Chapter 158 Serena Voss Moves

Chapter 158 Serena Voss Moves

Serena Voss Moves

POV: Jess

Danny messaged me again that afternoon. I had not asked him for anything new. He had reached out on his own, which told me before I even opened the message that something had moved on his end that he felt obligated to flag, the kind of instinct that came from someone who had been pulled further into something than he had originally signed up for and wanted to do right by it before stepping back out.

His message read: I think you should know something. Access request flagged on my end this morning. Voss requested a student welfare file. Under the institutional review banner. I can’t tell you whose file, but I think you can probably guess.

I read it twice. Then I called him.

“Tell me what you can,” I said when he picked up.

“I shouldn’t even be telling you this much,” he said. His voice had the particular strain of someone weighing a favour against a growing discomfort. “The request came through this morning, listed under the active institutional review into Holt and the welfare office connection. It’s procedurally valid. She has the administrative authority to request student files under that banner if she frames it as relevant to the review.”

“Whose file, Danny?”

He was quiet for a second. “I can’t confirm names. I really can’t, Jess. But the request was time-stamped two hours after the legal filing against Ethan went public. And it was flagged because the requesting officer is also the subject of significant scrutiny in the same investigation. That combination triggered an internal flag for review before it gets approved.”

“So it hasn’t gone through yet.”

“Not yet. It’s sitting in a queue. Could be approved in a day. Could sit longer if someone above her decides the optics are bad.” He paused. “I just thought you should know it exists before it potentially does go through.”

I thanked him, told him he had done enough, and that I would not ask him for anything else after this. He sounded relieved in a way that made me feel slightly guilty for how much I had already pulled him into.

I went straight to Riley’s room. She was at her desk with competition material spread in front of her, the familiar disorder of preparation that had become normal over the past weeks. She looked up when I came in and read something in my face immediately.

“What happened?” she said.

I told her.

I watched her absorb it the way she absorbed most difficult information now, not with panic, with the quiet, focused stillness of someone converting an emotional reaction into something she could work with. She pushed her competition notes aside and pulled a blank sheet of paper toward her instead.

“Let’s map it,” she said. “All of it. From the beginning.”

We worked at it for the next hour.

I sat beside her and we built the timeline together on the paper, the way we had built other maps during this year, the visual structure helping both of us see the full shape of something that lived too easily as scattered fragments in our heads otherwise.

We started with the email chain I had found, the correspondence between Voss and Holt that predated his appointment by eighteen months. Riley wrote the date at the top of the page.

Then the orientation week encounter, Voss knowing Riley’s name before introduction, the small detail that had seemed administrative at the time and now sat at the very start of the operational timeline.

Then the welfare referral. The intake session in Riley’s second week, presented as routine, that had actually been the first data-gathering exercise. We connected it with a line to the published paper Riley had found, the academic framework Voss had built years earlier under her own name, the vulnerability profiling methodology that had a legitimate-looking academic foundation and an entirely illegitimate operational use.

Then the profiling document itself, the one Marcus had read aloud, built from Holt’s observation and Voss’s clinical framework combined.

Then the complaint filed against Agatha during the intra-competition, the timing of which now made more sense given that Voss had access to the academic review process through her welfare office connections.

Then the legal filing against Ethan, two hours before which Voss had requested Riley’s full welfare file under the institutional review banner. We sat back and looked at the completed map.

It was not the work of someone who had been pulled in reluctantly or used unknowingly. Every single point on the timeline showed initiative. Voss had not waited to be asked to participate. She had built the infrastructure herself, years in advance, published the academic justification for it under her own name, and continued contributing actively right up to that morning’s request.

“She’s not a participant,” Riley said quietly, looking at the page. “She’s an architect.”

“Yes,” I said.

Riley traced her finger slowly down the timeline, following the years of it, the published paper, the welfare sessions, the referrals, the profiling documents. She stopped at the bottom, at this morning’s file request, and sat with her finger resting there for a long moment.

“Jess,” she said. Her voice had changed slightly, gone quieter, more careful, the way it did when she was arriving at something larger than the thing she had been looking at directly.

“What?”

“How many students go through that welfare office every year?”

“You asked me that already,” I said. “Four hundred, roughly.”

“Seven years,” she said. “She’s been in that role seven years.” She lifted her finger off the page and looked at me. “This isn’t just about me, Jess. Or about Agatha, or the fourteen students in Zane’s article, or whoever else has been specifically targeted in this operation.” She paused. “She built a framework. A published, peer-reviewed, institutionally endorsed framework for identifying vulnerable students. And she’s had access to every single student who has ever walked into that office for support.”

I felt the full weight of that land somewhere between us.

“Every disclosure,” Riley said slowly. “Every family history. Every mental health record. Every academic vulnerability anyone has ever shared in that room believing it was confidential.” She looked at the map again. “She has access to every vulnerable student on this campus. Not just me. Every student who ever walked into that welfare office.”