Page 7

"She is a member."

"She is a senior member."

Avery exhaled once through her nose. "Ah."

"Ah," Dominique agreed.

Leo closed the folder without having read past page two. "Which is why you are bringing this to me personally."

"Yes."

"Rather than handing it to a client manager."

"Yes."

"And which is why you want my sister in the room."

Dominique looked at Avery. "Your sister is my best analyst on pattern recognition under adversarial conditions. I want her on the intel side. I want you on the principal."

Leo nodded slowly. She had done Circle-adjacent work twice before, both on the edges, never on the inside. She understood what the inside looked like because Dominique had told her what the inside looked like in a specific evening-long conversation four years ago, in this same office, after she had asked Dominique a question she had earned the right to ask.

She said, "Why me?"

Dominique's eyes did not move off her face. "Because she is going to try to manage you."

"Most principals try to manage me."

"Most principals fail because you are rude. She will not be moved by rude."

"Charming."

"I do not need charming. I need someone who will hold the line without flinching when a woman with that face and that money decides she does not like being told what to do. I need someone who will not mistake her stillness for agreement. I need someone who will not sleep with her and lose discipline, and I need someone who, if the insider is in her executive team, will be willing to take down someone she trusts and wait for her to thank us later. I need you."

Avery kept her eyes on the middle distance, which was Avery's way of being politely absent from a sentence that was not addressed to her.

Leo said, "Understood.”

“I noticed you have not said Accepted.” Dominique’s voice was gravelly and her stare was hard.

"I have not."

Leo pulled the folder back across the desk and opened it again, this time properly. She read the summary on page three, which was a timeline of the Rotterdam breach. She read the pricing schedule on page five. She read the incident log on page seven, which was short, which told her that Strauss's internal security had been unable to produce any evidence of an intrusion because there had not been an intrusion. The data had been walked out in a briefcase or in a memory. Someone had sat in the meeting, or had been given the notes from the meeting, and had handed them to a competitor.

Two breaches in eleven days. Same pattern. Same surgical knowledge of what mattered. And a principal who had not asked for help and would probably not thank anyone for offering.

It did not add up. The pattern was not ego and it was not greed and it was not a commercial rival inching into adjacent territory. Somebody with access to the rooms had sat in those rooms and chosen, twice in a row, the one thing that would hurt Strauss most and help themselves least. That was a mathematical signature. A commercial actor optimizing for their own gain would have left one of those deals alone in order to keep the feed running. Whoever this was had no intention of keeping the feed running. They wanted the bleeding visible.

Leo had spent enough years in places where people were trying to kill each other to know what a sustained bleed looked like when someone was enjoying it.

She turned another page and stopped on the list of Strauss's executive committee. Nine names. Photos next to eight. The ninth was blank, marked RESIGNED / 2022. She touched the edge of that one with her thumb and looked up.

"What do we know about the resignation?"

Avery leaned in. "I can have a preliminary in the morning."

"Do."

"Already on the list."