The night had arrived, shrouded in the humid silence of a mid-week summer storm. This was the night the Iron CEO finally made his move. The previous twenty-four hours had been a blur of meticulous, high-stakes choreography, all designed to secure the absolute solitude of the Anderson Manor.
Noel utilized his CEO authority to its fullest. Henry's personal security detail, usually a suffocating presence around the study wing, had been dispatched to a distant, manufactured corporate crisis—a fabricated threat to a major European asset, complete with falsified reports from Finch’s network. Victoria Hayes was thankfully attending a pre-planned, mandatory regulatory conference in D.C., a distraction that Noel had quietly ensured she could not miss.
At 2:00 AM, a nondescript white van, beari
