The clock in the grand library chimed midnight. Style had finally drifted off, her head resting on a stack of open textbooks, the lure of the luxury sports car lost to exhaustion. Arm, however, was vibrating with a restless, frantic energy. The velvet curtains, the gold-leafed ceilings, and the constant, perfumed presence of a life he hadn't chosen felt like they were shrinking the room, crushing the air out of his lungs. He felt utterly suffocated.
He couldn't stay in this house another hour. He didn't have a plan; he just needed to breathe air that didn't smell like the Armitage legacy. He moved toward the heavy library windows, undoing the latches with trembling fingers. He intended to slip into the rose garden and scale the west wall—a path he'd taken as a child.
He swung one leg over the sill, the cold night air hitting his face like a shock. But before he could drop to the grass, the floodlights of the estate flared to life, blinding him.
"Going somewhere, Armitage?"
Silas stood at the edge of the patio, flanked by two security guards. His father's face was a mask of cold, disappointed iron. Arm was hauled back inside, the rough grip of the guards a humiliating reminder of his status as a prisoner in his own home.
After the initial explosion of Silas's rage, Arm was sent to the small morning room. Silas had stormed off to handle a "security breach" report, leaving Arm alone with his mother. She sat across from him, sipping a tea that had gone cold, her sharp eyes dissecting him.
"Your father thinks you are rebelling against the Foundation," she said quietly, her voice devoid of the usual performative warmth. "But I think it's simpler. I think it's the boy."
Arm looked at the floor, his jaw tight. "It's not about him. I just can't breathe in here."
"Look at me, Armitage," she commanded. He lifted his gaze. "What do you see in Mild Cho? Tell me the truth. Do you have feelings for him? Is that why you are willing to burn your father's ministry seat to the ground?"
Arm felt a flicker of something—a confusion he hadn't let himself voice. He shook his head firmly. "No. I don't ... It's not like that."
"Then what is it?"
"He's... a close friend," Arm rasped, the words feeling strange but safe. "He's the only person who doesn't look at me and see a President or a Golden Boy. I just enjoy being close to him. He's the only place where I feel like a person. That's all."
His mother watched him for a long moment. She didn't scold him or call him a liar. Instead, a look of chilling pity crossed her face.
"You are young, Arm," she said softly. "And you have lived a very controlled life. Sometimes, when we find a small light in a dark room, we mistake the lamp for the sun. You should take things slowly. Understand yourself first before you throw away an empire for a 'friendship' that might just be a symptom of your own boredom."
She stood up, smoothing her skirt. "Stay in your room. If you don't know your own heart, you shouldn't be out in the world breaking others."
***
Across the city, the atmosphere was far more clinical. Enock sat at the kitchen table in the new apartment, his notepad open. He was ready to start the real work.
"Let's go back to the beginning, Mild," Enock said, his eyes sharp. "Two years ago, when the courier gave you that silver feather... where were you working?"
Mild gripped his coffee mug. "A high-end dispatch center. 'Blue Horizon Logistics.' I was a sorter for the VIP packages."
"And the courier?" Enock leaned in. "Which company did he work for?"
"He wasn't from a delivery firm," Mild remembered. "He had a badge from 'Apex Global Security.' He told me the package was undeliverable and that it belonged to me."
Enock's pen stopped. Apex Global was the private firm Silas Armitage used for "sanitizing" family messes. The circle was closing.
Later that afternoon, Silas and his wife summoned Arm back to the study. The vetting committee was arriving the next day, and they needed the loose ends tied.
"We need the pendant, Arm," Silas demanded. "It's a liability. Hand it over."
Arm looked at his father, the suffocating feeling returning, but this time it was fueled by a cold, protective instinct. "I don't have it. I returned it to Mild."
"You did what?" Silas bellowed, his face turning purple.
"I gave it back to him," Arm lied, his voice steady. "It was his. I didn't want the weight of it in this house anymore."
"You've put a loaded gun in the hand of a commoner!" Silas screamed.
Arm's lie had been a masterstroke of desperation. By telling his parents he had returned the silver feather to Mild, he had effectively turned Mild into a lightning rod for his father's paranoia, while he kept the real prize. Hidden within the hollowed-out spine of an old encyclopedia in the estate library was the pendant. Arm had already spent hours examining it under a jeweler's loupe, discovering a microscopic serial number etched into the inner curve of the feather—a number that didn't belong to a jeweler, but to a high-security storage facility.
