Confrontation at the Summit

"Don't bother with the seat — I'm not staying long enough to need it."

Elara's voice cut through the conference hall's ambient hum like a scalpel through silk. I'd known she'd find me here. The Zukunft Digital summit in Berlin had been on my calendar for weeks, and my calendar, in this life, had a way of becoming everyone's business.

I turned from the coffee station, paper cup warm in my palm, and there she was: platinum hair scraped back so tightly it looked painful, charcoal suit sharp enough to draw blood. The frost in her eyes had nothing to do with the November chill outside the glass walls.

"Elara." I kept my voice level. "You've developed an interest in middleware architecture? I'm touched."

"I've developed an interest in you." She stepped closer, close enough that I could smell her perfume — something expensive and cold, like a winter garden. "You've been busy, little brother. Rotterdam. The audit files. That journalist with the ink-stained fingers."

My pulse ticked up, but I didn't move. Show nothing. In the first life, she'd read me like a ledger. In this one, I'd learned to keep the books closed.

"Sophie's a friend," I said.

"Sophie is a liability. For both of us." She smiled, and it was the smile she used on board members before a vote she'd already rigged. "I know what you're building. Helix Dynamics. The quiet little consultancy that's been poaching my engineers and my clients. It's clever, I'll give you that. But clever isn't enough."

"Are you threatening me at a tech conference? There's a panel on ethics starting in ten minutes. You'd have an audience."

"I'm warning you." Her voice dropped, and for a moment the mask slipped — not to anger, but to something rawer. Fear. I'd never seen that on her face in either life. "Walk away from the audit files. Stop the journalist. Fade back into whatever hole you crawled out of, and I'll let you keep your little company."

"And if I don't?"

"Then I'll bury you. I'll dig up everything you've done since you slithered back into this city, and I'll make sure the only thing you inherit is a criminal record." She straightened her cuff. "I did it before. I can do it again."

There it was. The confession, wrapped in a threat, dropped like a grenade she assumed I wouldn't know how to catch.

I took a slow sip of coffee. My hand was steady. I don't know how.

"You should be careful, Elara," I said quietly. "You're not the only one who's been digging."

Her eyes flickered — the smallest tell, there and gone. She turned and walked away without another word, heels clicking across the polished floor like a metronome counting down.

---

Matthias was waiting in a café two streets from the venue, hunched over a cup of something dark, his leather jacket smelling of machine oil and rain. He'd left Voss Logistik eight years back, and Elara had never bothered to track him. That was her flaw. She only ever watched the people she thought mattered.

"I heard her," he said, before I'd even sat down. "The whole hall heard her. You've got a knack for making enemies in public, kid."

"Keeps me honest." I unwound my scarf — my mother's scarf, dark green, fraying at one corner — and laid it across my knee. "You said you had something."

He slid a folder across the table. Actual paper, the way he did everything. "You remember the Hamburg depot audit? 2019. I was still inside then, running logistics. There was a shortfall. Two point four million euros, booked against a shell supplier that didn't exist."

"Elara framed me for that." The words came out flat. "I served four years for it in my first life."

Matthias's jaw tightened. "Except the shell company wasn't hers. Not originally. It was registered to a holding firm in Zurich — and the signatory on every transfer was Elara herself. I kept copies of the transfer slips. I didn't know what I had until you told me your side."

I opened the folder. Transfer records. Bank statements. A photocopied signature I'd recognise anywhere, elegant and looping, on documents dated six months before the audit that ended my name.

She hadn't just framed me. She'd committed the crime first, then needed a body to hang it on. I'd been the body.

"Why didn't you come forward?" I asked.

"Because when I tried, someone put a brick through my window and a note in my letterbox telling me my daughter's school schedule." His voice was gravel. "I had a family. You didn't."

The guilt in that sentence sat between us like a third chair. I shook my head. "You did the right thing."

"I did the safe thing." He looked at me hard. "There's a difference. So. What now? You going to take this to the police?"

I thought about it. I thought about the clean, bright satisfaction of watching her led away in handcuffs. I thought about what it would cost — the Voss name dragged through every paper, my grandfather's empire crumbling in the crossfire, everyone who worked for us losing their pensions.

Then I thought about the other option. The folder in my bag. The leverage.

"No," I said slowly. "Not the police."

Matthias's gaze didn't waver. "You're going to do what she did to you."

"I'm going to do it better." I closed the folder. "She wants me to fade. Instead, I'll let her know I'm holding the match. And then I'll let her spend the rest of her life wondering when I'll strike it."

"That's not justice, Kieran. That's a leash."

"Maybe." I rolled my shoulders, feeling the old weight settle. "But it's a leash she built herself. I'm just holding the other end."

Matthias was quiet for a long moment. Then he sighed, the sound of a man who'd seen too much to argue with reality. "I hope you know what you're doing."

So did I.

Outside, the rain had started again, streaking the café window like ink. Somewhere across the city, Elara was already planning her next move, secure in the belief that she was the hunter. She had no idea I'd just become something she'd never prepared for.

Her equal.