[SERA — POV]
Brennan came to her office at the end of the day shift.
She'd been expecting it. Not the specific timing—she couldn't have predicted that—but the visit itself, because Brennan was a collector of irregularities and he'd seen one in her Carnelian Club debrief and had been incubating it since.
He closed the door. He sat without being invited. He said: "You weren't in the building today."
"I was on patrol."
"Mira Senn signed your patrol log."
Sera kept her face very still. "She was covering for me while I followed up on a source. It was a brief absence."
"A twelve-hour absence, based on the building's access logs." He folded his hands on the edge of her desk—a specific posture, she noted, of someone who has decided to present their information rather than ask questions abou
