All Chapters of Betrayed Omega: Chosen by the Mafia Alpha : Chapter 11 - Chapter 13

JulianThe door had a lock I had set myself, and I used it. I stood at the window for a moment, looking at the darkened garden below: the same controlled quiet, even at night. I had told myself I was going to sleep.I lasted as far as the chair.The evidence file was open on my screen at eight forty-three, and I worked through two more entities with the disciplined focus I could always locate when everything else was unreliable, the part of my brain that turned distress into productivity as a matter of functional survival.Entity thirty-eight. Entity thirty-nine. Both clean, or clean enough: the skimming pattern didn't appear in either, which was its own data point; absence of the pattern was as informative as its presence.I was opening entity forty when the workstation's secondary email client flagged a message.I had set up secure internal email access as part of the compliance system integration, standard practice. I needed to be able to receive documentation from Serena, from the

JulianAt twenty past ten, the event was moving toward its natural second-act dispersal, the room thinning at the edges while the core consolidated. Alastor had drawn me into a conversation with two legitimate business affiliates, actual corporate entities, the kind that appeared in public financial filings, when the sound happened.Outside.A single, sharp crack.Automotive. Backfire, exhaust, mechanical rather than ballistic. Fifty feet from the building at most, muffled by walls and glass but present, penetrating, the frequency that my nervous system had been cataloguing since I was eight years old in the apartment above the laundromat where the walls were thin.My body didn't ask my brain.It simply stopped.The room continued around me: conversation, movement, the ambient social machinery of Cavendish operating at its regular register, and I was standing inside it with a wine glass in my hand and no access to the present tense, which had been replaced entirely by the specific, co