The room was cold—too cold for a digital forensics lab, Alyssa thought, though the chill she felt had nothing to do with the air conditioning. It came from the screen in front of her, where Noah clicked through the last layers of the corrupted video.

“Found something,” he said, voice tightening.

Alyssa straightened, her pulse quickening. Ethan moved to stand beside her, his expression unreadable but tense. Noah zoomed in on the metadata view—lines of code, digital signatures, timestamps.

“There’s a hidden file,” Noah explained. “Someone embedded a second data trail into the video. That’s why the file looked clean at first glance.”

Alyssa’s stomach dropped. “Hidden… by who?”

Noah...