Tangled in His Web
“You’ve seeded the feed?”
“In weeks,” Sebastian answered. “Small threads. A dormant backdoor we left months ago that only activates against a particular handshake. I let Knight get comfortable. Complacency makes for deeper cuts.” He tapped a key; one of the status bars ticked forward a fraction.
At the far edge of the room, the silent figure — a woman whose presence had been introduced only in shadow and whose name the world did not yet know — moved without taking her eyes off the screens. She was younger than Elara, less ornate, more contained, and when she leaned in, the light made her almost statue-like. Sebastian watched how she watched: not with hunger, but with a careful tempering of f