The bitter taste of failure was worse than the taste of the cold coffee Julian was nursing. It had been three days since the gala. Three days of nerve-shredding silence.
He sat in Celeste Vaughn's cluttered apartment, the "war room" feeling more like a wake. The adrenaline from their reckless gambit had long since faded, leaving behind a grim, anxious quiet. Their plan had failed. Not with a bang, but with a quiet, professional dismantling that was somehow more terrifying.
"He never took the bait," Julian said, staring at the corkboard where a photo of Nico Ren now had a red circle around it. "Nico Ren. He saw the jammer and knew it was a diversion. He never moved. He just... watched."
"And Liam Feng?" Celeste asked, her fingers paused over her keyboard.
"Ren saw him, too," Julian admitted, the words grating. "He knows Liam was the accomplice. He played us all. He let us think we were being clever while he was just gathering intel on his new threats."
Celeste leaned back, rubbing her tired eyes. "So, we didn't just fail to get anything on Qian. We exposed our key inside source and put a target on my back and yours."
The full weight of their miscalculation settled in the room. They had kicked the hornet's nest, and now the hornets knew their names and faces. Every move they made from now on would be under scrutiny. They had lost the element of surprise.
"Marco is seeing it, too," Celeste added, gesturing to her laptop. "He's been trying to find the digital trail from Qian's panic-run to the data center. Nothing. It's like a black hole. The moment Qian logged in, Nico Ren's security team must have initiated a complete system lockdown. They didn't just patch the hole; they rebuilt the entire wall. We're digitally blind again."
Frustration, sharp and acidic, rose in Julian's throat. He stood up, pacing the small space like a caged animal. "So, what's our next move? We can't get close to Qian now. We can't get near their data. And Liam is compromised. He's useless to us if Ren is watching his every move."
He was a cop with his hands tied, stripped of his official tools and now outmaneuvered in the world of shadows.
"We stop thinking like cops trying to build a case," Celeste said, her voice quiet but intense. Her eyes had that familiar, predatory gleam again. Failure hadn't defeated her; it had focused her. "And we start thinking like hunters. What does a hunter do when the prey goes to ground?"
"You find a new way to flush them out," Julian answered.
"Exactly," she said, turning her laptop towards him. "I've been going back over my old Liana Meng files. Not the Sterling Dynamics stuff. The personal stuff. Her life. Who were her friends? Who were her enemies outside the project?"
On the screen was a collection of old society photos from the early 2010s. Liana Meng at galas, at charity events, at opera openings. She was always poised, always beautiful. And in several of the photos, she was standing next to the same woman. A sharp, intelligent-looking woman with a familiar face.
Julian's breath caught. "Dr. Valeria Wu."
"The very same," Celeste confirmed. "Before they were researcher and subject, they were colleagues. Maybe even friends. They attended the same events, ran in the same artistic and scientific circles in London and Geneva."
"This changes things," Julian murmured. "Their relationship wasn't just professional. It was personal."
"And personal relationships are messy," Celeste said, a grim smile touching her lips. "They leave behind emotional residue. Jealousy. Rivalry. Guilt. Valeria Wu isn't just a cog in a machine. She was Liana's peer. And she stood by and watched—or helped—her friend get destroyed by that machine. That leaves a scar."
"You think we can use that? Get to her?"
"No," Celeste said, shaking her head. "She's buried too deep inside Sterling's R&D fortress. But we don't have to get to her. We just have to get a message to her. A message that reopens that old wound."
Her new plan was even more audacious than the last one. She wanted to use her journalistic credentials, what was left of them, to publish an article on an obscure but respected international arts blog.
"The article will be titled, 'The Swan's Shadow: The Unsolved Questions of Liana Meng's Final Year'," Celeste explained, her eyes alight with strategic fire. "It won't mention Project Phoenix or Sterling Dynamics. It will be framed as a retrospective, a tribute. But it will be filled with carefully chosen questions. It will mention Liana's 'intense final research collaboration'. It will talk about her 'struggles with a demanding, secretive patron'. And it will name her 'close friend and scientific confidante, Dr. Valeria Wu'."
"You're going to put her name out there," Julian said, understanding dawning. "Publicly."
"Exactly. It's a psychological hand grenade. To the world, it's a tribute piece. To the members of Project Phoenix, it's a threat. It tells them that someone on the outside is looking into the Liana Meng case again. It tells them the secret isn't safe. And to Dr. Wu... it will be a ghost story. Her name, linked publicly to her 'friend's' death. It will dredge up whatever guilt or fear she has buried for the last decade."
"Seraphina and Kian will see it as a direct attack," Julian warned. "The blowback will be immense."
"Let it be," Celeste said, her voice hard as flint. "We can't win by staying in the shadows anymore. They know we're here. It's time to let them know we're not afraid. We're going to make these people so paranoid, so busy looking over their shoulders and questioning each other, that they start making mistakes. We're going to turn their fortress of secrets into a house of mirrors."
Julian looked at her, at the fierce, unwavering determination in her eyes. She was right. Their old strategy was dead. It was time to go on the offensive. It was time to stop chasing ghosts and start creating them.
"When can you have the article ready?" he asked.
Celeste's smile was thin and sharp. "It's already written. I've been waiting for a reason to publish it for five years."