Marcus received the surveillance report at 3:47 AM on a Wednesday.
Grace had met with Michael Torres at a coffee shop in Tribeca. The meeting had lasted two hours and seventeen minutes. She'd left carrying a folder. She'd gone directly back to the penthouse. Nothing unusual. Nothing actionable.
But Marcus had read the report three times anyway.
It had started as simple monitoring. Someone his father brought into the organization needed to be watched. She was either going to become a problem or disappear. Marcus's job was to track which outcome was more likely.
That was six weeks ago.
Now he was installing encryption upgrades on systems specifically so he could monitor her movements without other people detecting the surveillance. Now he was positioning himself in locations where she would pass. Now he was running psychological profiles in his head every time he heard her name.
Now she was becoming a problem for entirely different reasons.
The pattern emerged slowly.
