The neon sign above the laundromat across the street flickered with a rhythmic, dying pulse, casting long red shadows across the concrete floor of the print shop. The light bled across Maya's face, painting her sharp features in crimson.

Maya sat cross-legged on her swivel chair, a half-empty mug of cold coffee resting beside a tangle of routing cables. Her cracked glasses slipped down the bridge of her nose as she squinted at the triple-encrypted terminal screen.

Isabella stood by the workbench, methodically stripping down her sidearm and cleaning the barrel with an oily rag. The data drive from the Sterling estate sat dead and silent in a Faraday pouch next to her elbows, completely isolated from any external network.

"The metadata on this drive is a goldmine, Iz," Maya said, her voice cutting through the hum of the cooling fans. She tapped a key, bringing up a sprawling schematic of offshore accounts and shell companies. "Sterling didn't just hide his money. He built a fortress out of bribes. Every single municipal zoning official who looked the other way on his port expansion project has a direct deposit trail leading straight back to his primary holdings."

Isabella didn't look up from her weapon slide. "Are the transaction keys fully decrypted?"

"Almost," Maya replied, typing a final string of commands that triggered a green confirmation prompt on the screen. "Give me twenty more minutes and I'll have every routing number and beneficiary name laid out like a menu. But that is not the only thing I found while digging through the access logs."

Isabella's hands stopped moving. She set the slide down on the metal bench with a quiet click. "What else?"

"Remember that second ping on the subnet right before you grabbed the drive?" Maya turned her chair around, her dark eyes sharp. "I ran a deeper trace on the IP address that bypassed the local firewall. It was not a corporate script. It was a localized terminal routing through a municipal subnet downtown."

Isabella's jaw tightened. "A police frequency."

"Closer than that," Maya said, leaning forward. "The digital signature matched an internal diagnostic tool used by elite investigative units. Someone inside the department was watching the vault metrics in real time. They knew the file structure was vulnerable before you even scaled the perimeter wall."

The memory of the gray-eyed detective standing in the threshold with his service weapon raised flashed through Isabella's mind. Julian had not been there by coincidence. He had been hunting the exact same ghost, tracking the exact same bleeding wound in Sterling's digital empire.

"He knew what I was after," Isabella said softly, more to herself than to Maya.

"If a cop has those files on his radar, it means we are not the only ones closing in on Sterling," Maya warned, her voice dropping into a harder register. "Which means your shadow friend with the badge is either going to try to use our work to clean up the precinct, or he is going to come looking for the person who beat him to the punch."

Isabella picked up her sidearm, the cold steel sliding back into place with a crisp, definitive snap. She locked the weapon into her holster and adjusted the strap across her shoulder.

"Let him try," Isabella said, her voice as cold and flat as winter stone. "If he wants to play in the dark, he has to catch me first."