The correction is too clean to be coincidence.
It happens within six hours of the consortium’s second summons—before rumors harden, before fear can metastasize. A regulatory body revises its position. A lender reconsiders terms. A market that was preparing to punish me exhales instead.
Not recovers.
Just… pauses.
“She intervened,” my COO says quietly, standing in my office doorway like he’s afraid to step too far inside the moment.
“Yes,” I reply.
“And it cost her,” he adds.
I look up. “Explain.”
He hesitates. “Whoever adjusted that advisory memo exposed themselves. Not publicly—but to the right people.”
To him, I think.
Her father.
***
The call comes from an unfamiliar secure line.
I almost ignore it.
Almost.
“You should not have allowed this,” the voice says the moment I a
