Smoke Without Fire
Cassian’s POV
It had been thirty-seven hours since the smoke alarm went off.
No official memo. No drill. No follow-up. Just the sound of alarms echoing down marble hallways and the smell of something charred clinging to the office rugs longer than anyone cared to mention. People returned to their desks pretending it hadn’t happened. Like a mass hallucination. Or a secret they’d all silently agreed to bury.
But I didn’t forget.
I’d seen what the fire touched.
And more importantly, what it hadn’t.
The footage hadn’t been scrubbed yet.
A quiet alert pinged from my tablet as I stood alone in my office with the blinds drawn, the overhead lights dimmed, the air heavy with something unspoken. My team had stopped asking where I was working from. Most assumed I was off-si
