The Weight of Silence
The penthouse office sat forty floors above the city, high enough that the traffic noise dissolved into something like breathing—a low, distant murmur that never quite stopped. Selina Vale liked it best at this hour, when the glass walls turned the room into a lantern suspended over a sea of amber lights, and the rest of Blackwood Enterprises had gone dark except for the floor she occupied.
She sat cross-legged in the leather chair that was technically Slias's, though he rarely used it before midnight, poring over a spreadsheet that refused to make sense no matter how many times she reordered the columns. Three monitors glowed in front of her, each one a different layer of the same rot. Numbers didn't lie, not really. People lied. Numbers just recorded the lies faithfully, if you knew how to read them.
And she did. God help her, she did.
"Come on," she murmured, scrolling through an encrypted ledger disguised as an inventory report for Antonio Reyes's downtown crew. The shipping figures matched the manifest. The manifest matched the invoices. But the money that hit the account three days later didn't match anything—it arrived short, every single time, by a percentage so small…