Shattered Allegiance: Part 2 — The First Breach of Confidence

The conference room felt like a vacuum, sucking the very air from Elara’s lungs. It was nearly two in the morning.

Outside, the city was a glittering, indifferent tapestry, but in here, the world had shrunk to the polished mahogany table, the scattered piles of legal documents, and the man sitting across from her.

Kael.

Every breath he took seemed to steal one of hers. He hadn’t touched her, hadn’t even looked at her with anything other than cool, professional intensity for the last four hours, but the memory of his hand on her back days ago was a phantom brand against her skin.

She kept replaying last night with Grant in her head—the forced passion, the hollow victory of his release, the crushing loneliness that followed. She’d sought an anchor and found only deeper water.

Now, sitting across from Kael, she felt like she was drowning.

“We’re going in circles,” she said, her voice raspy with fatigue and frustration. She pushed a stack of depositions away, the paper sliding with a sound that felt deafeningly loud in the quiet room.

“We have motive, we have opportunity, but the direct financial link to Aldridge is a ghost. We can’t find it.”

Kael leaned forward, his elbows on the table, steepling his fingers in front of his lips. The overhead lighting carved sharp, dramatic shadows across his face, making his eyes seem darker, more intense.

“It’s not a ghost. It’s buried. And we’re going to dig it up.” His voice was a low rumble, a physical vibration that traveled across the table and resonated deep in her chest.

She rubbed her temples, the diamond of her engagement ring catching the light, winking at her like a tiny, cold accuser. “How? We’ve subpoenaed every record, followed every shell corporation. It’s a dead end.”

“No,” he said, his gaze unwavering. “It’s a wall. And we need a way through it.” He stood, the sudden movement startling her.

He was a predator unfolding, all controlled grace and coiled power. He began to pace behind his chair, the soft fall of his expensive shoes on the plush carpet a maddeningly rhythmic counterpoint to her frantic pulse.

“There’s one more angle,” he said, stopping his pacing. “It’s… sensitive. Highly speculative. Something my informant gave me. If it’s wrong, it could blow back on us, hard. If it’s right, it cracks the whole thing wide open.”

Elara’s professional curiosity warred with a primal instinct to tell him to sit back down, to put the table between them again. “What is it?”

He glanced at the glass walls of the conference room, then at the closed door. “Not here.”

“Kael, the room is soundproofed. We’re the only two people on this floor.”

“You can’t be too careful,” he murmured, his eyes locking onto hers. A different kind of energy began to suffuse the room, thick and heavy, displacing the sterile atmosphere of legal strategy.

This was something else entirely. Personal. Dangerous.

He rounded the table in three long strides. Elara’s heart hammered against her ribs, a frantic bird trapped in a cage.

She didn’t move back, couldn’t. She was rooted to her chair, watching him approach as if in a dream.

He didn’t stop until he was standing directly behind her. She could feel the heat radiating from his body, could smell the faint, clean scent of his soap mixed with something uniquely him—something like sandalwood and storm-charged air.

Her own scent, the floral perfume Grant had bought her, felt like a flimsy, pathetic lie in his presence.

“Attorney-client privilege,” he whispered, the two words a smokescreen for what was really happening. He leaned down, his mouth coming to rest just beside her ear.

His breath was a warm caress against her skin, sending a shiver cascading down her spine. The fine hairs on her neck stood on end.

“The informant,” he began, his voice a low, hypnotic murmur meant only for her, “thinks Aldridge isn’t using a bank. He’s using a person. A ‘curator,’ he called them. Someone who deals in high-end, untraceable assets. Art. Antique jewelry. Things that can be moved quietly and sold for cash without a paper trail.”

The information was brilliant. It was a paradigm shift for the case, a path she hadn’t even considered.

But her brain could barely process the words. All she could register was the timbre of his voice vibrating through her bones, the light scrape of his jaw, unshaven from the long hours, against her hair.

Her eyes fluttered shut. She was supposed to be thinking about the case.

She was supposed to be thinking about her fiancé. Instead, all she could think was more.

“We’d need to find this curator,” she managed to breathe out, her own voice barely a whisper.

“Exactly,” he murmured, his lips brushing the shell of her ear. It was an electric shock, a jolt of pure, unadulterated lightning that shot straight to her core. “And to do that, we’d need to get very close to Aldridge’s inner circle. It’s a risk.”

