POV: Jasmine
The message read like an order.
Lunch at Étoile. One o'clock. Don't be late. –Z.
I tossed the phone onto the bed. Claire froze at the vanity when she saw the name.
"Zara?" she said. The brush stopped mid-stroke.
"She's testing me." I said, zipping my jacket. "If I don't go, she wins the headline that I folded. If I go and play scared, she wins the humiliation."
Claire came around and pinched the bridge of her nose. "Then take someone."
"No." I checked the mirror… calm face, tight jaw. "I don't want a caravan. I want to show I can walk into their room."
She didn't like it, but she folded her protest. "Promise me one thing… watch the exits."
"I will." I smiled once, sharp. "And don't call me on the stupid stuff unless it's life-ending."
When she left, I put my phone in my bag and practiced polite smiles until the real ones fit like armor.
Étoile was all white orchids and soft lighting. I sat where I could see the entrance and the private door. Zara arrived on cue… silk, pearls, posture that said precedence.
"Jasmine." she purred, sliding into the chair. Her kiss to my cheek felt like a calendar note: scheduled cruelty.
"You look well." I said.
"So do you." she returned. "Danger wears you nicely."
The waiter brought champagne. Zara raised her glass.
"To reunions," she said.
"To clarity." I answered.
She watched me over the rim of her flute like someone inspecting a specimen for flaws. "You've been busy," she observed. "KnightCorp keeps odd company lately."
"You follow corporate gossip now?" I asked. "Since when did you care about rumors?"
"Since when they affect our line," she said, eyes steady. "You poking around KnightCorp's archives… amusing."
"You know about Nyx?" The word left my lips before I could stop it.
A quick smile. "We keep tabs. Old handles stick." She tilted her head. "Curiosity is charming until it becomes dangerous."
I set my fork down without eating. "So this is a warning."
"Not exactly." She toyed with an oyster. "More like a lesson. We determine outcomes. Sometimes you neutralize variables. Sometimes you terminate them. It's governance, Jas."
She said the words casually, as if reading a weather report. The memory of printed directives… neutralize; ensure extract; if necessary, terminate… tasted like bile.
"You admit it." I said. "You engineered the fall."
"Engineered?" She laughed softly. "We adjusted the narrative. We protected the family. That's what families do."
"You call ruining lives protection." My voice didn't rise. I let the accusation hang.
"Protection demands decisions." she said. "You didn't fit the frame. We removed what didn't align."
A young reporter pushed through the doorway, breathless with good timing. "Ms. Knight, Ms. Duvall.. on the merger…" He thrust a phone at us.
Zara smiled for the camera the way athletes smile after a win. "Of course." She let the camera catch our arm-linked exit. Performance could be rated ad flawless.
When the reporter left, Zara's hand dropped like a it was disgusted.
"You're dangerous." she said softly. "Not because you plan to be, but because you don't know how to stop."
"I know how to stop," I answered. "I stopped myself from letting you see fear today."
She leaned in. "You vanished once. It was messy. You returned like a ghost. Thank you for the entertainment."
"You brag about that like it was art." I set my glass down. The servers moved around us like a current; no one should notice the tension, but the room hummed with small, sharp things.
"Entertainment," she repeated. "Yes. And one learns. One amends the stage. People have to believe the story. That was the point then… and it is still the point."
She smiled. It was a private smile, the kind that leaves you raw.
"You broke me," I said. "You took everything."
"She was unregulated," Zara said casually, as though pronouncing a medical term. "We had to make a decision."
"And you call that protection?" I asked.
She shrugged. "We protect our own."
Her next words were slow, deliberate. "I destroyed you once. I'll do it again."
They landed like ice.
I didn't flinch. I finished a sip of champagne and stood. "Try it," I said. "You'll find me harder to shatter."
Outside we walked past flashing cameras. The crowd's breath smelled of smog and expectation. The city pressed in… business as usual.
