Grayson slammed his hand on the stolen binder. The crack echoed like a gunshot.

“You stole her operational proposal,” he said, his voice dropping to a lethal whisper. “You took her intellectual property, handed it to Owen to secure your own promotion, and then deliberately scheduled her at a time she’d miss, purely to manufacture a paper trail and destroy her credibility. You tried to bury the only honest soldier in this company.”

“You have no proof of that!” she hissed, though her hands were shaking.

“I don’t need a paper trail, Cassandra,” Grayson said softly. “I just watched her diagnose a military-grade cooling failure from a blurry dashboard. Do you really expect me to believe Owen Rusk — a man who doesn’t know how to change a tire — wrote a forty-page manifesto on warehouse micro-climates?”

She stared at him. For the first time, the polished HR Director looked like a cornered animal.

She stood, smoothing her skirt with trembling hands.