By afternoon, plainclothes tech officers filled our house. They swept for bugs, replaced the compromised baby monitor, and installed a corporate-grade firewall.
Julian stayed beside Lily's nursery door until they finished.
At Julian's desk, I put the sterile USB beside my laptop and rested my fingers on the keyboard. It had been years, and the first lines came slowly. Then muscle memory took over.
I built the Trojan to open quietly, bypass the user's firewall, and copy the connected drive. I sealed it inside a file labeled "Phoenix_Key_Data_Transfer."
The burner phone lit up with a new image of Lily's crib, taken in real time. Chloe still had a backdoor somewhere.
Julian saw it over my shoulder. His fingers closed around the back of my chair.
Detective Miller's voice cut through the