At the hotel lounge a man in a courier jacket watched us. He checked his watch like a man whose timing was rehearsal. His backpack sat square on his shoulder; his eyes, however, kept finding me.
I felt the look, then told myself it was paranoia. Zara had a way of making the world seem staged. Maybe everyone was in on the performance.
We stepped into the elevator. I counted the floors, practiced a smile, and kept my posture correct. The man was at the distant end of the lobby when the doors closed.
A block later the courier crossed the street in front of our car. He moved with the casual, practiced rhythm of someone who did this for a living. The delivery scooter beeped, a city noise. He brushed past the side of my bag… just enough contact to warm my hand against fabric.
I felt nothing more than a nudge. I told myself city life has accidental grazes.
I didn't check my bag until I was inside the suite, the city lights smeared like watercolor through the glass.
I unzipped the tote and shoved receipts and lipstick to the bottom. A seam felt different against my fingers, an almost-imperceptible bulge. I smoothed the lining… nothing. I shrugged and left it for later. That was a choice: to believe I was safe.
Leonard called at ten. "How was the lovely afternoon with the royal malice?" he asked.
"Polite," I answered. "And deliberate."
"Did she say anything useful?" He sounded an inch less amused than usual.
"She said she'd enjoy watching me burn." I didn't add the rest.
"Then we sweep the footage. Courier manifests, CCTV at the hotel, sidewalk cams. If someone brushed you, we get the frame. We drag the courier into the light."
"I saw a man," I said. "Courier jacket. Watch in his hand. He grazed my bag."
"Good," Leonard said immediately. "You saw him. That gives us a start. I'll have a team on it in an hour. Don't touch anything. Don't move the bag."
I hung up and looked at the tote like it had become a device. Claire hovered by the doorway.
"You alright?" she asked.
"Yes." I forced the word. "Handle it."
She didn't like that. "Promise me you'll let Leon's team do the legwork. And don't go wandering alone."
"I won't." I said. "But nothing's changing my plan."
Claire studied me, then nodded. "Okay. Then let's make sure you're a dangerous woman with legal and logistical backup."
Later that night I replayed the meal in my head in fragments… Zara's chatter about narrative, the way she rolled the word terminate as if it were a season, the courier's practiced brush. It had the outline of a message: we can reach you; we can plant things in your life; we can make it look like an accident.
I pulled my laptop close. The file I'd copied from KnightCorp still sat on my encrypted disk. It was missing chunks… the worst of it pared away, enough to leave questions and not answers.
Someone had preserved the right amount of damage to scare me but not to expose them all.
I typed, forwarded, organized. Names. Shell companies. Dates. I made a list out of the holes.
At two a.m., the television in the suite murmured the city's late news. An anchor said something about optics and mergers. Zara's face flashed in a clip from earlier: pearls, a cut of cheekbones that could carve bone.
I turned the volume off and shut the laptop.
When I slid the tote off the chair to double-check the lining, a faint zip near the seam snagged a fingernail. I fumbled. There, tucked into a little fold where no one would likely put their hand, something black and angular caught the light.
I pulled it free. A flash drive.
My breath found me then… sharp, startled. I hadn't felt it earlier. I stared at the plastic between my fingers and thought of the courier's hand, the practiced brush. Of Zara's smile that promised annihilation.
I didn't plug it in. Not yet. Not stupidly. Not until I had people who could trace it without tracing back to me.
I slipped the drive into a small steel safe my legal team insisted I keep on the premises, the one with multiple codes and biometric locks. My hands didn't stop shaking until the safe clicked.
Zara had thrown a line. Someone had tried to hand me a detonator.
I lay awake until the horizon lightened. The city under glass looked like a grid of small, reachable things. The Knights had resources. They had reach. They had family.
And I had a drive that would either blow the whole thing open… or blow me out.
I closed my eyes and let the dread harden into a shape.
Tomorrow, I would move.