His hand came to rest on the back of her chair, his knuckles brushing her shoulder blade. A strangled sound escaped her throat.

It was too much. This proximity, this pretense.

It was a beautiful, exquisite torture.

“Kael,” she whispered, a plea and a warning in one.

“I know,” he breathed against her skin, his voice thick with a meaning that had nothing to do with the law. “I know.”

With a surge of self-preservation that felt like tearing her own skin, she pushed her chair back and stood, turning to face him. It was a mistake.

The space between them now was a combustible inch of air. She was trapped between the table and the solid wall of his body.

She could see the conflict in his eyes, the raw hunger warring with the iron control she knew he prided himself on.

“We can’t,” she said, her voice shaking.

A muscle ticked in his jaw. “Can’t what, Elara? We can’t win this case? Or we can’t stand in a room together without it feeling like the goddamn air is on fire?”

His honesty was a punch to the gut. “Stop it.”

“Why?” he challenged, his voice dropping to a dangerous hush. “Because you went home last night and played house? You tried to fuck the feeling away, didn’t you? Did it work?”

The cruel accuracy of his words stole her breath. A tear of fury and shame pricked at the corner of her eye.

“You don’t know anything.”

“I know what I see,” he countered, taking the final step, closing the last fraction of an inch between them. His hands came up, not to touch her, but to brace themselves on the wall on either side of her head.

He’d caged her. Her world narrowed to the crisp white of his shirt, the strong column of his throat, the storm in his eyes. “I see a woman wearing a ring she doesn’t want, pretending to live a life that’s suffocating her. I see you looking at me like you’re starving. And God help me, I’m looking right back.”

And then the tension snapped.

The control he held so tightly shattered into a million pieces. His mouth crashed down on hers.

It wasn’t a kiss; it was a collision. A desperate, explosive impact of want and warning, lust and danger.

It was all the unspoken words, the simmering glances, the charged silences of the past weeks igniting in a single, cataclysmic moment. His lips were firm, demanding, and she met him with a ferocity that shocked them both.

A guttural sound was torn from his throat as her hands fisted in the front of his shirt, pulling him impossibly closer. This wasn’t gentle or romantic. It was raw.

Primal. He tasted of late-night coffee and a frustration so deep it was bitter, but underneath it was a heat that promised to burn her alive. She didn’t care.

She welcomed the flames.

His hand left the wall, tangling in her hair, tilting her head back to grant him deeper access. His tongue swept into her mouth, a possessive, claiming act that sent a shockwave of pure sensation through her.

She moaned into his mouth, a sound of surrender and desperation. This felt more real, more honest, than any chaste kiss or dutiful encounter she’d ever shared with Grant.

Grant’s touch was about possession, about marking territory. Kael’s was about mutual immolation.

He wasn’t just taking; he was devouring, and she was devouring him right back.

The sharp corner of the wall dug into her back. Her mind, her carefully constructed world of obligations and propriety, was a distant, dying star.

All that existed was Kael’s mouth on hers, his body a hard, unyielding pressure against her own, the frantic beat of two hearts finally confessing their treason.

He broke the kiss as abruptly as he’d started it. They were both panting, their chests heaving.

His forehead rested against hers, his eyes closed, his breathing ragged. Her lips were swollen, tingling, and she could taste him on her tongue.

Her composure was gone, not just cracked but utterly annihilated. In its place was a wreck of guilt and a wild, terrifying exhilaration.

He opened his eyes, and the storm was still there, but now it was laced with a dark, possessive certainty. He raised a hand, his thumb tracing her bottom lip with a tenderness that was a stark, devastating contrast to the violence of their kiss.

“There,” he rasped, his voice a gravelly echo in the silent room. “Now we have a secret.”

She stared at him, unable to speak, unable to think. He was right. This wasn’t just a kiss.

It was a line drawn and crossed. It was a choice made in a moment of combustible insanity.

It was the point of no return.

And the most terrifying part was, she didn’t want to go back.

Chapter 7: The Night the Rules Changed

The key in my front door felt like a foreign object, its teeth grinding against the lock with a sound that was too loud, too final. I slipped inside, closing the door with a soft click that echoed the slamming of a door in my soul.

The air in the foyer was cool and still, smelling of the lemon-scented polish our housekeeper used and the faint, sterile scent of Grant’s ambition. It was the smell of my life.

