Alani
TWENTY-EIGHT
They built the counterintelligence plan in three hours.
Chaos handled logistics. His legal team—which operated with the institutional memory of a firm that had been drafting contracts since the Elizabethan era—prepared the documentation framework for the evidence chain.
Every piece of false data was registered, sealed, and timestamped with a precision that would hold in any courtroom.
Rowan coordinated with the security team to adjust monitoring on the vendor-liaison office without alerting Solis or his colleagues.
Giselle, operating remotely via a secure channel that she had set up with the focused competence of a woman whose organizational systems could survive a nuclear event, managed the parallel investigation: tracing Convention Talent Solutions’s registration back through corporate filings to the holding company that owned it.
The holding company was registered in Delaware.
Its board of directors included one name she recognized.
GISELLE: Convention Talent Solutions → registered to Apex Holdings Group → Apex board includes one Victor Marsh. Victor Marsh is CFO of Gryphon Ventures. Gryphon Ventures is the lead investor in NovaCraft’s parent company AND holds a minority stake in Griffin Media.
GISELLE: We have our through-line.
CRYSTAL: So it’s Varina Griffin.
GISELLE: The evidence doesn’t name her directly. Corporate insulation. But the financial trail puts her company at the center of every disruption.
ALANI: Forward everything to Chaos’s legal team.
Alani set down the phone. Looked at Chaos across the desk.
Three days ago, he had shut her out of this investigation.
Now they sat shoulder to shoulder—not touching, not quite, but close enough that she could feel the warmth radiating from his arm through the air between them—and the evidence trail she had demanded access to was leading exactly where she’d suspected.
Varina Griffin. CEO of Griffin Media. The woman who wanted Silverscale’s convention badly enough to plant a spy, sabotage a vendor, and leak proprietary data across three escalating incidents.
“We have a name,” Alani said.
Chaos turned toward her. The movement brought them closer—his shoulder angled into her space, his knee brushing hers beneath the desk. The contact was accidental. Neither of them moved away.
“We have a financial trail,” he corrected. “The name has always been Griffin. The evidence to prove it is what we’ve been building.”
“So we keep building.” She held his gaze.
Three days of shared focus had created its own kind of intimacy—long hours at the same desk, shared coffee runs, the quiet rhythm of two people solving a puzzle with their heads bent over the same screens.
She had not forgiven him. Not entirely. But the anger had cooled from a blaze into a slow burn that coexisted, uncomfortably, with the fact that working beside him was the best she had been at her job in years.
His strategic mind sharpened hers. Her operational instincts filled gaps in his approach.
They were better at this as a team than either of them was on their own, and the knowledge sat between them like a third presence at the desk.
“We keep building,” he agreed. His knee did not move from hers. “And we wait.”