A folder of documents central to their investigation had vanished from the shelf where Darius had left it only hours earlier. When he finally reappeared, there was a fresh cut across the back of his hand that he had not had before the lights went out. And when Celeste asked what happened, he gave her only a short, evasive answer and changed the subject. A review of the building's security footage revealed that the cameras covering the mechanical corridor had gone dark for exactly 17 minutes during the blackout, a gap too precise to be coincidence. Only a small handful of employees held the security clearance required to disable that particular camera feed. and one name among them belonged to a member of the board of directors, a detail that made Darius's suspicion of an inside conspirator sharpen into something closer to certainty.
He spent the following day quietly mapping every access badge that had swiped through the executive corridor during the missing window, cross-referencing timestamps against calendar entries and travel records until most names fell away as impossible. A junior analyst had been in a meeting two floors below at the time. An assistant had been logged into a video call with a vendor in another time zone, verifiable down to the minute. But one badge showed no corresponding explanation at all. No meeting, no call, no reasonable account of where its owner had been standing when the cameras went dark, and Darius wrote the name down on a folded scrap of paper he kept in his shirt pocket rather than in any file that could be searched or seized.
He had learned by then that the safest evidence was the kind no one else knew existed. The following morning, Celeste faced her board again, and one member in particular, a polished, silver-haired man named Marcus Vale, told her with practiced concern that her health was beginning to affect the company's stability. When she asked coldly whether he was suggesting she resign, Marcus smiled and said only that he was suggesting she protect her legacy while she still could. Something about the phrase lodged in Celeste's mind and would not let go. That night, Darius uncovered an old contract buried deep in the company's legal archive, dated 3 years earlier, in the months just before Celeste symptoms had first begun.
The agreement signed quietly by Marcus Vale granted him the right to acquire a controlling share of Whitmore Meridian in the event that Celeste was formally declared unfit to continue running the company she had built. Darius understood immediately what the document meant. If Celeste could be pushed toward a diagnosis of permanent incapacity, Marcus stood to gain everything she had spent her life building. He told her plainly, his voice low, that this had never been about making her sick for its own sake. When she asked what it was about instead, he held her gaze and answered that it was about taking everything she owned.