He drove to the laboratory himself that same morning, and the technician who met him at the door looked genuinely unsettled, insisting that the samples had been logged and secured according to protocol the night before, and simply were not there when the morning shift arrived. There was no sign of forced entry, no broken lock, nothing a security report would ever flag as suspicious, which told Darius that whoever had taken them either held legitimate access to the facility or had paid someone who did. He stood in the cold hallway outside the storage room for a long moment, thinking through every person who had known about the testing, narrowing the list until it became uncomfortably short. Someone close to Celeste, someone trusted enough to move through secure spaces without raising questions, had reached far beyond the tower to erase the one piece of proof that could not be argued away as coincidence. Celeste began to suspect the very people closest to her. running through years of trusted colleagues in her mind and finding uncomfortably that she could no longer be certain of any of them.
Darius spent long nights combing through personnel records and financial disclosures, and one name kept surfacing more often than the pattern of coincidence should allow. Marcus Veil again and again in contracts and calendar entries and expense reports that placed him near every critical turning point in Celeste's decline. Still, none of it amounted to proof a court or a board would accept, and Darius knew that suspicion alone would not be enough to stop a man as careful as Marcus had proven himself to be. The counterattack, when it came, was swift and precise. Security discovered a small data storage device hidden inside Darius's supply cabinet, loaded with confidential company files that had no business being in a contractor's possession, and he was placed under guard within minutes of the discovery.
Celeste stood before the assembled board as Marcus announced with theatrical somnity that the technician she had trusted so completely had been stealing proprietary data from the company all along. Darius did not waste breath defending himself with lengthy explanation. He simply looked at Celeste across the room and told her not to trust what she was seeing. Celeste faced an impossible choice in that moment, weighing whether to sign the paperwork that would have Darius removed from the property, whether to hand him over to the authorities as the board was demanding, or whether to trust the instinct that had told her from their very first difficult conversation that this man had never once lied to her. She chose to trust him.
The relief on Darius's face was immediate, but it was quickly followed by something sharper, almost satisfied, as he told her quietly that now they could finally catch the people responsible. Only then did Celeste understand that he had planted the device himself, deliberately, knowing it would draw the conspirators out into the open where they could finally be seen. Working together in absolute secrecy, Darius and Celeste constructed a piece of false information and let it circulate through only a tightly controlled handful of executives. A rumor suggesting that Celeste, worn down by years of unexplained illness, was quietly preparing to sell her controlling stake in the company. They shared the fabricated detail with no one outside that small circle and waited to see which single person would carry it beyond the walls where they had planted it.