The morning began with silence, not the peaceful kind but the heavy kind, the kind that settled over a room before bad news arrived. Adrian stood in front of the floor-to-ceiling windows of his office and watched the city below; traffic moved through the streets in neat lines. People hurried toward meetings, appointments, and obligations. At this height, everything looked organised, controlled, and predictable.
His phone vibrated against the desk, then again and again. Three notifications appeared within seconds with news alerts; he already knew what they would contain. The latest articles had gone live; he walked back to his desk and opened the first report. The headline was measured, almost polite, which made it worse.
Aggressive accusations could be dismissed as sensationalism; calm reporting was harder to fight.
