Emmanuel traced the leak in two days.
It wasn't difficult, once he stopped assuming malice and started assuming fear — a distinction that took him longer than it should have to make, given everything he'd watched happen to people under pressure across his years in this company. He pulled the access logs for Sophia's schedule, cross-referenced them against the small circle of people who would have had reason to know her morning walking route, and found, eventually, a single data point that didn't fit the pattern of an outside intrusion.
The information had come from inside. Not through hacking, not through surveillance — through a person.
He brought what he'd found to Jedidiah privately, in the fourth-floor office, late enough in the evening that the rest of the floor had emptied out around them.
"It's one of the household staff," Emmanuel said. "A woman named Grace. She's worked for the family for six years. No history of anything like this. But three weeks ago, Melissa approached her — outside the estate, somewhere she wouldn't be seen doing it — and pressured her with something personal. A debt, from what I can piece together. Grace's brother owes money to people connected to the network, and Melissa made it clear that the debt would become a much bigger problem unless Grace provided small pieces of information."
"Small pieces like Sophia's walking route."
"Exactly that. Grace didn't know what it would be used for. She told herself, I think, that it was harmless — a schedule, nothing more, not actual harm to anyone. By the time she understood what it had enabled, it was already done."
Jedidiah was quiet for a moment, processing this. "Fear, not malice."
"Yes. But the effect was the same either way." Emmanuel closed the folder. "What do you want me to do with this?"
Jedidiah considered the question carefully. "Don't fire her. Don't expose her publicly. Talk to her directly, quietly — let her know we understand the position she was put in, and that we'll help her brother's situation if she's honest with us going forward about anything else they might ask of her." He paused. "And recalibrate everything. Movements, communications, anyone outside this immediate circle who might unknowingly become a pressure point."
Emmanuel nodded, already making notes.
The recalibration touched every part of how Jedidiah's circle operated in the days that followed — meeting locations shifted without advance notice, communications routed through channels that changed weekly, a careful, exhausting vigilance that none of them had wanted to need but all of them now understood was unavoidable.
Jedidiah grew quieter through it. Not withdrawn, exactly — he was as present in every meeting, as engaged with every piece of the ongoing work, as he had been before. But something in him had tightened, the particular contraction of a man recalculating how much trust he could extend to the edges of his world without putting the people inside it at risk.
Ava noticed it before anyone else did. She didn't ask him about it directly — she had learned, across eight years of partnership, that some things he needed to work through silently before he was ready to talk about them. Instead, she simply stayed close. Not hovering, not crowding him — just present, in the specific, unobtrusive way she'd always been present for him, ensuring that whatever he was carrying, he wasn't carrying it entirely alone.
Jace, for his part, had positioned himself, without being asked, as a kind of physical buffer — walking a half-step ahead through every doorway, scanning every room before Jedidiah entered it, the quiet, instinctive vigilance of a man who had decided, somewhere in the chaos of the car chase, that this was simply part of what loyalty required now.
Eve called Ava again on the fourth day, her voice carrying a different quality than the careful, worried tone of their previous calls.
"I think I found something," she said. "Bigger than the last thing."
"Tell me."
"A name. Someone who used to be close to Lockwood, who's gone quiet in the last few weeks in a way that feels deliberate — like they're hiding from something, not just keeping a low profile. I asked around more than I probably should have. A few people noticed me asking."
Ava felt something cold settle in her stomach. "Eve. What do you mean, a few people noticed."
"I mean exactly what I said. I wasn't being careful enough, apparently. Someone mentioned to someone else that I was asking unusual questions, and that got back to me secondhand, in a way that made it clear I'd put myself somewhere I shouldn't have."
"Are you safe right now?"
"I think so. I haven't seen anything obvious — no cars, no one following me that I can tell. But I wanted you to know, because I think I might have done something stupid."
Ava closed her eyes briefly, the weight of fear and frustration both arriving at once. "You need to stop. Right now. Whatever you've found, whatever you're chasing — it's not worth the risk you've just put yourself in."
"I was trying to help."
"I know you were." Ava's voice softened, even as the urgency underneath it remained. "But Eve, this isn't a game. People who do this for a living are dangerous in ways that have nothing to do with how clever you are or how careful you think you've been. I need you to stop, and I need you to tell me everything you found so we can handle it from here."
There was a long silence on the line.
"Okay," Eve said, finally, her voice smaller than Ava had heard it in years. "Okay. I'll stop."
They met in person that evening, at a coffee shop neither of them had been to before — Ava's choice, deliberately neutral ground, away from anywhere either of their routines would normally take them.
Eve looked tired in a way that had nothing to do with sleep. She sat across from her sister with her hands wrapped around a cup she wasn't drinking from, and for a while, neither of them said much of anything.
"I'm scared," Eve admitted, finally. "I haven't said that to anyone. Not even to myself, really, until right now."
"I know." Ava reached across the table and took her hand. "I'm scared too, most days. I've just had longer to get used to carrying it."
"How do you do that? Carry it and still function?"
Ava considered the question honestly. "I don't always do it well. Some days I don't do it well at all." She paused. "But I think the difference is that I chose this, with full knowledge of what it might cost. You didn't choose it the same way — you got pulled into worrying about me, and then you went looking for ways to help, and you ended up somewhere more dangerous than you intended."
Eve was quiet for a moment. "I used to think you were the reckless one," she said. "Growing up. The one who went after things without thinking them through. I think I had that backwards, somewhere along the way."
"Maybe we both did some growing up the other one didn't notice."
Eve almost smiled at that — small, tired, but real. "We're not the same as we were in school."
"No," Ava agreed. "We're not."
It wasn't full reconciliation. The years of distance between them, the old resentments and old wounds, hadn't dissolved in a single conversation over coffee. But something had cracked open between them that had been sealed shut for a long time, and both of them, sitting there in the quiet of an unfamiliar coffee shop, understood that the crack was a beginning rather than an ending.
"Tell me what you found," Ava said, finally. "All of it. Let's make sure it's actually useful, and let's make sure you're done putting yourself anywhere near this again."
Eve nodded, and began to talk.