The victory at the Elekta party was a sterile, fleeting thing. It was the silence after a checkmate, not the roar of a crowd. Julian had been disarmed, but he was far from defeated. I knew him. His ego was a living, breathing entity, and a wound to it would not be nursed in private. It would fester, turn venomous, and demand retribution.
The retaliation came not as a thunderclap, but as a poison seeping into the groundwater of our industry. It began three days later. Evelyn forwarded me a link without comment. The subject line was a single, stark word: “Hostilities.”
The link led to an influential online trade journal, *Perfumer’s Pulse*. The headline was a masterpiece of calculated slander: *The Bitter Scent of Betrayal: Did AURA’s Ex-Creative Director Steal Its Future for a Rival?*
Th
