PAIGE
Four days.
The screaming headlines have softened to a persistent, worried hum. The office feels different. The air is thinner, charged with a quiet panic everyone is trying to hide. Reomen is a ghost in his own building.
He's either sealed in his corner office, a fortress of silence and strategy, or he comes home long after dark, his shoulders tight with a fatigue I've never seen in him.
The kind that sleep doesn't fix.
The swelling in my cheek is gone. Just a faint, yellowish bruise remains, a fading ghost of the pain. A souvenir. But the other wound, the one from the leak, is still raw and open.
I'm at my desk. My screens are a constellation of financial models, server logs, and email timestamps. The official investigators are doing their thing. Let them. They look for the obvious. A disgruntled employee.
A digital footprint.
I'm looking for a ghost. A pattern. A whisper.
