The day the papers dropped, the city seemed to tilt a fraction. It was a small, almost cinematic thing: a morning headline that unspooled in a dozen feeds and then, with terrible speed, on dozens more. "Hart Holdings under investigation for fabricated accounts." Underneath, a blurry screenshot of a bank ledger that purported to show shell transactions funneling through Marrin's company into a set of opaque entities. The byline named a reporter who had a habit of sensational scoops. Within an hour, the thread that had begun in one corner of the internet had tangled and rewired itself across the morning: shareholders worried, rivals smuggled glee; the market, nervous and animal, repositioned.
Marrin saw the first alert while she was still at her desk in the New York office — an automated no
