Page 26 of Wells

"I'm not one to applaud, you're right. But you stuck to your guns, and you were right."

"I'll take it."

She zips the bag, and I turn back to my monitor. The briefing draft sits in a folder marked Board Materials. But the real work, the layer underneath, stays where it always stays, behind access levels Cera does not have and queries she will never see.

I open a terminal window, scanning all of the dark web monitors I have set up. My fingers hover over the keyboard as I glance at her. She's checking her phone, her thumb scrolling, her attention somewhere else.

I angle the monitor away and minimize the windows.

She doesn't notice, and she has no reason to. She doesn't have clearance for the deep forensics, and probably wouldn't even know what she was looking at if she saw them anyway.

The truth sits heavier. I don't want her in this layer. I don't want anyone in this layer. The work I do here, the cyber surveillance and the breaches and the money I trace through accounts that don't officially exist, that's mine. It's the part of me no one touches.

I pull up the sanitized summary I'm already building for next week, the version that shows risk without showing method. She and the leadership council get threat assessments, vulnerability scores, and clean data points stripped of the ugly mechanics that produced them.

I send it to her inbox. Her phone dings a second later.

"That's next week's source file. There will be updates between now and then, but you can start building it out with your template."

Cera glances at her screen and nods.

"Got it."

She doesn't ask what's in the file and what isn't. She takes what I give her and builds from there. I'm grateful for that boundary, even as it bothers me.

I close the summary and open the next tab. Cera stands and slings her bag over her shoulder. Sadly, the pen is gone.

"I'm curious how the leadership team takes to our new presentation method."

Ours? I clear my throat.

"Hopefully the third-grade level graphs will make it easier for them to grasp," I say, turning back to my screen, clicking off the window and pulling up the one that is safe for other eyes.

She lingers for a second, her eyes locked on me. I don't look at her.

She moves toward the door, and the room shifts with her absence before she's even gone. The air is thinner, and I hate clocking it.

"Cera."

She stops and turns back.

"Make sure everyone gets your deck before the meeting. I don't like sitting there waiting for things to land when I'm in the middle of my presentation."

Her mouth curves, not quite a smile.

"On it."

She leaves before I can come up with anything else. There is nothing left to say, unless I start inventing reasons to hold her here. The door clicks shut, and the silence fills the room like water.

I light a cigarette and let the smoke curl toward the ceiling. I can smoke in my office because I had a top-of-the-line purifier installed. No one likes cigarette smoke anymore, so I make it disappear.

My hand tightens around the mouse as I bring the minimized window back up. Then, my gaze shifts to the door.

I force it back to the screen and pull up the Singapore breach logs. The packet captures load in neat rows, timestamps, and IP addresses, and authentication failures that paint the shape of the intrusion. I've been sitting on this for two days, waiting for the next thread to surface.

The next wire transfer hits at 14:47. It's the same shell company in Malta and the same credit union in Baton Rouge. The pattern is real. The question is whether it's a coincidence or something more.

I flag the account and start building the trace map, watching the money carve a path through jurisdictions designed to bury it.