But for now, he was a prisoner, and the game was moving without him.
Across the city, Enock didn't waste a moment. Leaving Mild under the watchful eye of a "trusted friend" (who was actually a paid informant), Enock drove to the industrial district. He didn't go to the front door of Apex Global Security. Instead, he met a contact in a dimly lit diner—a disgruntled former technician who had once handled Apex's encrypted logs.
"Apex doesn't just do security, Enock," the contact whispered, sliding a tablet across the table. "They do 'retrieval.' Two years ago, they were hired by an anonymous offshore account to intercept a courier from the Armitage estate. The mission was called 'Operation White Wing.'"
Enock scanned the logs. His breath hitched. "They intercepted Shelmith's courier. But the log says the 'package' was never recovered."
"That's because the courier was smarter," the technician said. "He knew he was being followed. He ditched the sensitive files somewhere only he knows and kept the silver pendant as a decoy. Apex caught him, took the pendant, and realized it was useless. To cover their tracks and mock the Armitages, they gave the pendant to a random kid at the dispatch center—."
Enock slammed the tablet down. "So the real files are still out there somewhere in a drop box or held by the courier who survived. And Apex gave Mild the pendant to make him the target if the family ever started looking."
Back at the estate, the atmosphere in the library was suffocating. Style had been briefed by Silas: the "availability" strategy was being accelerated.
"Arm," Style said, her voice soft as she sat next to him at the mahogany table. "Your mother told me you're feeling... confused. About your friendship with the Cho boy."
Arm didn't look up from his books. "My mother talks too much."
"She's just worried, and so am I," Style said, moving closer until her shoulder brushed his. She decided to use his "confusion" as an opening. If he didn't know if he loved Mild, she would give him a reason to love her. "You said you enjoy being close to him because he makes you feel like a person. Don't you think I can do that too? If you'd let me in, Arm, you wouldn't have to escape. We could build our own world within this one."
She reached out, gently turning his chin to face her. "I don't want to be a 'policy' or a 'brand' to you. I want to be the person who understands why you're so restless."
Arm looked into her eyes. For a second, Style saw a flicker of hesitation. She leaned in, her heart racing—not for him, but for the Phantom car that was now so close she could almost smell the leather seats.
"You're very good at this, Style," Arm whispered, his face inches from hers.
"I'm not acting," she lied, her voice a breathy caress.
Arm pulled back suddenly, a cold, knowing smirk on his lips. "You almost had me. But you forgot one thing. If you really understood my restlessness, you wouldn't be trying to pin me down to a desk. You'd be helping me open the window."
Style's face hardened. The mask slipped for a fraction of a second, revealing the predatory industrialist's daughter beneath. "The window is barred, Arm. I'm the only air you've got left. You might want to start breathing."
Neither of them noticed the small, blinking light of a hidden camera tucked behind a bust of Aristotle. In a different part of the house, Silas and his wife watched the feed.
"He's resisting," Silas hissed. "But he's wavering. Style is making progress."
His mother replied coldly, "We have ten days left. If Enock does not find those files before the vetting is over, we are dead."
***
The investigation into Shelmith's final hours had always been a puzzle of missing pieces, but as Enock sat in the dim light of the diner, the technician's words rewired the entire narrative. The Armitages had known Shelmith was carrying a bomb—intellectual property and financial records that could sink the Foundation. They had called Apex Global Security to play the role of the silent reaper, ordering them to intercept her courier and retrieve the "White Wing" files.
But Apex had failed. The courier had vanished into the city's veins, leaving the mercenaries with nothing but a silver feather.
Enock returned to the apartment, his mind racing. He paced the small living room, staring at Mild, who was watching him with growing anxiety.
"Mild," Enock said, his voice dropping to a low, intense register. "We've been looking at the pendant as a gift. It wasn't. It was a diversion. But there's a detail that doesn't fit. The Apex courier didn't just dump the pendant at a random warehouse. He walked straight to you."
Mild shook his head. "I told you, he said it belonged to me."
