The rain started just after midnight, turning the asphalt outside the precinct into a slick, black mirror that caught the amber smear of streetlights. Exactly twenty-four hours after the vault door at the Sterling estate had been blown wide open.

Julian sat in his unmarked sedan down the block from the print shop, the heater humming a low, dry warmth against the chill seeping through the door seals. He killed the engine. The abrupt silence inside the car felt heavy, crowded by the weight of the notes spread across his passenger seat.

Printouts of the Sterling estate firewall logs sat side by side with the encrypted diagnostic traces he had pulled from his own terminal. The timestamps were identical down to the millisecond.

He hadn't found the print shop by luck. It had taken him half the night to isolate a secondary, low-frequency ping that had bounced off a dead satellite relay during the hack. It was a crude, analog ghost-line routing straight to an old commercial storefront fronting as a shuttered print shop.

His phone buzzed on the console. He glanced down.

Clara: You didn't come home for dinner. Don't make me send a wellness check to your desk.

Julian typed a fast, tight response. Working a case. Go to sleep, Clara.

He deleted it before sending. Instead, he typed: Late night. Eat without me. He stared at the words for a moment, then sent them before he could delete those too.

He dropped the phone back onto the passenger seat, and stepped out into the cold drizzle.

The rain plastered his dark hair against his forehead as he crossed the empty street, his boots splashing through the oil-slicked puddles. He didn't park directly in front of the building. He parked twenty yards down, keeping the shadows of a brick alleyway between his position and the glowing red neon sign of the laundromat across the road.

The print shop windows were dark, blocked by heavy iron security shutters, but a faint, rhythmic line of yellow light bled out from beneath the rear service door. Somewhere inside, the hacker was pulling apart the final layers of Sterling's financial empire.

He knew Isabella Vance wasn't in that building tonight. He had tracked her separate exit vector hours ago. She had dropped the physical drive off-site and vanished into the city grid long before he managed to isolate this address. Only the tech ghost remained behind the iron shutters.

Julian pulled his coat tighter around his neck, his hand resting casually near the cold leather of his holster. He wasn't here to make an arrest. The brass wanted a scapegoat, and Captain Cross wanted a closed file to appease Sterling's lawyers. But Julian didn't give a damn about the brass.

He just needed to know who was holding the other end of the wire.

He stepped into the mouth of the alley, watching the reflection of the red sign bleed across the wet pavement, waiting for the shadows to move.