers combed device logs for the pattern we knew: cloned transponders, looped feeds, smoke deployment. Whoever took Miles understood security kits and ritual counters. They were not amateurs.
Lucien and I mapped a joint recovery: he would greenlight court strike teams for a narrow window under sealed terms; I would authorize corporate resources to fund a parallel operation, a legal grey that would be notarized after the fact. Both of us would keep a leash on the other’s leverage—two keys, remember.
The proxy vote reprieve gave us a strategy window. We moved within it.
We also signed off on a limited disclosure to the regulator—enough to buy legal breathing room without tipping the city into panic. There are ways to be transparent that look like weakness and ways that look like control. We chose the latter.
The forensic team promised deliverables: logs, signatures, CRC checks, immutable hashes. They promised to find a digital smoking gun if one existed. They promised that if the company had been backdoored, they would show me the insertion point, the binary fingerprint, the actor’s trail.
And then, mid-afternoon, they called.
“It’s not just a backdoor,” Elena said, voice flat. Elena was our lead analyst, thirty-two, tired eyes and a mind that would not quit. “It’s an embedded kill chain. It looks like it was introduced months ago and set to activate when a governance file changed signature patterns. It’s sophisticated. It’s signed.”
Signed.
The word landed like a physical thing. I thought of wax seals stamped into leather, of Lucien’s wolf and crown pressed into my glove in a different life. I thought of forgeries that could make a man appear guilty of murder. I thought of the rune in the annex and the forged footage that had shut down half the city last week.
Elena kept talking. “We can trace elements of the chain to proxies matching industrial hosts tied to River House infrastructure. But the signature is obfuscated. It’s like someone threaded ritual markers into the code.”
Ritual markers. The phrase bridged worlds in a way I had not wanted. It meant whoever engineered this had not only corporate access but arcane literacy. It meant courts and corporations were not just clashing in the boardroom; they were using sabotage that moved between systems.
“How long?” I asked.
She hesitated. There are numbers that feel like verdicts. “Forty-eight hours to produce a counter-forensic report or the regulator’s automated triggers could recommend an asset freeze. They’ll hold everything in escrow pending a full audit.”
Forty-eight hours. Two days to unpick someone who could write curses into code.
The bond tightened around me like a hand. Lucien’s presence in the doorway steadied me and terrified me at the same time. The memory overlays gave me three images—a watchtower at sea, a ledger burnt at the edges, a child’s lullaby in a language I didn’t know—and none of them helped.
“This is engineered to look like us,” he said. No accusation. Just the bare assessment of a predator.
“And if they win the freeze?” I asked.
He stepped into my space, close enough that cedar was no longer subtle. “They take the company,” he said. “They take control. They weaponize your tech against the city.”
It was the map I had feared. It was also the calculus I’d trained myself to run a thousand times: balance risk, hedge, defend.
Elena sent the first dump of logs. The file names were innocuous. The signatures were not. In the header of one innocuous patch, a tiny rune pulsed in hex code—an emblem I recognized from the annex Lucien had slipped into my portfolio weeks ago. Its presence was a fingerprint.
Someone with both legal access and shifter-ritual knowledge had used the same mark. The same mark that had dragged us into this mess.
I swallowed. The room tilted.
“You said forty-eight,” I said.
Forty-eight hours to expose a forger or risk losing everything. Forty-eight hours to find Miles and prove our innocence.
Two days to turn a bond that felt like a sentence into a weapon we could wield.
I picked up my phone. The screen woke to a single new message: a still-frame from a surveillance feed—Miles’s face, bound, eyes sharp as always; time-stamped three hours earlier and blurred by smoke. The caption read one word.
Sign.
7
VIVIAN PARK