A life that suddenly felt like a perfectly constructed, beautifully furnished cage.

My lips still burned.

I could feel the ghost of Kael’s mouth on mine—the rough press of his desperation, the shocking heat of his tongue, the way his fingers had dug into the soft flesh of my arms, holding me pinned to the cool plaster of his office wall. It wasn’t a kiss of tenderness.

It was a claiming. A raw, frantic collision that had lit a fuse in the deepest, most dormant part of me.

Guilt was a venomous serpent coiling in my stomach, but a wild, terrifying exhilaration sang through my veins, a melody I hadn’t heard in years.

I leaned back against the door, closing my eyes, and the memory assaulted me again. The low growl in his throat.

The scent of his skin, something like expensive whiskey and clean, masculine soap. The shattering realization that this—this raw, forbidden danger—felt more real than the diamond on my finger.

“Elara?”

My eyes snapped open. Grant stood at the entrance to the living room, a crystal tumbler of scotch in his hand.

He was still in his suit, though his tie was loosened and his jacket was off, slung over the back of a pristine cream armchair. His dark hair was perfectly styled, his jaw sharp, his eyes—the eyes of a prosecutor trained to see every lie—narrowed on me.

“You’re late,” he said. It wasn’t an accusation, just a statement of fact, but it landed like a judgment.

“The meeting ran over,” I managed, my voice sounding strained to my own ears. I forced my feet to move, walking toward the hall closet to hang up my coat, needing to put some distance between us.

My body felt like a live wire, and I was terrified his gaze would see it humming.

“Productive, I hope.” He took a slow sip of his drink, watching me over the rim of the glass. “You look… flushed.”

My hand flew to my cheek, the skin hot to the touch. “It’s just—it was a long session. A lot of dense material to get through.” The lie tasted like ash in my mouth, clumsy and inadequate.

He didn’t move. He just watched, his stillness a form of pressure. “You missed dinner. I saved you a plate.”

“Oh. I’m not hungry.” My stomach churned at the thought of food. “I’m sorry, Grant. I should have called.”

“Yes,” he said, the single word sharp and clean as a scalpel. “You should have.” He swirled the amber liquid in his glass. “Everything alright with this case, Elara? You seem… distracted lately. More than usual.”

The serpent of guilt tightened its grip. He saw it. Of course, he saw it.

He made a living seeing what people tried to hide. I was an open book to him, and I’d just ripped out a chapter and set it on fire.

“It’s just high-stakes,” I said, finally meeting his gaze, praying the lie would hold. “You know how it is. A lot of pressure to make sure we get it right.”

He held my gaze for a long moment, his expression unreadable. Then, he gave a curt nod.

“Just don’t let your counsel get you in over your head. Men like Kael “Rook” Volkov… they operate in the grey areas. Make sure you stay on the right side of the line.”

The irony was so thick I could have choked on it. I had just obliterated that line, let Kael pull me so far over it I couldn’t even see it anymore.

“I know what I’m doing,” I whispered.

He drained his glass. “Good. I’m going to review the Chen deposition briefs. Don’t wait up.”

He turned and walked back into the living room, leaving me alone in the silent hallway, the burn on my lips a phantom heat that branded me a liar.

***

The next morning, the world felt too bright, too sharp. The crisp autumn air did nothing to clear the fog of guilt and adrenaline from my head as I walked toward my car, parked on the quiet, tree-lined street in front of our brownstone.

My hand was on the handle when I saw it.

A long, jagged gash ran the length of the driver’s side door, carving through the pearlescent white paint down to the dull grey metal beneath. It was deep and ugly, a violent scar on a flawless surface. My breath hitched.

I followed the line of it with my eyes, and my stomach plummeted. Etched into the paint near the rear wheel well, in crude, angry letters, were two words:

DROP IT.

My gaze darted down. The front tire on the driver’s side was completely flat, the rubber slumped sadly against the asphalt.

It wasn’t a nail. A clean, deliberate slice marred the sidewall.

This wasn’t random. This was a message.

A wave of cold dread washed over me, so intense it made me dizzy. This wasn’t about spreadsheets and offshore accounts anymore.

The abstract danger Kael had warned me about had just materialized on my car, on my street, a stone’s throw from the home I shared with the man prosecuting the case.

