The air in the Helwart Industries executive suite had turned to crystal—beautiful, brittle, and charged with the static of impending shatter. Sophia’s whisper hung between them, not as gossip, but as a desperate warning flare.

Linsy finally lifted her gaze from the blinding white of her computer screen. Sophia’s face was pale, her eyes wide with an urgency that had nothing to do with office drama and everything to do with witnessing a crime in progress. She kept glancing, with palpable ...