While the crew waited for it to land safely, Nolan coordinated a full diagnostic team to inspect the suspect m the moment the wheels touched the runway and the readings confirmed exactly what he had feared. The same erratic signal pattern that had nearly downed Vale. One days earlier, Ardan's decision had been correct, and everyone in that hanger knew it. With Camille's help, Nolan traced the falsified parts back to a supplier called Crown Meridian Components, a vendor Grant himself had approved for the company's parts catalog only 8 months earlier. On paper, Crown Meridian appeared to be owned by an anonymous investment fund, its ownership structure buried beneath several layers of shell corporations.
Working late into the night, Nolan and Camille followed the paper trail through one intermediary after another until they arrived at a name neither of them had expected. A holding company controlled entirely by Blackthornne Capital. Arton was not ready to believe Sebastian could be involved. He had been her father's closest adviser for two decades and had personally guided her through the chaos following her father's death, helping her hold the company together when half the board doubted a woman in her early 30s could run an airline. Nolan told her gently that loyalty should never be measured by how many years someone has stood beside you, but by what that same person does in the moments when nobody is watching.
During one especially long night of reviewing documents together, Ardan drifted off for a few minutes in a chair inside the technical office. And when she woke, she found Nolan's jacket draped over her shoulders, though he had made no attempt to wake her or claim any credit for the kindness. She realized, sitting there in the quiet hum of the fluorescent lights, that he had shown her a decency she had never once offered him. Something unspoken passed between them in that moment, though Nolan kept a careful distance. Unwilling to let anything personal blur the urgency of an investigation still far from finished, he busied himself instead with a fresh pot of coffee, setting a cup near her elbow without com. the small gesture saying more than either of them was ready to put into words.
Ardan watched him move around the cramped office with the same unhurried precision he brought to a fuel line or a wiring harness and found herself wondering, not for the first time, how a man so careful with machines had been treated so carelessly by the people who depended on him. It was Camille who eventually uncovered the document that changed everything. a confidential agreement buried deep in an archived legal folder stating that if Veil Meridian ever lost its operating certification, Blackthornne Capital held the right to purchase a controlling share of the company at a price far below its actual market value. Ardan read the contract three times before she could accept what it meant. Sebastian was not merely covering up a mistake. He had built the mistake himself, brick by brick, waiting patiently for the company to collapse under its own weight, so he could buy the wreckage for a fraction of what it was worth.
Working side by side through the following days, Ardan and Nolan pieced together nearly a year of quiet sabotage hidden inside routine maintenance records, a pattern that only became visible once someone finally knew to look for it. The counterfeit parts had never been meant to cause a single catastrophic accident all at once. Instead, Sebastian had designed a slow campaign of delays, near misses, and canceled flights calculated to erode client confidence and depress the company's valuation gradually. So gradually that no single incident would ever draw enough scrutiny to expose the pattern behind it. He had gambled that pilots and technicians would catch each individual failure before it became fatal.