My first instinct wasn’t to call the police. It wasn’t to run inside and tell Grant.

My hand, shaking, was already pulling my phone from my purse. My thumb hovered for a second over Grant’s name before swiping past it, my heart pounding a frantic rhythm against my ribs as I found Kael’s number and pressed call.

He answered on the second ring. “Elara?”

“They vandalized my car,” I blurted out, the words tumbling over each other. My voice was a thin, reedy thing. “Kael, someone—they slashed my tire and carved a message into the door. It says to drop it.”

There was a beat of dead silence on the line. Then, his voice came back, stripped of all its usual smooth charm.

It was low, hard, and lethal. “Where are you?”

“Outside my house.”

“Don’t touch anything. Go back inside and lock the door. Are you alone?”

“Grant left for the office an hour ago.”

“Good. I’m ten minutes away. Don’t talk to anyone. Don’t call anyone else. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” I whispered.

“Elara. I’m coming.”

He hung up. I stood frozen for another moment, staring at the ugly gash on my car, a physical manifestation of the secret I was keeping. The threat wasn’t just to my case anymore.

It was to me. And the only person I wanted was the one who had put me in its path.

***

We met in the echoing concrete confines of a subterranean parking garage two blocks from my house. The air was cool and smelled of damp cement and exhaust fumes.

I’d taken a cab, my nerves shot, glancing over my shoulder the entire way. Kael was already there, leaning against the hood of his sleek black sedan, his arms crossed over his chest.

The moment I stepped out of the cab, his eyes locked on me, blazing with an intensity that had nothing to do with desire and everything to do with a cold, protective fury.

He didn’t say a word, just pushed off the car and closed the distance between us in three long strides. He stopped just shy of touching me, but the heat rolling off him was a palpable force.

His jaw was a hard line, a muscle jumping in his cheek.

“Are you hurt?” he asked, his voice a low growl.

“No, I’m fine. Just… shaken.”

“Let me see the pictures.”

I fumbled with my phone, my fingers still clumsy, and showed him the photos I’d taken. He took the phone from me, his gaze fixed on the screen.

I watched his knuckles turn white as he gripped the device. He swiped through the images, his expression growing darker with each one.

“The bastards,” he breathed, the words laced with venom. He handed the phone back to me, his eyes lifting to scan my face, my arms, as if searching for injuries they might have inflicted. “This changes things.”

“What does it mean, Kael?”

“It means they know who you are. And it means they’re not afraid to come to your home to make a point.” He scrubbed a hand over his face, his anger warring with a self-recrimination that was plain to see.

“This is my fault. I pushed you. I never should have let it get this personal.”

“You warned me,” I said, a strange need to absolve him rising in me. “I knew the risks.”

“You knew the theoretical risks,” he shot back, his voice sharp. He took a step closer, crowding me against the cold concrete pillar behind me. The air crackled, just as it had in his office.

But this wasn’t lust. This was something deeper, more primal. This was possession.

“This is not theoretical, Elara. This is a promise. They’re telling you what they’ll do if you don’t back off.”

He reached out, his hand hovering for a second before his fingers gently brushed a strand of hair from my cheek. The gesture was so tender it stole my breath.

“I won’t let them touch you,” he murmured, his thumb stroking my jaw. His eyes, dark and stormy, held mine.

“But you have to be smarter. Safer. We can’t use our regular phones anymore. We can’t risk Grant’s office, or anyone else, tracking our communications.”

He reached into the inside pocket of his jacket and pulled out a small, featureless black phone. A burner. It was cheap, plastic, and anonymous.

He pressed it into my palm, his fingers wrapping around mine, holding them closed over the device. The warmth of his skin was an anchor in the cold, swirling sea of my fear.

“This is for us,” he said, his voice dropping to that same intimate murmur that had undone me the day before. “It’s untraceable. The number is programmed in. Only use it to call me. No one else. Don’t save the number in your real phone. Don’t tell anyone about it. Especially not Grant.”

The plastic felt heavy in my hand, a solid, tangible secret. It was a tool for my safety, but it felt like so much more.

It was a link, a tether that bound me to him, and only to him, severing the last thread of plausible deniability. This wasn’t just attorney and client anymore.

This was a conspiracy.

“Kael…” My voice was barely a whisper.

He leaned in closer, his forehead resting against mine. I could feel his breath on my lips, warm and shaky with suppressed rage.

