Sabotage at Dawn

The email arrived at 06:47, and by 06:52 I knew exactly who had sent it.

"Your supplier in Rotterdam has terminated the agreement," Matthias read aloud from the printout, his coffee going cold in his fist. "Effective immediately. Citing 'irreconcilable strategic differences.'" He looked up at me, the lines around his eyes deepening. "That's corporate for someone got to them."

"Elara." I said it without heat, the way you'd name a tumour. I'd been expecting her move since the night at the estate — the way she'd watched me across the table, cataloguing. In my first life she'd ignored me until I was useful to crush. In this one, I'd made myself visible too early. The butterfly effect, flapping its wings. "She ordered a background check on me weeks ago. Sophie heard it from a contact at the registry office."

"And she found?"

"Nothing." I rolled my shoulders, feeling the old tension settle there like a hand. "That's what worries me. If she'd found something, she'd have used it. Instead she's going after what I've built — which means she's decided I'm a rival worth the effort."

Matthias set down the printout. "The grid-balancing units are already in production. We've got orders from three municipal utilities. If we can't source the components—"

"Then we source them elsewhere." I was already at the whiteboard, marker squeaking. "Elara thinks like a Voss. She assumes everyone has a single point of failure — one supplier, one factory, one weakness. She's spent her whole life exploiting that assumption." I drew a circle, then three lines branching from it. "But I've spent mine learning to be unfindable."

"You planned for this."

"I planned for *her*. Ten years of watching how she operates, Matthias. She doesn't attack directly — she cuts supply lines, poisons relationships, makes you look unreliable to your own clients. It's not about destroying you. It's about making you destroy yourself."

He was quiet for a long moment. Then: "How long have you known she'd do this?"

"Since the day I signed the lease." I turned from the board. "I've got a fabricator in Leipzig. Small outfit, family-run, been struggling since the tariffs. They can retool for our components in ten days. I sent them the specifications last month."

Matthias stared at me. "Last month. Before we'd even signed the Rotterdam deal."

"Because I knew we'd lose it." I said it flatly, no pride in it. "I've been wrong about a lot of things since I came back. The timing's off — people I expected to be somewhere aren't, events I counted on haven't happened. But Elara? Elara is a constant. She will always choose the knife over the handshake. That's not a prediction. That's just reading the room."

He laughed — that low rumble, but there was something new underneath it. Something steadier. "You're a strange man, Kieran Voss."

"I'm a man who's been dead once already. It clarifies things."

The fabricator in Leipzig came through in nine days. Matthias drove the components back himself, the van rattling over the autobahn, and by the end of the month Vireo Energy had shipped its first units to Stadtwerke München — ahead of schedule, under budget, and with a quality of finish that made the procurement officer call me personally to ask who our supplier was.

I didn't tell her. But I did send Elara a copy of the delivery confirmation. No note. No gloating. Just the timestamp, so she'd know.

The threat arrived two days later.

No sender. No subject line. Just a single image: a photograph of the Kreuzberg office, taken from the street, with the timestamp of that same morning. And beneath it, four words in a font that looked like it had been typed on an old typewriter:

*You should have stayed dead.*

I sat with it for a long time, the screen's glow the only light in the room. Outside, Berlin carried on — trams, sirens, the clatter of the bakery shutters going up. Ordinary life, indifferent.

My hands were steady. That surprised me. In the first life, a threat like this would have sent me spiralling — drinking, hiding, apologising to people who'd never earned it. Now I felt only the cold clarity of a problem to be solved.

Matthias found me still at the desk at midnight. He read the screen over my shoulder, and I heard his breath go slow and deliberate.

"Police?" he asked.

"Won't help. It's untraceable, and even if it weren't — she's a Voss. The family owns half the lawyers in the city." I closed the laptop. "No. We do what we've been doing. We build. We ship. We make ourselves so useful that destroying us costs more than tolerating us."

"That's it? We just take it?"

"We take it *and* we outgrow it." I stood, and for the first time that day the scarf at my throat felt less like a relic and more like armour. "She wants me to react. To lash out, make a mistake, give her grounds. So I won't. Every unit we ship is a brick in a wall she can't knock down. That's the game, Matthias. Not revenge. Endurance."

He looked at me for a long moment, then nodded slowly. "Then let's endure."

I didn't tell him about the second part — the file I'd started, the one with dates and names and the things I remembered from a life that hadn't happened yet. Elara had chosen her war. I hadn't chosen mine yet.

But when I did, it wouldn't be with a knife in the dark.

It would be in daylight, with the whole city watching.