The morning was draped in a thick, suffocating fog that rolled off the East River, turning Roosevelt Island into a ghost ship adrift in a sea of grey. Inside the apartment, the air felt just as heavy. Elena stood in the kitchen; her fingers curled so tightly around a ceramic mug of black coffee that her knuckles had turned a porcelain white. She hadn't slept for more than two hours. Every time she closed her eyes, she saw the gold-leaf Beaumont logo burned into the back of her eyelids like a solar flare.
It had been seventy-two hours since Daniel Carter had dropped the name of the "Founder," and the world Elena had spent three years building felt like a house of cards in a wind tunnel.
She was vibrating. It wasn't a visible tremor, but a deep, internal resonance, the kind of high-frequen