“I will burn them to the ground for this, Elara. I swear to you. But you have to trust me. Can you do that?”

I thought of Grant’s suspicious eyes, of the sterile silence of our home. I thought of the raw, honest fire in Kael’s kiss and the terrifying, protective fury in his eyes now.

There was no choice. There hadn’t been a choice since the moment his lips crashed down on mine.

“Yes,” I breathed.

He didn’t kiss me. He just stayed there for a heartbeat longer, his thumb stroking my skin, a silent vow passing between us in the grim, grey light of the parking garage.

Then he stepped back, and the loss of his heat was immediate and sharp.

“Go home,” he said, his voice back to being clipped and professional, the mask slipping back into place. “Have the car towed to a dealership far from your neighborhood. Tell Grant it was a simple flat tire. I’ll handle the rest.”

I could only nod, my fingers curled tightly around the burner phone in my pocket. He watched me until I was safely in another cab, his powerful figure a dark silhouette against the concrete, a guardian in a bespoke suit.

As the taxi pulled away, I clutched the phone. It was a lifeline and a weapon, a shield and a shackle.

It was the weight of every line I had crossed, and the only thing that made me feel safe.

Chapter 8: Partnership, Tested

The burner phone felt alien in her hand. Heavy, anonymous, and cold.

For two days, it sat at the bottom of her purse, a dense knot of potential and dread. Every time her fingers brushed against its cheap plastic casing, a jolt, equal parts guilt and a shameful, thrilling anticipation, shot up her arm.

She was an officer of the court, engaged to the prosecutor trying to put Kaelen Vance away for life. And she was hiding a secret line of communication to him, a gift from her vandalized car and his explosive, terrifying protectiveness.

Finally, on the third night, she cracked. Grant was working late—a common occurrence now, his presence at home becoming as sparse as his patience—and the silence of their apartment was a roaring accusation.

Her own case files blurred before her eyes, the words meaningless. All she could see was the memory of Kael’s thumb brushing her lip, the raw fury in his eyes when he saw her shattered car window.

With trembling fingers, she pulled out the phone, powered it on, and found the single contact saved under the letter ‘X’. Her heart hammered against her ribs, a frantic drumbeat of betrayal.

She pressed the call button before she could lose her nerve.

It rang only once.

“Elara.”

His voice. Not the clipped, careful tone from the visiting room, but a low, intimate gravel that curled directly into the base of her spine. It was the voice of a man in his own space, unguarded.

The sound of it made her dizzy.

“Kael,” she breathed, her own voice a fragile whisper.

“You’re okay?” The question was immediate, laced with an intensity that had nothing to do with legal strategy.

“I’m fine. The car… the garage replaced the window.” The words sounded stupid, mundane.

“That’s not what I asked.” A beat of silence. “Are you okay?”

She sank onto her sofa, pulling her knees to her chest. “No,” she admitted, the confession a painful release. “I’m not.”

“Tell me what’s happening with the discovery,” he said, his tone shifting, becoming a shield for them both. The professional pretense. “What did they give you yesterday?”

“A supplemental evidence list. Chain of custody reports for the warehouse seizure.”

“The reports from Officers Miller and Davies?”

“Yes. How did you…?”

“Look at the time stamps,” he commanded, his voice sharp with purpose.

“Davies’s report will say he secured the evidence at 22:40. Miller’s will say he logged it into the evidence locker at 22:55. It’s a fifteen-minute drive from that warehouse to the precinct, lights and sirens, on a good night. There was a five-car pile-up on the interstate that night. The log shows traffic was diverted for two hours. There’s no way Miller made it in fifteen minutes.”

Elara’s mind raced, flipping through the digital files she’d been staring at blankly moments before. She found the reports, her fingers flying across the trackpad. He was right.

The discrepancy was there, small but undeniable. A detail anyone else, anyone without inside knowledge, would have overlooked.

A detail that could create reasonable doubt about tampering.

“He’s lying,” she whispered, stunned.

“Everyone lies,” Kael said, his voice dropping low again. “You just have to know where to look. I’ll help you look.”

That was how it began. An unholy alliance forged over an untraceable connection.

Their calls became her lifeline, a dangerous addiction she fed in stolen moments—in the courthouse bathroom, in her car before pulling into the garage, in the dead of night when Grant’s breathing was deep and even beside her.

