Xavier accepted the chip but didn’t look at it immediately. Instead, his eyes found Grayson, and this time, the man didn’t bother to hide the smile.

It was small—barely a curve of the lips—but it was so pronounced that it seemed like he deliberately showed it to let his opponent see it.

"What does this mean, Dr. Shortle?" Xavier deliberately asked.

Dr. Shortle could feel everyone’s eyes were on him. He cleared his throat and carefully answered, "Meaning, despite not having the previous footage, we could still receive live footage from the remaining surveillance working in the basements of the building."

Catalina heard that and immediately moved forward, almost begging. "Show us. Show us everything."

Xavier paid her no mind and asked, "So, inside this chip were the footage taken just this past hour?"

Dr. Shortle nodded and said, "Yes."

Xavier scanned the chip to his light brain first, and his face changed to grave, making everyone tense and curious about the contents. But Pete saw the brief curl at one end of his lips.

He stared back at Grayson and played with the chip a little bit. Before saying in a low and grave tone, "Mr. Maxwell, how would you like to deal with this?"

Xavier was acting like he was giving Grayson a choice. But in the first place, there was no other choice to choose from.

"Show it," Grayson said firmly, guiltless.

Xavier raised an eyebrow and inserted the chip into the table’s holographic display.

The projection flickered to life—a three-dimensional wireframe rendering of the basement sublevel, reconstructed from the structural scan data. The image was ghostly blue-white, translucent, rotating slowly to display all angles.

The room went quiet as the scans began to turn into images.

The basement corridor outside the detention room was catastrophic. Debris from the upper floors had dropped down the stairwell and partially blocked the hallway.

But the scan’s penetrating resolution showed what lay beneath: there were pools of blood, dark and extensive, mapped in crimson overlay against the blue wireframe.

Bodies—four of them—crumpled in various positions along the corridor. About eleven of them were all on the outside of the detention room’s door.

The security personnel assigned to guard the room sprawled on the floor and died at their posts. They were caught between the blast from above and whoever had come for Lilianna from below.

But inside the room itself—

Pete stared at the projection.

Inside the detention room, there was a single large pool of blood.

From the one and only entrance, there were no bodies in sight.

But within the pool of blood towards the other debris inside were a seriesof drag marks.

Long, irregular, smeared—an unmistakable trail of a person being hauled or crawled across a floor while actively bleeding.

There was only one person who could produce that trail from the inside.

Lilianna’s trail.

Pete’s jaw tightened. He and Grayson exchanged a single look—half a second, but loaded with shared assessment.

Whoever had taken Lilianna hadn’t been gentle about it. The blood volume visible in the scan was a lot. The drag marks suggested she’d been incapacitated or, at a minimum, unable to walk under her own power.

This wasn’t a rescue performed by someone who cared about the subject’s well-being, like the initial theory.

This was a brutal and efficient abduction.

But they landed on that interpretation because they had a context.

Context that the other people in this room didn’t have—or chose not to even think about.

Pete watched them land on their own conclusions of what they think they saw, and his stomach dropped.

"Oh, God." Catalina’s voice was barely a whisper.

Her hand flew to her mouth.

She saw the blood inside the room, the blood outside the room, the bodies of the guards, and she connected the dots. Her daughter, held in a room with that much blood on the floor, guarded by armed men who were now dead.

To her, the drag marks weren’t evidence of an abduction. They were evidence of an escape attempt.

Lilianna, hurt and bleeding, was being carried to safety by someone brave enough to fight through the blast and the guards to get her out.

In Catalina’s mind, the blood inside the room came before the explosion. Someone had been hurting her daughter while she was detained.

Her knees buckled, and Geron caught her, pulling her against his chest with both arms. His face had gone red.

Geron stared at the holographic scan over his wife’s head, and Pete watched the man’s carefully maintained ambiguity crumble in real time.

Because Geron knew what Catalina was thinking, and unlike his calculating self that maintained the delicate balance between his cover, his duty, and his conscience—that was his daughter’s blood on that floor.

His daughter’s drag marks. His daughter’s empty room.

Geron looked at Grayson, barely controlling himself not to lash out like his wife.

But with that look, he already declared who he would side with.

"Explain."

Pete stepped forward, ready to intervene, ready to offer context, ready to point out the dozen alternative explanations for Grayson.

But Grayson’s hand came up again and stopped him.

Pete clenched his teeth behind his closed lips.

Xavier was watching Grayson, waiting for him to explain like everyone else in the room.

Pete looked at Grayson in askance, aren’t you going to explain?

Grayson closed his eyes tightly before opening them again and said, "I suppose the Imperial Military would handle everything from here on out. Is that correct?"

"Yes," Xavier said as he raised an eyebrow. 𝚏𝗿𝗲𝐞𝐰𝚎𝕓𝐧𝚘𝘃𝗲𝐥.𝐜𝚘𝕞

He was wondering what Grayson was up to, because this question was too obvious to even ask.

"Are you taking full responsibility for everything, General Hunter?" Grayson said, repeating his meaning.

"We are," Xavier said confidently. "Given the nature of the incident—"

Geron, who seemed to have realized belatedly what he was up to, tried to rise, but he was currently holding his wife.

But his urgent movement was noticed by everyone, making Xavier pause.

Xavier frowned at this because it meant that there was more to the story, and it somehow involved Baron Gringer here.

He couldn’t have that.