The room answers with a sound like the city exhaling—then Ana's console floods with an incoming feed that is not surveillance at all but a voice, a single clear tone slicing through encryption.
A broadcast line opens on Ana's console.
"We have met," a voice says over the feed. The same clipped phrase we'd both received before.
The screen goes white with an emblem I thought we'd buried: the wolf rearing beneath a crown, bright as a brand. The file name that no one should be able to make—but has—appears.
PROOF.MKV begins to propagate.
We did everything right.
We are still not safe.
9
VIVIAN PARK
The hearing room smells like new paper and fear. My shoes click on marble until the sound blurs into the hum of cameras. I keep my shoulders back. Control is a muscle; I flex it until my hands stop shaking.
Lucien is not here. He should be. The doctor called it prudence—rest, staggered vitals, no exposure. His absence should be one more advantage for the people who want me small. Instead it feels like a missing limb.
Ana meets me at the table and hands me a slim folder and a drive the size of my thumb. “We pulled everything,” she says. “Forensics chained and timestamped. PROOF.MKV is verified across three nodes. The broadcast logs match the upload window from the plant.”
Her voice is steady. Her fingers are not. I slide the drive beneath the folder with a thumbprint I trust: mine.
Outside, shareholders circle like gulls over a wounded city. Their faces are the same as the ones who applauded last quarter—cautious, waiting to see whether I survive. The mate-bond thrum under my skin, cedar and salt, sharpens when I’m onstage. A watchtower, wind, a wolf’s scent so close my pulse slides.
“Vivian.” The clerk arranges microphones with bureaucratic grace. “Begin when ready.”
I breathe. The cedar clogs the back of my throat, then recedes. Facts are my ally.
“Shareholders, counsel, regulators,” I say. “Thank you for coming under these difficult circumstances. I’m not asking for your trust. I’m asking for your confidence—on evidence and on process.”
I lay the forensic dossier on the table: photos, metadata, frame-by-frame annotations. The forged clip that stitched Lucien’s car to a murder. The rune someone sewed into the video’s watermark—the same rune Ana found pressed into the red-lined annex he slipped into our MOI.
A murmur ripples through the room. I keep going.
“We traced the feed to a private server physically tied to an industrial node outside the city,” I say. “That node was routed through an operator with legal clearance at River House and a shadow identity we traced to a single external contractor. That contractor’s toolkit includes both modern code-signing keys and ritual ink stencils. The malicious signature is both a cryptographic backdoor and a cultural sigil—meant to force cross-system attribution.”
Faces twitch. “Ritual” tastes different to lawyers than to shifters; to them it’s theatrics. To me, it’s law.
“We did not stumble on this,” I press. “This was engineered using our own signatures—signed keys, forged manifests, cloned transponders. It was designed to trigger a regulatory cascade and fix the company on the market after a forced transfer.”
Ana projects a timeline. Red lines and deliberate lies pulse on the screen.
“Why?” asks one of the major fund managers, equal parts accusation and curiosity.
“For profit, influence, and to weaponize my platform,” I answer. “My identity-mapping system can bridge municipal wards to infrastructure. That’s what they wanted to exploit. This is paired sabotage—legal and ritual—meant to make the wrong fingerprints appear at the right moments.”
The bond tightens: claim, lineage, expectation. The wolf-and-crown stamp presses at an old part of me that learned to keep nothing to lose.
“I offer two things,” I say. “One: transparency. Full, recorded access to our forensic pipeline. Ana will publish a redacted log and make our chain of custody available to an independent audit committee.” I nod to the legal team I flew in: neutral trustees, cross-jurisdictional auditors on retainer, kill-switch protocols to isolate implicated nodes.
“And two,” my throat tightens, “a mirrored covenant.”
Heads pivot. The room leans in.
“A public corporate charter,” I continue. “It guarantees the shareholder protections you demand: strict limits on emergency transfers, multi-signature thresholds, neutral trustees. And a private blood-covenant, sworn by recognized courts, that binds external houses to a non-interference oath in exchange for verified, conditional access to our security nodes during true, validated threats.”