"But how did he know your name?" Enock leaned over the table, his eyes boring into Mild's. "Apex doesn't do 'random.' They follow orders. The only way Apex knew to deliver that pendant to a boy named Mild at Blue Horizon Logistics is if their client told them exactly who you were."
Enock slammed his hand on the table. "Shelmith was planning to meet someone the day she died. Someone she'd been talking to on Tinder. She was using an anonymous profile, and so was her contact. But the contact's name on the app... was Mild."
Mild froze, his breath hitching. "I've never had a Tinder account, Enock. You saw my phone. It's empty."
"Exactly!" Enock shouted. "Someone stole your identity two years ago. They used your name and your workplace to cat-fish Shelmith. They lured her out, and when the Apex team closed in, the person using your name made sure you were the one holding the evidence—or at least, what everyone thought was the evidence."
The investigation had taken a jagged turn. The question was no longer just about the files; it was about the Architect.
"Think, Mild," Enock urged. "Who would have known you worked at Blue Horizon? Who would have had access to your photos or your basic info to set up a profile? This person had to be close to Shelmith to know her secret digital life, but also close enough to your world to pick you as the fall guy."
Mild's mind spun. He had always been a loner, a ghost in the hallways of his old life. But someone had seen him. Someone had looked at the "invisible" scholarship boy and seen the perfect sacrificial lamb.
"If the person who ordered Apex to give you the pendant is the same person who was talking to Shelmith online," Enock mused, "then they are the ones who actually have the files. They let Apex take the heat, let Arm obsess over you, and let Silas panic, while they sat in the shadows holding the real detonator."
Enock didn't return to the Armitage estate with a white flag; he returned with a scorched-earth policy. Leaving Mild in the safety of the apartment, he spent the night submerged in the dark web, utilizing a high-level forensic coder to peel back the layers of the "Fake Mild" Tinder account from two years ago.
The trail was cold, but not erased. The account had been created using a burner phone, but the GPS pings for the initial registration weren't from the docks or the slums. They were centered around a high-frequency radius: the St. Jude's Foundation Gala venue.
"He was there," Enock muttered, staring at the lines of code. "The person using Mild's identity was at the very event where Shelmith decided to run. They were watching her in person while messaging her as 'Mild' on the app."
Further digging into the Apex Global logs revealed the smoking gun. The order to the Apex courier—to deliver the decoy pendant specifically to Mild at Blue Horizon—had been sent via an encrypted relay. The source of that relay was a hardware-bound terminal.
"A terminal inside the Armitage estate," Enock realized, his jaw tightening. "The person who framed Mild didn't just know Shelmith; they had a key to the front door."
An hour later, Enock stormed into the Armitage drawing room. Silas and his wife were reviewing vetting documents, the image of "Traditional Excellence" they so desperately clung to.
"You knew," Enock barked, slamming his tablet onto the table between them. "You knew Shelmith didn't just 'lose control' of her car. You knew she was carrying a payload of files that could dismantle this entire Foundation."
Silas didn't flinch. He slowly removed his reading glasses. "We knew she was being reckless, Enock. We knew she was attempting to sabotage her own family."
"You called Apex!" Enock shouted, his voice thick with disgust. "You hired mercenaries to intercept your own daughter! And when the files vanished and she ended up dead in a ditch, you didn't call the police. You didn't even look for her killer. You just scrubbed the scene and called it an 'accident.'"
"Because the police would have asked why she was running," Silas's wife interjected, her voice cold and clinical. "The files she carried were our doom. To investigate her death was to invite the state to investigate our finances. We chose to preserve the legacy she was trying to burn."
Enock felt a wave of nausea. "She was your daughter. Your only daughter. And you let the mastermind—the person who cat-fished her and likely caused the crash—walk free just to keep your path to the Ministry clear? You're not a family of faith. You're a family of cowards."
"We are a family of survivors," Silas countered, his eyes hardening. "And you, Enock, are part of that bloodline. If those files ever surface, the Governor's office falls right along with the Foundation. You're protecting yourself as much as us."
"I'm nothing like you," Enock hissed. "You used a scholarship boy as a human shield for two years. You let Arm rot in obsession over a decoy. I'm going to find the person who actually sent that relay from your house, and when I do, I'm not bringing the files to you. I'm bringing them to the press."