The fallout didn’t announce itself.
It seeped.
Through boardrooms. Through inboxes. Through the careful silence of people who had suddenly stopped returning calls.
Lucien felt it in the way the city moved around him—still alive, still bright, but subtly resistant, like a body rejecting a foreign organ.
Contingency had been activated.
And contingencies always had consequences.
By 9 a.m., three regulatory bodies had issued simultaneous notices—not accusations, but requests. Polite. Formal. Dangerous.
Elias stood across Lucien’s desk, arms folded. “Jonathan’s scrambling.”
“He should,” Lucien replied, calm but coiled. “He’s been laundering influence through shell consultancies for five years.”
“Yes,” Elias said. “But now he knows you know.”
Lucien finally looked up. “Good.”
Across t
