The Next Day – Lucy's Apartment
The next day started off deceptively normal. Too normal, actually. Lucy should've known better. She sipped her lukewarm latte, stared at the blinking cursor on her laptop, and tried to ignore the tiny scream building in the back of her throat.
Her inbox had been quiet all morning. No threats, no weird anonymous messages, no passive-aggressive board emails suggesting she convert her life's work into a TikTok filter for parrots. Just silence.
And silence, in Lucy's world, was never good.
The smell of overbrewed coffee lingered as she refreshed her inbox again, hoping something—anything—would break the stillness. She was used to chaos, thrived in it even, but the quiet left too much space for paranoia. Cole had offered to hack into the company's internal systems to trace the anonymous text. She'd told him no. Repeatedly.
But she'd also left her office door unlocked and her laptop open.
So naturally, he did it anyway.
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