Adrian abandoned appearances and took on the scent of pursuit in a way that left him hollow and relentless. He flew to the notary's town ahead of the scheduled hearing and found the sealed envelope—empty. The evidence had been lifted.
The notary's daughter, a jittery teenager, admitted a courier had come at dawn with cash and driven away with a black satchel. The courier's license plate traced back to a shell company linked not to Victor directly, but to a lawyer long-retired and now conveniently out of town.
Adrian snapped. He assigned a team to follow financial trails—old debts, small consultants paid large fees, and a pattern of erasure that smelled like deliberate design. He realized someone larger than Victor had been paying for the "disappearances" of certain files for decades.
Back in the city, Mei confronted a woman she had assumed was a friendly social worker at her mother's old shelter. The woman wept and admitted she'd signed a document when Mei was a child—one that allowed a wealthy benefactor to move Mei to another town for protection during riots. The woman had been told it was temporary. She had never known the identity of the benefactor.
Mei's anger had become fuel. She started making a list of demands: the names of every person who had touched her file, the papers that authorized the transfers, and a guarantee that the child's identity would not be sold.
Adrian's detective texted with a single line: We have a witness. He'll meet at midnight at the old pier. He'll talk for cash and a clean record.
Adrian planned to go alone; he had refused security on principle. He needed to face the witness as a man, not a corporation.
Cliffhanger: At the pier, Adrian finds the witness dead—slumped against the railing, hand clutching a scrap of paper with a single name on it: Hannah Wu.