I straightened slightly in my chair, my shoulders settling back into alignment, my posture shifting from prepared to present, even as the conversation continued around me without pause, without explanation, without anyone acknowledging that I had just walked into the middle of something already in motion.
The door behind me opened again.
The shift in the room was immediate.
Subtle—but undeniable.
Not louder. Not abrupt. Just… redirected.
I turned instinctively, and relief hit before I could stop it.
Ezra.
He stepped into the room like he belonged to it without needing to prove it, his presence steady, measured, already focused on the conversation unfolding at the table. His gaze swept once across the room, taking everything in with quiet precision before landing on me.
And just like that, something in my chest loosened.
“Bea,” he said, his voice warm, familiar, cutting through the noise without disrupting it as he crossed the room. “You found us.”
Not:Are you okay?
Not:What’s going on?
Just enough to ground me. Just enough to remind me I wasn’t completely out of place.
“I did,” I replied, my voice steady even as everything else still felt slightly off-balance.
His hand brushed briefly against my shoulder as he passed—quick, reassuring, gone almost as soon as it landed—before his attention shifted forward again.
“Where are we, Char?” he asked, already stepping into the flow of the meeting like he had never left it.
Momentum didn’t pause for him.
It sharpened.
“We’re trying to get control of the narrative.” Char’s tone was clipped as she watched Ezra take the empty chair at my side.
“No decisions until we understand the full picture,” he responded, his voice low, steady.
The room shifted around that.
Not dramatically.
But enough.
A counterbalance.
“We don’t have the luxury of slowing down,” the man Ezra’s right shot back, irritation threading through his tone. “If this gets out?—”
“When it gets out,” someone corrected quietly. “Rawlings, you know it’s just a matter of time.”
The GM exhaled sharply, dragging a hand through his hair. “When it gets out, we need to be ahead of it.”
“We will be,” Ezra replied, calm, unshaken. “But we don’t react blind.”
Silence pressed in for half a beat. Then—“Müller was processed at approximately 2:14 a.m.”
The words came from the far end of the table, delivered in a neutral tone by a woman I hadn’t noticed speaking before. They landed in the center of the room and didn’t move.