Chapter 85

Amelia

Jenny didn’t show up to HQ that morning. At first, no one said anything. It wasn’t unusual for her to work remotely when she was sulking or nursing a headache, especially if the calendar was light. But by noon, it was obvious something was wrong. Her name was absent from the group thread. Her status was blank. Even Elsa, who usually made a show of being detached, was seen pacing the east hallway with her phone pressed tight to her ear.

When I passed Jenny's room, the door was slightly open. I wasn’t trying to eavesdrop, but her voice carried. “He humiliated me. You knew and you didn’t say anything. You just watched it happen.”

Then came the sobbing.

"He used me," Jenny cried between ragged breaths, her voice cracking with fury and devastation. "He made me feel like I was helping him, like we were building something together. And the whole time he was sneaking around, giving information to David just to climb his way to the top."

Her voice hitched again, loud and messy. "He told me I was different. He made me feel special, like I mattered more than all the girls before me. But he was using me to get close to Amelia. He always looked at her like, like he wanted her back. And I told myself it was in my head, but it wasn’t."

She kept going, her words tumbling over one another. "And now he’s gone. Richard kicked him out. No warning, no conversation, just vanished like he never mattered. Like I never mattered. And everyone’s acting like I should be grateful. Like I should thank them for protecting me."

Elsa said something soft I couldn’t hear.

Jenny snapped, "Don’t you dare act like you didn’t know. You watched him circle me like a vulture. You told me to keep my mouth shut, to let him work. You were grooming him for a staff role, and you didn’t care who got trampled in the process."

Ugly, broken sobbing. I had never heard Jenny cry like that before. Not even when her mom left. It cracked through the quiet like a storm, sharp and guttural, the kind of sound that made your stomach knot even when you didn’t like the person making it.

Elsa’s voice was a low murmur. I couldn’t make out the words, but I knew the tone. Placating. Cold. Professional. The same way she’d talked to me when I was still trying to be a team player.

And she wasn’t even supposed to be in the Pack House. That restriction had been quietly put in place after the banquet, after Richard was poisoned. But there she was. Maybe she actually cared about her daughter enough to break the rule and show up for once. Or maybe this was just her excuse to get her foot back in the door, to position herself close to power again under the guise of maternal concern. Either way, I’d be keeping tabs.

I should have walked away. I should have pretended I hadn’t heard anything. Instead, I stood there in the hallway, my hand hovering near the doorframe, every instinct screaming at me to go, but my feet refusing to move. Guilt swirled low in my stomach, sticky and unshakable.

Guilt, and something else. Relief. She knew. The lie had cracked open and swallowed her whole. And for a split second, I felt free.

Jenny didn’t come in the next day. Or the day after that. Or the day after that.

By the time the third campaign event came and went without her, Nathan called me into his office.

“You’re covering her slate until she returns,” he said, tapping a list of deliverables on his tablet. “Forum prep, press routing, talking points. All of it. You’re point until further notice.”

I blinked at the list. “This is... a lot.”

“You’re the only one who knows her system well enough to fake it,” he said. “And frankly, I trust you more.”

I nodded slowly. “Okay. I’ll get it done.”

“You sure?”

“No,” I said honestly, and he smiled.

The next forty-eight hours were chaos. I barely slept. The televised forum was fast approaching, and half the team was still scrambling to finalize Richard’s speech draft. Jenny’s color-coded folders were helpful, but half her files were password protected or written in shorthand that made no sense to anyone but her. I pieced together what I could, trusting muscle memory and instinct.

I was reviewing video feeds late, well past midnight, when I noticed something strange.

One of the camera feeds, labeled “Cam 3A, Main Angle,” was routing through a third-party filter. A visual enhancement tool, allegedly, to balance light and sharpen focus. But when I checked the source data, the filter wasn’t one the campaign had approved. It was an external plug-in, downloaded from a server I didn’t recognize.

I opened a test playback from last week’s rally.

It took a moment to spot it. A two-second lag. A minor visual shimmer across the bottom of the screen. Barely noticeable unless you were looking for it.

I was definitely looking now.

My pulse quickened. I double-checked the server log. Someone had installed the filter on multiple feeds. It wasn’t just a rogue test, it was a pattern. And the more I looked, the more it became obvious that whoever had done this knew exactly what they were doing.

I grabbed the footage file, copied the stream log, and sent them both to Nathan with a brief message: “Potential breach. Investigating.”

Then I marched down to Richard’s office.

He was still there, because of course he was, pacing by the windows with a legal pad in one hand and a half-drunk mug of coffee in the other. He looked up when I entered, eyebrows lifting slightly.

“Something wrong?”

I handed him my tablet. “One of the livestream feeds is being run through an outside filter. It could be nothing, but if it’s not, it could mean someone’s been manipulating footage.”

He didn’t say anything at first, just tapped through the timestamps and watched the playback. His jaw tightened.

Nathan arrived two minutes later, summoned by my warning.

“I checked the plugin,” he said, setting a laptop on the table. “It wasn’t cleared by IT. And the download trail leads back to one of the unregistered workstations in the overflow lab.”

“So what does that mean?” I asked. “Can someone edit what goes out in real time?”

“If they know what they’re doing, yes,” Nathan said. “Nothing major. But enough to tweak lighting, blur details, maybe drop audio for a frame or two. It’s subtle. But in the wrong hands, it’s powerful.”

Richard didn’t speak for a while. Just stared at the screen like it might confess something else.

“Shut it down,” he said finally. “Reroute all footage internally. No third-party anything until this is over. We’re going to have to start untangling every knot Adam tied. Who knows what else he left behind, or who else he gave access to. Until we know, we treat every channel like it's compromised.”

Nathan nodded. “I’ll get the team on it.”

“I want to review every second of footage from the last three events,” Richard added. “We’re not missing anything else.”

The next few hours were a blur of emergency meetings and hush-hush tech cleanups. I helped coordinate the revised streaming routes, stayed up to manually cross-reference speeches with the final footage, and triple-checked the filter had been completely removed.

The forum went off without a hitch. We double-checked every angle, every feed. There were no glitches. No unexplained distortions. Just clean, boring footage of Richard delivering a pitch-perfect statement on inter-pack trade protocols.

During the debrief, Nathan brought up the footage issue without naming me, referring only to “an anomaly discovered and corrected before broadcast.”

Richard waited until the end of the meeting. Then he looked at me across the boardroom table and said, “That was good work. Thank you.”

Just that. Nothing more. No wink. No hand on my back. No secret code.

But I felt it anyway.

I watched him as everyone else shuffled out of the room. His eyes lingered, just for a second, and I thought he might say more. He didn’t.