Ares's POV
The silence that followed was louder than any explosion. Every pair of eyes in the control room was fixed on me… stunned, frozen, disbelieving.
I had just defended Jasmine Duvall.
The woman every system alert had tagged as Nyx.
The same alias that had nearly destroyed this company once before.
She stood there, breathing hard, her face half-lit by the pulsing red emergency lights. There was fury in her eyes… hurt too… but she didn't speak.
Not yet.
The engineers around us shifted uneasily, glancing between her and me as if waiting for me to retract my words.
Zara was the first to recover.
"What the hell are you doing, Ares?" she demanded, stepping forward. Her heels clicked sharply on the floor, slicing through the tense silence. "You can't just defend her after what we saw! Look at those screens! The system was breached under her alias… her digital signature!"
I didn't waver. "And I said we don't know that yet."
