Episode 11 — Whispers in the Dark
Rain had left the city glossy; streetlights smeared soft gold across wet pavement as Layla and Ethan cut through quieter blocks toward campus. The week's chaos had settled into a low, dangerous hum — a thousand tiny alarms that went off the moment a notification landed on someone's phone. Layla's fingers flexed around hers, still carrying the weight of the folder Naomi had given her and the echo of the last line Ethan had spoken in the car: "We're both pieces on someone else's board."
They moved without a map of calm. Conversation opened and closed on pragmatics — meetings, interviews, a possible emergency ethics panel Alexandra Vaughn wanted to convene. But under the facts lived currents neither had named aloud: distrust, the thrill of being hunted, the private, precarious warmth that came when Ethan's hand found hers and stayed.
At the student union, the glass front warped reflections of hurried students and the nation of umbrellas crowding the steps. Layla's phone buzzed before she could reach for a seat: Tiffany Larson: Meet me at 5th Street Café. I have documents. — T. Her chest tightened; Tiffany's byline had been a stormcloud since Prom fallout. Ethan read the string of words over her shoulder and did not hide the way his jaw tightened.
"We should go together," he said. "If this is staged, I don't want you alone."
Layla slid the phone closed. She remembered exactly why she'd let the Prom madness happen: a mix of careless youth and a desire to be brave. Now, the stakes were sharper. "Okay," she said. "Together."
The café smelled like espresso and lemon peel; the windows wore a film of rain. Tiffany sat by the back wall beneath a low lamp, fingers folded around a black takeaway cup. Her hair was sleek, eyes ringed by the sleepless edge of someone who'd been working nights and chasing clicks. Seeing her there — not tweeting, not live-streaming — made something in Layla's chest bristle. Tiffany's performance had always been public; this was private, and privates had motives.
"Tiffany," Ethan said, drawing a slow breath. "You wanted to meet."
Tiffany's smile was quick and practiced. "Thanks for coming," she said to Layla first. "I know things are messy. I thought — well, I thought you deserved to see what I have." She slipped a slim folder across the table to Layla, not meeting Ethan's gaze.
Layla's fingers paused on the paper. The folder looked official — printouts, timestamps, cropped screenshots — the kind of thing that makes hearts lurk at the edges of panic and curiosity. She trusted Naomi's folder more, but she would look through everything. That's what you did when the world threatened to rearrange itself: you gathered evidence and tried to find the shape beneath it.
"Who gave this to you?" Ethan asked. He was careful; the clerk behind the counter took two steps closer without looking rude.
"Someone who wants the truth out," Tiffany replied too quickly. "Not everyone does. Not all of them." Her voice dropped. "This is a different angle. You'll want to see the timestamps. It ties investor notes to internal memos. There's a pattern."
Layla opened the folder. The pages proved how easily truth could be carved into slices that served whoever held the knife: an email thread missing headers, a photograph with the metadata stripped, an internal memo that looked like it had been pasted together. Nothing in Tiffany's stack was raw; it had been curated. Naïve proof would be messy. This was surgical.
Ethan watched her face. "Who's your source?" he asked.
Tiffany's eyes flitted past him, to the street, to where the rain glittered in the pool of the streetlight. For the first time since Layla had met her on this case, she looked afraid. "I can't say. Not yet. I'm protected. That's how I work. You should be more worried about who's paying attention to you," Tiffany whispered, not cruel, only exhausted. "Someone's buying reach. Someone wants you both knocked off balance."
Layla's skin prickled. "We know that," she said.
Tiffany nodded. "I'm just — consider this a favor. Or a ledger entry. I don't know which." Her fingers drummed on the table. "There's more. But I can't be seen handing everything to you. Not publicly." She looked at Ethan then, and the briefest shadow crossed her expression: pity or calculation — Layla couldn't tell.
Outside, a black sedan idled by the curb, half-hidden under the awning of the bakery across the road. Layla noticed it the moment Tiffany glanced at the window. Ethan's hand tightened around her wrist under the table, an instinct more than a warning.
Tiffany watched the car too. "They don't like it when things get messy," she said. "You don't become the person who sees everything without getting a target on your back. I can help you, or I can help someone else. Right now, helping means making people pay attention."
A quiet took the table, a thin tautness that tasted like metal.
When they stepped back into the rain, Layla's mind filed through the content she'd seen. The documents were a map of selective truth-making: true names, doctored contexts, the faint smell of a frame. Naomi's folder, by contrast, was granular and raw — encrypted logs, transaction chains, a single highlighted name that had lit up in red: Julian Blackwood. Naomi's evidence had carried the weight of someone burned by secrecy. Tiffany's papers felt like a show — a stage prop handed to them with the tacit instruction: act.
They walked without speaking for a while. The city seemed to conspire with their unease. Neon hummed; people moved with the clumsy purpose of weekend lives. Finally Ethan said, quietly, "She's being used. Or she's using us. Either way, the reach is paid. Naomi's paper is the one that matters."
"Naomi put Julian's name in my hands," Layla said. The syllables landed like a stone in her stomach. "If he's involved, then it's not just a smear campaign. It's a play for control."
Ethan's eyes darkened with something that might have been anger, might have been calculation. "Then we move differently. We stop feeding the public. We hunt for the trail."
They didn't know where to hunt next. Elena Petrova's PR hand circled like a vulture over newsrooms; Alexandra Vaughn had called for an ethics review that might give them cover — or might be another kind of cage; Olivia Reyes kept her corporate smile on while Julian Blackwood watched numbers and waited. The net around them tightened.
That night, before Layla slept, she re-read Naomi's folder. The transaction logs led to shell companies and timestamps padded with meaningless comments. But Naomi had done something raw and brave: she'd pulled a fragment of the data thread that linked the boardroom to the server room, and it pointed, undeniably, to human choices made by people who measured profit above consequence.
Her phone lit with an encrypted message from Naomi: "If you follow this, be careful who sits next to you at meetings. Friends wear suits now."
Layla's thumb hovered over reply. She didn't answer. Instead, she moved the Naomi folder into a safe place and sent the Tiffany folder to Ethan's secure drop. For now, proof would be a thing to weigh in private, not a banner to be waved in the wind.
The city outside stilled, and for the first time in days Layla allowed herself a small, unguarded thought: whatever came next, she wouldn't let them make her into someone else's evidence. She had been the key someone warned about; she would not become the pawn.
Somewhere, the black sedan rolled away.
The storm, it seemed, was only deepening. And in the dark, under rain and neon, two quiet, stubborn people leaned closer together, drafting plans in the margins of a world that wanted them to perform.