POV: Jasmine
The laptop sat closed before me, its matte surface reflecting only the trembling light of the city outside. My pulse still hadn't settled from what I had just read in that cursed file. It pounced against my ribs like a warning drum.
2018.
The scandal.
Neutralize. Terminate.
The words replayed in my head, circling like vultures.
I told myself to breathe, but the air felt foreign, heavy. I pressed the heels of my palms into my eyes until stars bloomed. My chest ached with the weight of something too big for me to hold alone.
And yet… I couldn't put it down.
I reopened the laptop. The file was still there… an ugly truth laid bare in sterile font. But as I scrolled, I noticed something off. The formatting shifted abruptly halfway through. Sentences cut short. Tables missing data. A section of the appendix was blank where there should've been transaction logs.
I scrolled again, faster. Pages flickered past, whole swaths of them stripped bare. White space where incriminating detail should've been. The file was incomplete.
My stomach dropped.
Someone had emptied it.
"Claire." I called, my voice harsher than I intended.
The bedroom door cracked open, and she padded out, her hair tied up in a loose bun, her silk robe wrapped tight. Her eyes widened at my expression. "What is it? You look like you've seen a ghost."
"Not a ghost," I murmured, gesturing toward the screen. "Something worse."
She walked into the room quickly, rested on the arm of my chair, and stared at the file. Her lips moved silently as she read, her hand tightening on the chair's leather.
"Oh my God…" Her whisper barely made it into the air. "Miss… this isn't just corporate misconduct. This is…"
"Orchestrated." My voice was flat. "Deliberate. Planned."
Claire looked at me, her face pale. "And you're telling me you broke into KnightCorp's system to find this?"
"Yes."
"Do you realize what they'll do to you if they even suspect you touched this?"
I pushed the laptop away as if it might burn me. "I don't need them to suspect. I need them not to know."
She dragged a hand through her hair. "So what's the plan? Leak it? Go to the press?"
"Not yet." My throat was tight. "It's incomplete. Someone's already stripped it. If I leak this incomplete version, it looks sloppy. It could even backfire, making me the unreliable one."
Claire's eyes softened with something closer to fear than concern. "Then you're going to keep digging?"
I didn't answer. I didn't need to.
The next morning, sunlight stabbed at my curtains like an uninvited guest. I had barely slept. When I did, the dreams were cut short… faces blurred, words like "terminate" flashing red in the dark.
"Vrrrrrmmmmm.. vrrrrrmmmmm" The piercing sound of the phone cut through the silence.
Leonard called just past nine.
"You sound like hell." he said as a way of greeting.
"Good morning to you too."
"Don't deflect. What happened? Claire texted me last night."
I frowned. "She had no right…"
"She had every right, Jas. She's worried about you. And now so am I."
I pinched the bridge of my nose. "Leon, it's worse than we thought. The scandal wasn't some organic fallout… it was engineered. There are directives, signatures, money trails. But half of it is missing. Redacted or scrubbed."
"Jesus." His voice dropped low. "You're saying Ares… or his people… covered it up?"
"Yes. And kept just enough as leverage."
There was silence on the other end, the kind weighted with thought. Then: "We need the missing pieces. Without them, it's just smoke without fire."
"I know."
"Jas…" His voice sharpened. "Be careful. Files like that don't just go missing. Someone made sure they disappeared. Which means someone's probably watching for anyone who goes looking."
A chill crept down my spine. "I'll be careful."
"Promise me."
I let the silence hang long enough for him to hear the answer I couldn't say out loud.
By noon, I was in the office at Duvall Holdings. I'd forced my body into a navy suit, hair slick, makeup precise. My armor.
The boardroom was alive with chatter… strategies for the joint ventures with KnightCorp, projections for growth, whispers about my apparent alliance with Ares. I played the part flawlessly, nodding, smiling, signing off on schedules.
But inside, I was elsewhere… back in that stripped file, staring at blank pages like missing teeth in a skull.
When the meeting ended, Leonard cornered me in the hall. "We need to run an internal sweep. If you're digging, there's a chance KnightCorp already suspects. And if they've got moles…"
His warning faded when my phone buzzed.
A single notification.
Unknown Sender.
I frowned and unlocked it. The screen flooded with black text on white background.
"You're looking in the wrong places, Nyx."
My breath caught. "Damn it."
Leon leaned over my shoulder. "What the hell…"
Another line appeared before my eyes.
"Stop digging… or next time, I won't miss."
The blood drained from my face. "They know."
Leon snatched the phone, his jaw tight. "Nyx? They called you Nyx?"
I nodded slowly. The name was an echo from my past… the handle I'd used in the early days when I dipped my toes into hacking at university. A name only a handful of people should've known.
"Whoever this is," Leon said grimly, "they've been watching you longer than you think."
My phone buzzed again.
A final message.
"Consider this your only warning."
The screen went black.
I couldn't breathe. The corridor seemed to close in, voices muffled and distant. For the first time in years, I felt something I hated admitting to.
Fear.
Claire found me minutes later, still frozen with the phone clutched in my hand. "Miss? What's wrong?"
Leon answered for me, his voice low and deadly calm. "She's been compromised."
Claire's gaze darted between us. "Compromised how?"
I forced the words out. "Someone knows. They know I've been digging. They called me Nyx."
Claire's face went white. "Nyx? But that was…"
"I know."
The three of us stood in a fragile silence, the weight of it pressing in.
Finally, Leon broke it. "You have two options. Back off… or push harder and risk them coming for you."
I lifted my chin, even as my hands trembled. "I won't back off."
Claire's voice cracked. "Miss Jasmine, this isn't just about outsmarting Ares anymore. This is dangerous."
"Dangerous is fine." I whispered, my eyes on the black screen. "What isn't fine is letting them scare me into silence. Whoever this is… they just confirmed I'm close."
That night, back at the Grand Sterling, the city lights glittered like indifferent stars. I sat at my desk again, laptop open, gloves back on. My reflection in the glass looked pale, drawn… but unbroken.
The threat still echoed in my mind. *Stop digging, Nyx."
But the threats were just smoke. I wanted fire.
I retraced my path through KnightCorp's system, careful this time, slower, like a thief testing floorboards. Every move I made could trigger eyes I couldn't see.
Still, I searched.
Buried beneath the legal memos, I found fragments. Not whole files, just echoes: broken metadata, ghost entries in the server index where a file should've been but wasn't. Pointers without destinations.
One fragment caught my eye. A filename stripped to gibberish, but its timestamp matched the scandal's peak. When I cross-referenced it against the surviving ledger, the gap was too neat.
Someone hadn't just erased files. They'd surgically removed the most important ones and left breadcrumbs… just enough for someone like me to notice.
My heart pounded. This wasn't incompetence. It was a message.
A game.
And I'd just walked into it.
By two a.m., exhaustion dragged at my bones. I shut down the laptop, pulled the curtains tighter, and pressed my back against the cool wall.
Ares was dangerous. KnightCorp was dangerous. But whoever sent that message… they were something else entirely.
This wasn't just revenge anymore.
This was survival.
As I lay in bed, the phone vibrated one last time on the nightstand.
I picked it up with dread gnawing at me.
A single line glared back at me, no name attached:
"Sleep with one eye open, Nyx."
The words carved ice into my spine.
"You think you're clever, Nyx. But you're not the only one with secrets. Don't push your luck."
And for the first time since I returned to Crestfall, I realized:
This war wasn't just mine and Ares's.
It was bigger. Older. And far deadlier.