The warning stayed with Mercer for days, turning over in his thoughts during council sessions, during quiet evenings with Isla, during the ordinary rhythm of warehouse business that had once felt comfortably predictable. *Someone closer than you currently realize.* He found himself studying the people around him with new, uncomfortable scrutiny, searching for anything that might hint at the kind of knowledge he himself carried.
He started, carefully and without alarming anyone, with the people whose instincts had always seemed slightly sharper than their circumstances should have allowed.
Senna came to mind first, inevitably. Her competence had always carried something faintly familiar, a confidence in business dealings that occasionally reminded him uncomfortably of his own early days r
