Elara's searches grew bolder as the days blurred into a tense rhythm, each one a calculated incision into the penthouse's digital veins. The laptop's glow became her midnight companion, the throttled connection a puzzle she chipped at with VPN proxies scavenged from obscure forums—risky, but Julian's IT team hadn't flagged them yet. Or if they had, he'd chosen silence, a game within the game that set her nerves alight. Is he watching? Testing? The thought coiled low in her belly, equal parts dread, and illicit thrill.
That afternoon, she uncovered a gem: an encrypted email chain pulled from a cached server via a shady data leak site. Her father's name threaded through it like a vein of ore—Vance to handle the reroute. Discreet. No traces. The sender? An alias, ShadowLedger, timestamped mo
