The warrior's duty

Chapter Four - Threads to Pull

By the second morning, walking into Company X felt less like trespassing and more like sliding into a role we'd been rehearsing for weeks.

Nara Keene. Jace Arden.

The badges worked. The smiles worked. The cover stories worked.

Now we needed to make them stick.

We arrived ten minutes early, the way new hires wanting to impress always do. The floor was still half-empty, the overhead lights humming faintly in the quiet. Lira from analytics was already at her desk, a mug of something herbal in hand.

"Morning, lovebirds," she said without looking up from her screen.

Kael's mouth tilted in the kind of smile that could sell anything. "Morning."

"Coffee's fresh. Get it now before it tastes like regret," she added.

I grabbed a cup for myself and one for him—small acts that fit the couple cover without drawing too much attention. Every move was part of the play.

By midmorning, Devrin stopped by our desks, leaning on the divider. "You two are with me today. We've got a prep session for the new Light Without End campaign. Big pitch this afternoon."

Perfect. If the king was right about marketing being where the narrative got rewritten, pitch prep was where the seams would show.

The meeting room was a glass box with a holo-board projecting the campaign timeline. A dozen faces turned toward us—designers, copywriters, two people from senior accounts. Devrin introduced us quickly, framing us as the new recruits here to observe and "bring fresh perspective."

Kael and I took seats at the far end of the table. I made a show of pulling up the campaign files on my device, but most of my focus was on the people in the room.

The head of Campaign Strategy, a woman named Orra Vale, commanded the space without raising her voice. She was tall, dark-haired, dressed in sharp grey. Every slide she advanced was polished to perfection, every sentence smooth.

But the numbers—when she brought them up—didn't match the ones we'd seen in the onboarding materials yesterday.

Kael caught it too. I could tell by the way his pen paused over his notebook, a tiny stillness that would've been invisible to anyone who didn't know how to read it.

No one in the room reacted. Either they didn't notice, or they were used to the numbers changing.

The rest of the day was spent shadowing Devrin's team. I worked with Lira on mock social posts, her quick humor making it easy to keep the conversation flowing while steering it toward XX.

"So, do we ever do campaigns directly for the material?" I asked casually as we adjusted a headline.

She snorted. "Direct? No way. It's always wrapped in something—city pride, future vision, sustainability. You know. Sparkly words so people stop asking what's under the hood."

"What is under the hood?"

Her eyes flicked to me, just for a second, before she shrugged. "Not my lane, Nara. I just make the numbers dance."

Kael, meanwhile, had somehow ended up in a corner with Orra, reviewing the data flow for next week's presentation. He was playing it perfectly—interested, but not too interested. The kind of curiosity that made you look eager to help, not dangerous.

When he returned to his desk, he passed me a folded sticky note without breaking stride.

Quarterly report altered – pre & post versions in separate drives.

I didn't react, just stuck it to my monitor like a to-do reminder. That was the first thread.

After hours, the office emptied out slowly, leaving the faint smell of stale coffee and the hum of standby machines. We kept our pace casual on the walk back to Azure Mews, stopping at a street vendor for dumplings to carry upstairs.

Inside the apartment, Kael dropped onto the couch, his coat still on. "They're hiding something," he said, no preamble.

"Vale's numbers," I agreed, setting the dumplings on the counter. "They didn't match the onboarding sheets."

"And they've split the original reports from the sanitized ones," he said. "Two sets of files. The clean version's public-facing, the other's locked to a handful of people. I only saw a fragment, but it was enough."

"Could be a reporting delay."

He gave me a look that said he didn't believe it either.

We ate at the counter, the dumplings hot enough to burn. Kael spoke between bites. "We need to get closer to Vale and whoever's on her clearance list. Lira's good for analytics chatter, but she's not in that circle."

"We don't push yet," I said. "We let them start trusting us. Make ourselves useful. People talk when they forget they're supposed to be careful."

He nodded, then hesitated. "You and Jade... you really have no idea if you're related?"

I arched a brow. "We're not. She adopted me when I was seven."

"That doesn't rule it out. You look so much alike it's... strange. When we get back, you should take a DNA test."

"I'm not in a hurry to have the ground pulled out from under me," I said.

His expression softened. "Sometimes knowing the truth steadies the ground."

"Sometimes it breaks it," I countered.

We let it drop.

Dinner finished, Kael leaned back, the city lights from outside catching in his hair. "You know," he said, "this is the first time I've eaten with... friends. People I'm not obligated to by blood or title."

"That's sad," I said without much sympathy.

He shrugged. "It's deliberate. After I saw Rael—my brother—stabbed by his best friend, I decided no one would ever get close enough to do that to me."

The words hung between us. The stabbing had been empire gossip for years, but hearing it from him gave it weight.

"Guess you made an exception," I said.

"Guess I did."

We cleared the counter and moved back to the couch. The plan came together in quiet, methodical pieces.

Step one: stay embedded. No sudden interest in XX. No questions that could be traced.

Step two: build rapport with the inner circle—Vale, two senior account leads, and a data controller named Renn.

Step three: once we had access, cross-check the original reports with the public-facing data.

If the numbers told a different story, we'd know. And once we knew, the real game would begin.

Kael tapped the sticky note from earlier, now on the coffee table between us. "Tomorrow," he said.

"Tomorrow," I agreed.

Outside, the city pulsed in neon rhythm, the rain turning the streets into rivers of reflected light. In here, we had warm dumplings, a thread to pull, and seven days before anyone in Veylin realized the prince had been walking among them.

And I was determined to make those days count.