Kael was a brilliant, ruthless strategist, dismantling the prosecution’s case from the inside out, piece by damning piece.

He pointed her to a witness with a known gambling problem, a CI with a grudge against his organization, a procedural error in the warrant’s execution. He was giving her the ammunition to destroy a case that his own criminal enterprise had likely orchestrated.

The irony was a bitter pill she swallowed with every call.

But beneath the strategy sessions, something else was growing. A perilous intimacy. He’d ask if she was eating, if she was sleeping.

He’d make her describe the view from her office window, and she’d find herself telling him about the way the afternoon sun hit the glass of the opposite building. They never spoke of the kiss, or of Grant, or of the life that existed outside these clandestine calls.

They didn’t have to. The space between their words was charged with everything left unsaid.

***

“I’m telling you, Grant, the timeline is airtight.”

Isobel Chen leaned over Grant’s desk, her sharp, dark eyes scanning the flowchart he’d spent the better part of a week perfecting. She smelled faintly of jasmine and ambition.

Her presence in his office had become a constant, a welcome one. Where Elara had become distant and brittle, Isobel was focused, her energy a whetstone against which he could sharpen his own.

“It’s not just airtight, it’s a boa constrictor,” Grant said, a rare, genuine smile touching his lips. He tapped a box on the chart.

“The wiretap corroborates the informant’s testimony, which is supported by the GPS data from Vance’s car. It’s a perfect triangle.”

“A holy trinity of guilt,” Isobel quipped, her own smile bright. She straightened up, tucking a strand of sleek black hair behind her ear.

“It’s impressive, Grant. Truly. The way you’ve woven these threads together… no one else in this office could have done it. You don’t just build cases; you build fortresses.”

Her admiration was a balm on his frayed nerves. He’d been pouring everything into this case, not just for the sake of justice, but as a distraction from the growing chasm in his own home.

Elara was like a ghost in their apartment, her thoughts a million miles away. He’d try to talk to her about the Vance case, his case, and her eyes would glaze over.

She’d offer vague, distracted platitudes. But here, with Isobel, the case was alive, a living thing they were building together.

Their minds moved in sync, anticipating each other’s thoughts, finishing each other’s sentences. It felt… easy. Natural.

“It’s not a fortress until the jury agrees,” he said, leaning back in his chair and rubbing his tired eyes.

“They will.” Isobel’s confidence was absolute. She moved to the small coffee station in the corner of his office and poured two mugs of the sludgy, late-night brew.

She placed one on his desk without asking how he took it. She already knew. Black, two sugars.

“The only thing that worries me,” he admitted, taking a grateful sip, “is Elara.”

Isobel’s expression softened with practiced sympathy. “Is she still… struggling with the ethics of it all?”

Grant snorted, a humorless sound.

“I wish it were that simple. She’s pulling away, Iz. It feels like she’s actively working against me sometimes. She’s found a dozen tiny little holes—a time stamp discrepancy, a witness with a ten-year-old perjury charge. It’s like she’s looking for reasons for him to walk.”

“She’s a defense attorney, Grant. It’s her job to look for holes.”

“This is different,” he insisted, frustration coiling in his gut. “It’s her fiancé’s career-making case. You’d think she’d be in my corner. Instead, she feels like she’s in his.”

He didn’t mention his deeper suspicion, the one that ate at him in the dark—the image of her, flustered and wide-eyed, after her meeting with Vance. The faint scent of a man’s cologne he’d smelled on her coat. He couldn’t give voice to that. Not yet.

Isobel perched on the edge of his desk, her posture a study in casual intimacy. “Her loyalty is to her client. That’s what makes her a good lawyer. It’s what you love about her.”

Her voice was gentle, but her eyes were sharp, analytical. “But my loyalty? It’s to this case. And to you. We’ll make it so strong, it won’t matter what little tricks she pulls out of her hat. We’ll win.”

He looked at her, at the fierce intelligence in her gaze, the unwavering belief. For the first time in weeks, he felt a sense of partnership.

A sense of being on the same team. It was a feeling he was supposed to get from Elara.

***

“He’s bringing in another prosecutor.”

Elara’s voice was tight with stress as she paced her small home office, the burner phone pressed to her ear. “Isobel Chen. She’s a shark, Kael. They’re building something… solid. They’re working day and night.”