Elira stared at the dark monitor in Damian’s underground vault, her face pale under the sterile white light.
The air smelled of cold metal and dust, the kind that carried secrets no one dared to touch.
“You found this in Byron’s encrypted archives?” she asked, voice barely above a whisper.
Damian nodded, his jaw tight. “The file was called CICADA. Your name was in the metadata—seventeen times.”
She stepped closer to the paused frame on the screen. The man—gaunt, bloodied, barely recognizable—looked up into the camera before whispering again, “Elira Quinn is the key.”
“I don’t recognize him,” she murmured. “But I feel like I should.”
Damian touched the keyboard. “The footage is dated. But the GPS metadata shows he was held in a compound on the outskirts of Accra.”
Her breath caught.
