Chapter 54 The Gilded Cage

• The threat to the Foundation’s funding was, as Alexander predicted, a bluff. A desperate gambit by Nephilim’s remnants to claw back assets. With Vance’s federal clout and Clara’s legal scalpel, we swatted it aside within forty-eight hours. The victory was clean, clinical, and should have felt like a triumph.
• Instead, it left a residue of tension. The fight had been a distraction from the unsettling quiet that had begun to settle between us. The work continued—the Lin Foundation was a hungry engine that required constant fuel—but the spaces between were filled with a new, unspoken awareness.
• Alexander’s physical presence was a constant, low-grade test of my resolve. His body was healing, the last vestiges of neural damage smoothing out, leaving behind the lean, powerful frame that had always seemed to take up more space than it physically should. He moved with a recovered grace that was both familiar and utterly new because it was now devoid of its former arrogance. It was just… movement. Efficient. Controlled. And I found my clinical eye, the one that had coolly assessed his tremors and pallor, now unconsciously noting the way his sweater stretched across his shoulders as he reached for a file, or the way his focus etched a faint line between his brows.