Chapter 35: The Long Watch
The three months leading up to the trial were the longest, most agonizing stretch of Su Nian’s life. Time, which had once been a sharp tool she wielded with surgical precision—a sequence of milliseconds to be exploited in a hack or a series of minutes to be timed for an escape—had transformed into something thick, viscous, and suffocating. It was a slow-moving tide that threatened to pull her back into the lightless depths of her own memory, where the ghosts of nineteen years ago still screamed for a resolution she wasn't yet sure she could provide. She had spent nearly two decades as a phantom, a digital ghost gathering evidence in the darkest corners of the encrypted web. She had woven a web of proof so intricate that even a man as powerful as Ahmad Farid couldn't tear it apart. But wai
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