“Yes.”
“And they knew how to remove it without triggering the obvious alarms,” she continued. “Without setting off the fail-safes designed to do exactly that.”
“Yes,” he said again.
Sera’s throat went dry. “Which means the power of it isn’t in the contents. It’s in the fact that it’s gone.”
Alaric’s gaze sharpened at that. “Exactly.”
Sera swallowed.
She didn’t know what was in the packet. She didn’t know who it implicated. She didn’t know what it proved or providedfor.
But she knew what it meant when someone erased something that shouldn’t be erasable.
It meant fear. Not panic, but calculation.
It meant leverage, sharpened down to a single choice:silence or blood.
It meant someone wasn’t trying to win. They were trying to make sure the truth never survived long enough to matter.
And that meant getting rid ofher.
Sera didn’t move for a long moment.Not because she was frozen. But because movement would be permission. Permission for panic, for tears, for the kind of spiraling fear that made smart people sloppy. Sloppy people left trails. Trails got people killed.
Alaric was clearly giving her time to assimilate everything they’d discussed. After several long minutes, he gestured toward his office. “Come on. We have work to do.”
She entered his office without a word. It was too quiet. The house around them held its breath in that Severin way, all polished stone and muted air, like the walls had been trained not to carry sound. Somewhere far beyond the glass, Dallas kept moving, bright and indifferent.
Sera forced her shoulders down and looked at the desk he’d indicated.
Work.
That was the only thing she could control rightnow.
Alaric shifted, just enough that she heard the faint rasp of fabric. She didn’t look at him. She didn’t want to see the watchfulness in his face or the way her own resolve bent underit.
“Show me what’s left,” he said quietly. “Not the file. The residue.”
It was a command, yet also a statement that her competence mattered. That he wasn’t going to take the keyboard from her hands just because he could.
Sera nodded once and pulled the laptop closer.She didn’t open the file. There was no file to open. That was the point.”People think deletion is a clean act,” she said, voice steady, as if she were briefing a board instead of standing at the edge of a cliff. “Like something disappears and that’s it. Like you can erase a thing and never prove it existed.”
Alaric’s gaze didn’t waver. “That’s not true.”
“No,” she agreed. “It’s not. Not if you know where to look, and not if you have enough access to trace what’s left behind.”
She drew in a breath and leaned in, fingers moving, pulling up a timeline view that looked innocuous to anyone who didn’t live in systems.
“This is residue,” she said. “Not content. You’re not going to find the body. You’re going to find footprints. Wherethe body was dragged, what door it went through, what locks were touched.”
She pointed to the first column. “Access paths. What accounts touched the container. What tokens were issued. Even if a file is removed, the authentication events remain unless someone has the authority and the time to scrub those too. That’s almost never worth it because it draws attention.”
The second column. “Permission escalations. If someone needed more access than they normally had, there’s a record of that request, even if it’s disguised as a routine service call. Sometimes it looks like a normal admin check. Sometimes it looks like nothing. But timing tells on it.”
She slid to the third. “Timing anomalies. Humans don’t behave like automation. Automation is consistent. It runs on schedule. People run on opportunity. They act when someone’s distracted, when meetings start, when elevators open.”
Her finger hovered over a narrow spike in activity, athin line that rose and fell inside a window that should have been quiet.
