The accusation lands and the cameras feast. My legal counsel gives me a look: get them off script, Vivian.
I reach for the rehearsed moves: transparency, immediate forensic analysis, independent review. I announce a forensics hold, promise full cooperation with law enforcement, offer unredacted documentation to the oversight board.
It placates some, but others still hunger for blood. A woman screams, "He killed him!" into a microphone. Rumors seize the room.
My phone buzzes in my hand. Lucien’s name lights the screen. The bond flares so bright it knocks the breath out of me.
The message is a single sentence: Go. Now.
His words contain no explanation. He promised coordination. He promised tactical exile if necessary—protection through distance so his house wouldn't be pinned under subpoenas. He said it would be painful but required.
A hot, terrible wave rises in my chest: abandonment, betrayal. The misbelief I've worn like armor since childhood claws into my throat: love costs you power.
I tell the cameras the path we will take. I keep my voice steady. I am CEO; I know how to hold a narrative, how to buy time with legal cadence.
After dismissing the press, people swarm the stage. Counsel pulls me aside with a file. "We need a secure briefing," she says. "There are law enforcement questions. Preserve evidence."
In the private conference room the board dissolves into competing plans—emergency filings, calls to institutional investors, damage control teams rewriting statements. The head of security lays out probable leaks and likely channels; my headof communications drafts a feed: "Ms. Park condemns violence; full cooperation with independent forensics is underway."
And Miles's face appears in my chest—his kidnap ransom looping like a scratched record. Sign. Sign. Sign.
I ask to see the evidence. We have the video file, timestamps, chain of custody—publicly available. I scroll with my thumb, in front of legal and the board, because transparency is our line.
The clip plays on the secured laptop. I freeze it on the emblem and magnify.
The crest is faint. Someone embedded it into a quarter second of footage as a watermark. The same wolf-and-crown seal that matched the red-lined annex Lucien slipped into our portfolio three nights ago—the ceremonial piece he insisted wasn't legal.
My throat goes dry.
I zoom further. In the motion blur, tucked beneath compression artifacts, is a second mark, smaller and pressed like a stamp in the pixel noise. It's not the wolf exactly. It's a sigil—intricate, curling like a river. The hex lines trace the same pattern the kill-chain forensics team found in the sabotage code. It matches the rune we pulled from the annex when we first discovered that red-lined page with its wax I never signed.
A cold clarity moves through me. Someone with both legal access and ritual knowledge—the kind who can manipulate surveillance, forge timestamps, embed runes that read to both machines and rites—has made a weapon of our optics.
My hands go numb. The room edges blur.
"Who else has copies of the annex?" I ask. My voice sounds small.
Legal shakes her head. "We sanitized the file. Only you, me, and counsel reviewed last night's changes. Then the CFO and security team viewed it in the vault."
Counting possibilities is a cruel exercise. River House has motive and means. Raider financiers do too. But this sigil—this rune—links the forged footage to something older, methods that fold bloodwork into code.
Someone has found the perfect way to weaponize both courts and markets at once.
My phone buzzes again. A push alert: police are combing through footage. Markets open red. A livestream host asks if I'm complicit.
I should call Lucien. Part of me reaches for the bond—to demand, to tether. But his plan asked for distance. He left to protect the court. For all the pain of it, he did not abandon me.
I close the laptop. A slow, dangerous plan maps itself: expose the sigil, trace the edits, make the runes public as proof—not of Lucien’s guilt, but of a conspiracy that spans legal channels and shifter rites.
If I can prove that, I can undo the narrative.
If I cannot, regulators will freeze us. Investors will retreat. A rival will win by playing both worlds.
I stand, wrists aching. The board looks to me. They want a leader who does not throw up.
"Prepare the forensics request," I say. "Notify the independent auditors. Find every copy of that annex. Now."
They move. My team is already in motion.
