Julian had pulled the connection mapping three times. Between the nurses on duty that night and Sebastian. Between the nurses and Kalian. Had gone backward through employment records and financial histories, and the kind of investigation that required the resources he had been quietly deploying for days now.
Nothing.
No thread. No payment. No communication appeared anywhere in the architecture of what Sebastian and Kalian had built together.
Which was where it became genuinely complicated.
Because Julian understood how these things worked. He had spent enough years in rooms where the machinery of influence operated to know that the absence of a visible connection did not mean the absence of a connection.
It meant the connection was buried deeper. Was routed through something he hadn't found yet. Was sitting in a layer beneath the layer he was currently excavating.
But the footage was so clean.
