Chapter 61

• It came on a Wednesday morning, folded quietly between shipping invoices and scheduling threads, buried just low enough in my inbox to be easily missed. There was no subject line. No greeting. No sender signature. Just a string of numbers that looked like a transaction ID at first glance and a single blue hyperlink beneath it.
• I almost deleted it.
• Lately, the volume of spam and digital noise had tripled. Everyone wanted access. Everyone wanted answers. Everyone wanted a piece of the drama, the comeback, the chaos. It would not have been the first time someone tried to fish their way into our internal systems through mimicry. But something made me pause. The email address was encrypted, and the routing trail had been scrambled through a network that looked oddly familiar. I frowned at the address line, tracing the pattern again.