A Whisper Before the Fall
POV: Calla Monroe
The first thing I noticed was the silence.
Not the calm, peaceful kind—but the brittle, charged quiet that comes right before something detonates. It clung to the office like a second skin. Too still. Too tight.
The usual hum of keyboards and low chatter was gone. My desk felt like an island in a dead sea of productivity. Jules wasn’t there yet, and the others nearby were unusually focused, heads ducked, lips tight. No morning gossip. No grumbling about coffee temperatures or Cassian’s impossible deadlines.
Just silence.
I sipped lukewarm tea and stared at the audit packet in front of me—the one I’d spent the last two days triple-checking for inconsistencies. But this morning, something about it felt… wrong. The numbers hadn’t changed, but
