Midnight was less than three hours away when Seraphina stopped looking at the countdown and started looking at the structure around it.
Ashford Tower had reached the point where every department was reacting instead of thinking. Legal teams were trapped inside the formal Helios review path. Cybersecurity was still unravelling the dormant Elias Ashford relay. Finance was building loss models for a termination event that seemed increasingly unavoidable. The board had shifted from pressure to contingency planning.
Everyone was staring at the same door.
Seraphina chose another one. Q She stood in the cybersecurity war room, eyes fixed on the archived authority path connected to Lucien's late father.
Elias Ashford's relay had been the visible route used to plant the Helios breach. Adrian had hidden the sabotage inside legacy family control, which meant the official review channel would keep circling the same poisoned evidence.
That was exactly why the formal route would fail.
