I pick up the flash drive with two fingers and slip it into my bag.
“You leave first,” I tell her. “No lingering, no extra conversation.”
She laughs once, and it’s sharp. “You’ve changed.”
“I had to,” I answer.
She slides out of the booth and walks away without looking back.
I wait longer than thirty seconds, because I’m not giving her an easy line from me to the door. I do the check-in with the code word Ethan gave me, and I don’t move until the response comes back.
Clear.
Then I exit through the side and get into the car Harrison arranged. The driver doesn’t speak, and I don’t ask questions, because questions aren’t useful right now.
When I get back to the apartment, Ethan is already inside.
He isn’t pacing. He’s set up the offline laptop on the table and a small recorder sits beside it. The case it came from is locked and tucked against the wall like it lives there.
He looks up the second I step in. “Any trouble?”
“No,” I say, and I pull the flash drive out of my bag. “She wants immunity.”
Ethan takes it and plugs it into the offline system, and his fingers move fast while his face stays controlled. He reads for a minute, scrolls, then stops.
“Trace checks out,” he says. “Shell entity is one we flagged.”
I cross my arms. “So she isn’t bluffing.”
“She’s panicking.”
“Or she’s setting us up,” I say.
He looks up at me. “This is too specific to be fake, and it’s too risky to hand over if she’s still loyal.”
I stare at the screen, then back at him. “Spell it out. What’s Victoria doing.”
Ethan’s voice is steady. “Pay-to-play. She sells access and outcomes, routes the payments through shells, and keeps the paper thin.”
“And Gavin,” I say.
“Collection and leverage,” he replies. “He pressures targets, and he runs errands in systems he shouldn’t touch.”
I nod once, because it fits, and because I hate that it fits. Sabrina wasn’t lying.
“So Sabrina has receipts,” I say.
“She has enough to trade,” Ethan answers. “She’s also the type who tries to trade twice.”
I take my shoes off and press my toes into the floor, because grounding is the only thing keeping my thoughts from sprinting.
“Then we pull her into a recorded deal and lock her to the terms,” I say.
“Carefully,” Ethan replies. “She burns bridges when she’s scared.”
I look at him. “She wants a meeting.”
He doesn’t blink. “With counsel present, recorded, and controlled.”