Chapter 2: “Shaking the Branches"

Amyula didn’t put clothes back on.

She stood in front of the research wall in nothing but black lace briefs, bare feet planted on the cool floor, warm light-brown skin still carrying the faint sheen of her ride home. The apartment lights cast soft highlights along the long line of her legs and the gentle curve of her waist. Her high, perky breasts rose and fell with steady breaths as she studied the photographs again.

The pattern was clearer now.

Every time Lord Umbra had been cornered in the last four decades, the same names appeared in the margins of the reports — Sentinel Prime, Lady Silver, Ironclad, The Nightingale. Never as the ones who brought him in. Always as the ones who somehow arrived too late, or lost the trail, or filed incomplete statements.

Someone had been protecting him.

Amyula reached out and touched the edge of an old black-and-white photo of Umbra from the 1950s. Even then he looked composed, almost bored, like a man who already owned the board.

She smiled.

Marcus’s warning still echoed in her head. *Above your pay grade. No one will be able to protect you.* The words should have scared her. Instead they sat warm and low in her stomach, the same place the danger always lived. She had always been like this — stubborn, cocky, and addicted to the moment a story stopped being safe.

She pulled her laptop onto the dining table, still half-dressed, and started making the harder calls.

First was a mid-level records clerk at the city’s metahuman archive. The woman on the other end of the line went quiet the second Amyula mentioned the old pact files.

“I can’t talk about that,” the clerk whispered.

“You already are,” Amyula replied calmly. “I just need the reference numbers from the 1962 and 1978 closed cases. That’s all.”

There was a long pause, then the soft click of keys. Two numbers came through. Amyula wrote them down in neat black ink.

Next she called a former sidekick who now ran a quiet bar on the east side. He didn’t want to meet. She told him she would come anyway. He hung up.

By midnight she had three new connections and a short list of people who had suddenly become very nervous. She stretched, arms above her head, spine arching, the movement long and elegant. The black lace of her briefs shifted against her skin. She felt awake. Alive.

Outside, across the canal, a tall figure stood in the deeper shadows between two streetlights.

Gravemind watched the eleventh-floor window without moving.

He had been ordered only to observe for now. The journalist was still useful as a warning. But the way she moved — tall, lean, completely unbothered by her own near-nakedness while she worked — made something cold and interested settle behind his eyes. He noted the long legs, the warm brown glow of her skin under the apartment lights, the careless confidence in the way she stood.

He would remember all of it.

Inside, Amyula finally pulled on an oversized white shirt, leaving it unbuttoned, and sat cross-legged on the couch with her notes. She circled two names, drew a line between them, and underlined Lord Umbra three times.

Her phone buzzed once with a new message from an unknown number.

A single line of text:

**Stop.**

Amyula stared at it for a moment. Then she typed back.

**Make me.**

She hit send, set the phone down, and went back to her research, the unbuttoned shirt slipping off one shoulder. The giant moon hung heavy over Crown City, silver light sliding across her bare legs.

Somewhere in the dark, Gravemind smiled without warmth and began walking toward her building.