They returned to the penthouse past midnight to find it had already been searched—carefully, professionally, nothing obviously disturbed to the untrained eye, but Ezra clocked the wrongness within seconds of walking through the door.

“They were here,” he said quietly, scanning the study with the same trained precision he’d once used to catalogue Lucien’s habits from a rooftop weeks earlier. “Recently. Whoever did this knew exactly what they were looking for and knew better than to take anything obvious.”

He moved through the rest of the apartment with the same careful eye, checking the bedroom, the kitchen drawers, finding nothing overtly disturbed but registering, in a dozen small details only...