Watching a man you might be about to destroy, while treating him exactly the same as any other day, turned out to be one of the harder things Elena had done at Vance Enterprises.
Julian Drake ran the mid-level analytics team two floors below her own office — mild-mannered, punctual, the kind of colleague who remembered everyone's coffee order and never once, in over a year, gave her reason to look twice at him. Now she found herself cataloguing every small thing: the way he checked his phone under the conference table during Monday standup, the extra ten minutes he'd started taking at lunch, the new habit of stepping into the stairwell to take calls instead of his own office.
None of it was proof of anything. All of it felt, suddenly, like it might be.
"You're staring," Priya murmured,
