Tyler did his part with the ease of a man who’d learned how to bide sins into usefulness. He went back to the Velvet in a way that was almost reverent — quieter, more discreet. He whispered to the bartender, not the stage manager. He sat alone in a booth with a cheap scotch and watched the private rooms empty out. He texted the vendor with a code that meant the buyer wants footage and then, with practiced pay-to-play calm, he made an offer that sounded like a rumor.
Two hours later the bait was taken. The mirror pinged. Gage traced it back through a thicket of shell hosts and found — for a blinding second — the node that Julian’s people used to manufacture the “exclusive” uploads. The bait looked real: mirrored files, corrupted fragments, a juicy timestamp for the promised “release.” They
