The email glowed on Zoe's screen at 2 AM, a single anonymous sentence that made the stale coffee in her stomach churn: 'Follow the money on the Aethelred vote. Thompson didn't just flip. He was pushed.'
Zoe Barnes leaned back, the springs of her worn-out office chair groaning in protest. Pushed. That was the word that had been clawing at the back of her mind all night.
She grabbed her notes and marched over to her editor's desk. Frank was still there, a monument to deadlines and disappointment, his face illuminated by the glow of his monitor.
"Frank, look at this." She slid her phone in front of him.
He glanced at it, then back at his screen. "An anonymous tip? Zoe, we get a hundred of these a day. Ninety-nine are garbage."
"This one feels different," she insisted. "It fits. Thompson torpedoed a multi-billion-dollar contract. His biggest donor is Aethelred Defense. It makes no sense. This isn't a flip-flop; it's political suicide."
Frank finally looked at her, his eyes tired. "Or he found a conscience, Zoe. It happens. Rarely." He gestured to a stack of old newspapers on his desk, literally burying a fresh lead she'd pitched yesterday. "Get me 500 words on the budget hearing and stop chasing ghosts. We don't have the resources for a wild goose chase."
Zoe's jaw tightened. "This isn't a ghost, Frank. It's a story."
"Find me proof, not a feeling," he grunted, turning back to his work. The dismissal was absolute.
She stood there for a second, the fluorescent lights of the newsroom humming around her. Fine. If the Washington Chronicle wouldn't chase it, she would.
Back in her apartment, the city lights did little to brighten the stacks of files and empty coffee mugs. Zoe lived in a state of organized chaos.
She cracked her knuckles and dove in.
For hours, she scoured financial records, PAC donations, and Senator Thompson's public schedules. Everything was clean. It was too clean, like a room wiped down after a murder. Men like Thompson didn't make moves this big without leaving a financial footprint.
She slammed her mug down, sloshing cold coffee onto a stack of files. She didn't even care. "Come on," she muttered at the screen. "Show me something."
Frustrated, she tried a different angle. Instead of looking at Thompson's old connections, she searched for new ones. Recently registered corporations. New consulting firms. Anything that popped up in the last month.
The search returned hundreds of meaningless shell companies. She scrolled, her eyes burning. And then she stopped.
Nile Strategic Solutions.
The name was… odd. Poetic, almost. It was registered just two weeks ago. Its funding was a complex maze of offshore accounts, layered so deep it was designed to be untraceable. But the date was the key. It was created just before Thompson started getting cagey about the Aethelred vote.
A thrill, sharp and electric, shot through her exhaustion. "Got you," she whispered. The name 'Nile Strategic Solutions' glowed on her laptop screen in the dark, the only real light in her cluttered room. It was a thread. Now she just had to pull it.
Across the city, in a penthouse that felt more like a temple, the air was calm.
Cleo was reading ancient Greek texts from a glowing tablet, finding the philosophers of old just as tedious as she remembered. Marc stood by the window, monitoring the digital ripples their first move had made.
"This world has more eyes than Argus," he said, his voice tight with a modern paranoia she found distasteful. "Cameras, data trails, digital footprints. We have to be cleaner than clean."
Cleo didn't look up from her tablet. "Let them look. Mortals have always been fascinated by gods. It is part of their subjugation." Her arrogance was a shield forged over a lifetime of absolute rule.
"Our next target," Marc continued, changing the subject. "The lobbyist, Meredith Vance. She controls the energy sector committee. She is not as easily swayed by the flesh as Thompson."
Finally, Cleo looked up. A slow, dangerous smile spread across her face.
"Every mortal has a void that needs filling, my love," she said, her voice like honeyed wine. "Power, faith, or flesh. We simply need to find which one."
Zoe hit a wall. The money behind Nile Strategic Solutions was a ghost. She couldn't trace it. Not without a warrant she couldn't get for a story her editor didn't believe in.
"Okay, new plan," she said to her empty apartment. If she couldn't follow the money, she'd follow the man.
She picked up her phone and called in a favor. "Hey, Dave? It's Zoe. Yeah, I know it's late. I need a look at some security logs. Unofficially."
Ten minutes later, a file landed in her encrypted inbox. Hotel security logs for every major hotel near the Capitol. She cross-referenced them with Thompson's schedule. There. A four-hour block marked 'private meeting' at the Hay-Adams. The night before the vote.
"Bingo."
Using the login credentials Dave had 'accidentally' left in the email, she accessed the hotel's exterior camera footage. The quality was grainy, designed to catch cars, not secrets. She saw Thompson's town car pull up. She saw him get out and walk inside.
She fast-forwarded. Hours passed on the timestamp. Then, the main doors opened again.
A woman emerged.
Zoe leaned closer to her screen, squinting. She couldn't see the face clearly, not from this distance. But her walk… it wasn't a walk. It was a procession. Her posture was perfect, her movements fluid and utterly commanding. The confident, regal gait was so out of place in the blurry, mundane footage it was jarring.
Who walked like that? It was like watching a queen inspect her territory.
At the same moment, in a penthouse overlooking the city, a discreet alarm chimed on Marc's laptop. It was a silent security tripwire he'd placed on the hotel's network.
'UNAUTHORIZED ACCESS: SECURITY FEED – LOBBY CAM 02.'
Zoe frantically worked the enhancement software, trying to clean up the pixelated image. The woman turned slightly as her car arrived, her face angled toward the camera for a fraction of a second. The image was still a blur, but the outline of the face, the dark, commanding eyes… they were mesmerizing even through the distortion.
Marc's fingers flew across his keyboard, tracing the digital intrusion. It was sloppy, low-level. It traced back to an IP address registered to a subsidiary server for the Washington Chronicle. He looked across the room at Cleo, who was serenely watching the city lights, completely unaware. His expression was no longer victorious, but sharp with deadly focus.
Zoe whispered to the ghost on her screen, "Who the hell are you?"
Across the city, Marc stood behind his queen and said, his voice a low warning, "We have a problem. A reporter is pulling on the thread."