Gideon was not a man who second-guessed his decisions. He had built ten years of careful, deliberate work on the premise that doubt was a luxury you couldn't afford once a plan was in motion. You thought before. You committed. You saw it through.
He sat in his office on Sunday evening with the city going dark outside his window and the encrypted folder open on his screen and tried to locate the clarity he usually carried into these moments.
It was there. Mostly. He held onto mostly.
Elara Vaughn had been in the archive. He knew because he had been manually checking the access log every two days since the failed conflict-of-interest memo, which had been an embarrassing miscalculation, Rowan had shut it down faster and more publicly than Gideon had anticipated, and the procedural breach t
