#Chapter 146: After Dinner Aftershocks

The morning after the council dinner felt more like a hangover than a victory. Not from alcohol. Not from exhaustion. My thighs ached from how hard I'd squeezed them under the table, every nerve still buzzing from what Richard had done. He hadn’t looked at me once on the way back. Not in the elevator. Not when I followed him down the hall, still shaking. I had tried to thank him. To explain. He didn’t let me. “We’ll debrief in the afternoon,” was all he said. Now I was in the strategy room, pacing behind Nathan as he crouched over his tablet. “Three clerks,” he said. “All from bell-tower archival sectors. All accessed sensitive records within the last week. None of them reported home. No outbound calls. No confirmed exits.” I stopped pacing. “Did they know each other?” “One worked second shift. One was rotating. The third was in the habit of double-tagging checkouts. We might not have caught it if she hadn’t flagged a ghost invoice two nights ago.” He tilted the tablet to s