DAX'S POV
5:47 AM.
He'd been awake since four. He ran at four-thirty the way he always did — the building's private gym, forty minutes, the particular quality of physical effort that cleared the night's accumulated thinking without replacing it with anything specific. By five-thirty he was back upstairs, showered, coffee made, the penthouse in its pre-dawn state of being the truest version of itself: no performance, no management, just the rooms and the morning and the city coming awake outside the floor-to-ceiling windows.
He'd been standing at the kitchen island when the email came in.
Dr. Okafor. 5:44 AM. Result attached. Please call when you've had a chance to read.
He opened the attachment.
He read it once. Very quickly, the way he read everything — systematically, taking it apa
