The first sign of trouble arrived in the most mundane form possible: an email from Apex Global's procurement director, forwarded to Elena by Priya with a single line of commentary — *did we send this??* — attached to a document neither of them recognized.
Elena opened it, and felt the floor tilt slightly beneath her.
It was a preliminary budget breakdown forgot the Apex campaign — real numbers, real internal allocations, the kind of granular financial detail that should never have left Vance Enterprises before the formal proposal was finalized and approved. Worse, it wasn't even accurate. Someone had altered the figures, inflating certain line items and slashing others in ways that made the agency look either wildly overpriced or suspiciously desperate, depending on which section a skept
