Total pages in book: 75
Estimated words: 77051 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 385(@200wpm)___ 308(@250wpm)___ 257(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 77051 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 385(@200wpm)___ 308(@250wpm)___ 257(@300wpm)
He flinches at her name. I clock it.
“You think it’s her, don’t you?” I ask quietly.
He hesitates. “I think… she’s dangerous. More than she lets on.”
I think back to Helena’s perfectly coifed smile. Her hand on Andrew’s arm. Her presence in every room I’ve felt most unsafe in.
“She’s always hated me,” I admit. “I never understood why. She was cold… calculating. I thought it was just me projecting.”
“It’s not,” he says. “There’s something else, too.”
“What?”
He shifts. “We’ve been digging into Cathedral’s admin chain. Regent… is good. Invisible. But not perfect.”
I blink. “You found something?”
“Breadcrumbs,” he says, echoing the word we’ve thrown around lately. “But one of them led to a restricted account. An employee who doesn’t officially exist. And guess who has access to every internal HR credential in the system?”
“Helena.”
He nods.
My heart thunders.
“And Andrew?” I ask.
Gage looks at me. “I don’t think he’s clean either. But I think he’s being used. Manipulated. Maybe Helena’s got something on him. I’d bet my company badge on it.”
I finish my coffee, hands trembling slightly.
“I have something on my laptop,” I murmur. “Or at least… I think I do. Files from a backup. Things I forgot I even copied over. There was a project, years ago—one of our coworkers died. I remember the HR announcement was weird. Short. Cold. Like a template was used.”
Gage’s head snaps up. “What was the employee’s name?”
“Shawn Presley,” I say slowly. “He was in dev, like me. Talented. But he was about to go public with something—I think it was about the pay discrepancies. Then he just… didn’t show up. They said he died in a car accident. But nobody talked about it.”
Gage swears under his breath. “Arrow mentioned that name. We flagged it when we were searching for people who had filed internal complaints tied to Regent’s known aliases.”
“Wait—Shawn filed something?” I ask.
Gage nods. “It was sealed. Probably buried by HR. But if you have a local copy, River…”
“Then Helena wants me quiet,” I finish for him.
He nods, jaw tight.
And suddenly it all makes sense.
The escalation. The stalking. The smear campaigns. The images. The deepfakes.
They’re not just random cruelty.
They’re cover-ups.
And I’m the loose end they didn’t expect to unravel.
“We need to go through that drive,” Gage says, standing. “And we need to be careful.”
I look up at him, feeling like the floor has just shifted under my feet.
“Do you think Tasha knows?”
He hesitates. “If she’s working under Helena, she might. Or maybe she’s just being manipulated too.”
“What if she’s more than that?”
“We’ll find out Friday,” he says. “We’re planting a tracker in Helena’s bag. Arrow has a listening device. We’ll be monitoring every conversation she has at that party.”
“And if we get proof?” I ask.
“Then we bring them down.”
The words don’t feel real.
But I know now—we’re not just trying to survive this.
We’re going to end it.
And when we do, I’m going to finally get my life back.
THIRTY-FOUR
GAGE
We spread the contents of River’s backup drive across two laptops and an external monitor like a crime scene—timestamps, folder trees, filenames that mean nothing until they suddenly mean everything. On the coffee table: still-warm cartons of Chinese, chopsticks, two sweating cans of ginger ale, a bottle of chili oil that could qualify as a weapon.
“Rules,” I say, cracking open the sesame chicken. “One—no coding while hungry. Two—if you find a smoking gun you’re legally required to take a victory dumpling.”
River salutes me with a spring roll. “Addendum: if you quote legal statutes while eating lo mein, you’re banished.”
“Cruel.”
“Necessary,” she says, eyes dancing.
We eat over spreadsheets—me driving the directory crawl, her surfacing the human context only she would remember. It’s comfortable in a way that should scare me and doesn’t. She hooks one bare foot under my thigh without noticing, and the casual touch feels like someone just drew a circle around us and wrote home.
“Here,” she says, pointing at the monitor. “That project folder. Odin Patch — ‘Odin_revC.’ Shawn worked on that.”
I scroll. “Two weeks before his ‘car accident.’”
She flinches on the last words, then leans in until her shoulder bumps mine. I click into /Odin_revC/HR-shadow/. A handful of PDFs, redacted names in the filenames, and one encrypted text bundle labeled PSALM88-notes.enc.
My heart does a slow, heavy thud. “Psalm 88.”
Her breath catches. “Open it?”
“Trying.” I drag it into a clean sandbox, fire up a local decryptor, and try common corp keys. No dice. “Whoever encrypted this didn’t want IT reading it.”
“Try ‘HelenaAuth’ as a seed,” she says, voice dry. “She loves naming things after herself.”
I raise a brow. “That can’t possibly—”
The prompt flips green. The bundle unfurls into dated memos, clipped emails, and a transcript of a sealed Zoom meeting. We both go very, very still.
I scroll the first memo aloud. “‘HR Compliance Note: Subject S. Presley asserts compensation fraud in DevOps; alleges punitive assignment practices. Referred to liaison H.L. for escalation review. Action: contain.’”