Clara easily slid into a routine in her existence, her days were spent similar to the day before.
She always had something alcoholic in her drinking vessel as she moved throughout the tasks that Talia assigned.
Clara started with a chest-warming spirit in her espresso and moved on to icier drinks when the sun rose high overhead, moving back to espresso as the sun set and she transitioned to the early evening.
Maya was always waiting for Clara in her quarters, fresh clothes ready for after she showered off the day. Clara's dinner was generally brought to her by Maya under a silver cloche.
Clara found herself thankful for the time to herself she had after Maya lifted the shiny dome and she was left alone, the door locked from the outside of course.
As Clara picked the olives out of her salad, she scrutinized a small, spiral notebook she had opened to the middle.
She ran her eyes down the list of passwords and juicy nuggets of intel from overheard conversations and overturning every digital rock and ending around every firewall.
Time might've passed easily for Clara but not everyone felt the same.
Barsad spent each day trying to crane his neck for even just a glimpse of Clara.
Bane kept him occupied with tasks that made it difficult for him to watch Clara through the custom-made holes in the wall.
He began to observe her, studies her.
He found himself looking forward to the moments she would get lost in her work and start singing to herself.
Bane's resolve was tested as he watched her from the doorway as she mined data, massaging her neck and shoulders, small sounds of discomfort breaking up the words to the song.
He found himself hypnotized when his eyes found her rubbing at the base of her skull, groaning uncomfortably as she scrutinized electronic data.
Despite the few words Bane exchanged with Clara during any given day, he saw everything.
As Fabiana flitted around the estate, attending to everything, and seeing more, back on the eastern seaboard of the United States, Governor Leroux settled at the oblong table with a buttery, flaky croissant, and espresso as he logged onto his desktop, immediately knowing something was amiss.
He'd had a feeling for a while that someone had their hand in the top-secret cookie jar but would never have considered Clara a suspect. He'd been briefed in the past about her activity on the dark web under her feathery disguise.
Clara was quiet when she was everywhere but the dark web, where she crowed and made her voice heard throughout the pixelated ether.
The morning was overcast, and Matthew nearly choked on his croissant when he opened an encrypted message from his head of security.
His eyes grew larger as he scanned the message about an uncovered document that someone had written about Governor Leroux in honor of his reelection campaign.
A document about Matthew that The Raven had written and posted overnight.
Mathew's face paled as he read the article that Clara had written while she reclined on her outdoor patio, writing the article as she contemplated her next chess move for hours, before dawn broke she moved her Bishop diagonally forward, stopping on a lighter square.
Julie Leroux nearly dropped her wooden handled hairbrush when Matthew burst into their bedroom stammering and stuttering as he tried to spit out the scathing letter that was circulating in the web's pixelated darkness.
"My fellow compatriots, I just flew in from attending the best little gala thrown by Governor Kingston in honor of dead children, no wait, war. Fund the war I think.
I was wearing my black dress, very little of course, my luscious bosom on display, so many diplomats and ambassadors tried to slip a hand into my bloomers after I dipped my beak in a delicate, aged cognac.
This little bird was hovering near a private bathroom, the buffet didn't settle well with these hollow bones. The Governor came in with someone who just recently launched a coup. This feathered birdie heard all about the exchange of payment in blood diamonds and gold, there's a certain government that's interested in plutonium.
Whisper to me some numbers for more about what this delicate birdie heard and wrote down on the bare skin of their inner thighs."
"Who did this?" Matthew shouted as he stomped over to where he had an aged bottle of scotch, wracking his brain to figure out who could've been so close the night of the gala.
He didn't know that Clara had been hiding in the gun closet.
Julie resumed brushing her hair, trying to narrow down the many, many, many suspects that may have taken issue with Governor Leroux in the past, present, or even preemptively for the future.
9,000 miles away, Leonid Pavel was being rushed down a concrete corridor, the walls wet as they dripped condensation. The overhead lights flickered; moths crashed into the lightbulbs. His travel plans had been accelerated after rumors of their being a spy within the nuclear plant, someone working for a third-party with intent of abducting Pavel during the change of guards.
Pavel's flight was being arranged for much sooner, the technician that transmitted the updated flight plans to the destination country foolishly used an antiquated system that was intercepted all the way in South America where Talia's well-paid, even more well-armed muscle for hire, immediately notified Talia.
Talia needed to scramble and quickly threw together a contingency plan to snatch Pavel when he landed at the private airstrip that was funded by a billionaire with a 200-foot super yacht docked in the Baltic Sea.
Bane was always close to Clara but never encroached on her breathing space. He continued to move his chess pieces in the cloak of the night.
Clara would wake up, not finding money under her pillows, but a moved chess piece.
Clara was oblivious to the violence and bloodshed that took place around the compound, to the throats that were slashed and thrown into the trough, the matriarch sow Leonora was a fan of human cheeks, and the other soft tissue in the head.
The other pigs gave Leonora her space and respect to feed, they were grateful for what she left them to eat.
As the days blurred together with their cookie-cutter contents, Clara kept searching and infiltrating further past firewalls and secure databases.
Bane kept watching.
Fabiana also continued to observe.
The Crimson King kept killing.
Talia kept plotting her revenge while Barsad remained starved for glimpses of Clara.
Clara's illusion of reality was about to violently crack at the foundation. A mallet would soon shatter her insulated existence on the estate of the bloodthirsty murderer and his glamorous wife.
It was very early in the morning on the other side of the world as Leonid Pavel was escorted onto an airplane with bogus tail numbers and an inaccurate flight plan.
As the plane rose to the minimum altitude set forth earlier, Dr. Pavel asked for a drink and then held onto the bottle, nursing it like it was mother's milk.
As the plane ascended to its maximum altitude of 31,500 feet, on the ground, a surface-to-air missile was launched by a pro-separatist group.
The warhead exploded a few feet from the cockpit, causing hundreds of pieces of shrapnel to tear through the front of the plane, shearing it free but leaving the fuselage mostly intact.
The detonation of the warhead reduced the plane in which Pavel was drunkenly seated into a metal tube, flying forward with no eyes to squint for the murkiest of details on the ground, eventually falling blindly to the earth.
No nose to smell the burning jet fuel and human flesh.
No ears to hear the remnants of the plane mechanically ripped apart and the cried of those that remained living while the plane stayed in the air for more than a solid sixty seconds before falling from the sky.
The wreckage would be spread over fifty miles in a sheep pasture, some of the woolly ewes would be found nibbling on the hair of the dead at the crash site from those whose skulls remained mostly intact.