8 PM.
The address was a building in Century City. Glass and steel. No sign. Just a lobby with a single guard at the desk.
I gave the code. 1417.
The guard nodded. Swiped a card. Pointed to the elevator.
"Thirty-second floor. Someone will meet you."
The elevator was fast. Silent. Doors opened onto a hallway. One door. Black. No label.
It opened before I knocked.
Julian stood there. No suit now. Dark sweater. Jeans. Looked younger.
"Come in."
His office was huge. Windows on three sides. City lights below. A desk with three monitors. A couch. A coffee table with laptops and cables.
"No assistants?" I said.
"Sent them home. Told them I had a date."
"That's one word for it."
He almost smiled.
I walked to the desk. Looked at the monitors. Security dashboards. Network maps. Encryption protocols.
"This is your live system?"
"Mirror. Isolated from the main network. You can't break anything from here."
I sat down. Started working.
He watched for a while. Then went to the couch. Opened his own laptop.
Forty-eight hours. I had forty-eight hours.
I started with the brand partnership portal. That was her original access point. The system that let influencers share links, track clicks, collect commissions.
It was clean. Too clean.
I moved to the employee network. Her current access. Head of Strategic Partnerships. That meant she had credentials for the partner database. The user analytics platform. The API keys.
Those logs showed nothing unusual. Normal queries. Normal data pulls. Normal times.
I checked her login history. Also clean.
"She's good," I said.
Julian looked up. "Meaning?"
"Meaning she's not doing it from her work account. She's not doing it during work hours. She's not doing it from her work devices."
"Then how?"
I kept digging. Switched to the API access logs. Looked for unusual patterns. Data requests that didn't match typical usage. Times that didn't line up with business hours.
Found something.
A series of API calls from an IP address that resolved to a coffee shop in West Hollywood. Every Tuesday and Thursday. 9 AM to 10 AM. Small data pulls. Nothing that would trigger alerts.
I checked the dates. Eighteen months. Consistent. Reliable.
"Tuesday and Thursday," I said. "She goes to a coffee shop. Uses their wifi. Pulls data through a backdoor account."
"A backdoor account she created?"
"Or someone else created for her. Let me trace the credentials."
I followed the API calls back to the authentication source. Found the user account. It was a generic service account. Created three years ago. Used for system maintenance. Should have been disabled.
It wasn't.
The last login was yesterday. From that same coffee shop IP.
"She's using a service account," I said. "One that was supposed to be deactivated. Whoever set it up gave her the credentials."
"Who set it up?"
I checked the creation log. The account was created by someone in IT. Three years ago. The employee had left the company eighteen months ago. Right when Sloane started selling data.
"Your former IT director," I said. "He left eighteen months ago. Created this account before he left. Probably handed her the keys on his way out."
Julian stood up. Walked over. Looked at the screen.
"That's David Chen. He was with us for five years. Good guy. Left for a startup."
"Or left because Sloane paid him."
He didn't answer. Just stared at the screen.
I kept digging. Found the data destination. An FTP server in a cloud account. Anonymous registration. But the payment method was a credit card. A prepaid one. Purchased at a CVS in West Hollywood.
Date of purchase: eighteen months ago. Two days before the first data transfer.
I pulled the store location. Checked the street view. It was two blocks from Sloane's apartment.
"She bought the card at CVS," I said. "Two blocks from her place. Eighteen months ago."
"You can't prove that was her."
"No. But I can prove the data went to a buyer. Your competitor."
I pulled up the payment confirmations from Sloane's phone. The offshore account. The deposits. Cross-referenced the dates with the data transfers.
Match. Every time.
"She's been selling in batches," I said. "Every two weeks. Small enough to avoid detection. Large enough to matter. Eighteen months of this. She's made—" I calculated. "About two million dollars."
Julian went quiet.
I kept working. Mapped the entire flow. The service account. The coffee shop IP. The FTP server. The offshore payments. The buyer. All of it.
Forty-eight hours became thirty-six. Became twenty-four. I didn't sleep. Julian brought coffee. Then more coffee. Then sandwiches I didn't taste.
At hour thirty-two, I found the smoking gun.
A file on the FTP server. Not data. A document. PDF. Titled "Croft Security - Internal Vulnerabilities - Chen."
David Chen's farewell gift. A complete map of every weakness in Julian's system. The ones he'd patched. The ones he hadn't. The ones only the IT director would know.
Sloane had been using this document for eighteen months. Selling data through the holes Chen identified.
I turned to Julian.
"She didn't just steal data. She had a blueprint. Chen gave it to her. She's been exploiting it since the day he left."
Julian's face was stone.
"Can you prove she knew about this document?"
"She accessed it. From her personal phone. Three times. The first time was the day Chen left. The second was a week later. The third was yesterday."
I pulled up the access logs from her phone. The ones I'd retrieved when I first took it. The PDF was in her downloads folder. Opened. Read. Shared.
She'd shared it.
To David Chen's personal email.
"Why would she share it back to him?" I asked. Then answered myself. "Insurance. He gives her the blueprint. She shares it back to him. Now they're both compromised. Both have something on each other."
Julian sat down slowly. Looked at the screen.
"She's been playing me for eighteen months."
"Longer. She got the job because your mother begged. But she'd already been stealing for three months by then."
He rubbed his face. For the first time, he looked tired.
"What do you need to finish?"
"Twelve more hours. I want to trace the money. The offshore account. The payments. If I can link them directly to her—not just the phone, but bank records, transaction IDs—she's done."
"Do it."
I did.
Twelve hours became fourteen. Became sixteen. I found the bank. The Caymans. The account number. The signatory. Sloane Parrish. With a matching signature from her passport.
I found the transaction records. Deposits from a shell company. The shell company traced back to Julian's competitor. The CEO's signature on the incorporation documents.
I found emails. Stored on a backup server the competitor didn't know existed. Emails between Sloane and the CEO. Discussing pricing. Data types. Delivery schedules.
All of it.
At hour forty-eight, I turned to Julian.
"It's done."
He looked at the screens. All of them. The map. The money. The emails. The proof.
"You're good," he said.
"I'm trained."
"No. You're good. Most people would have found the data. You found the story. The connections. The people."
I didn't say anything.
He stood up. Walked to the window. Looked out at the city.
"She's my sister. Half-sister. But still. My mother will never forgive me."
"She stole from you. She sold your users. She laughed at my death."
"I know."
He turned around.
"What do you want me to do?"
"The public narrative first. She's still playing victim. Thirty million views on that crying video. We need to flip it."
"How?"
"Drop the data. Not all of it. Just enough. The offshore account. The payments. The emails with the CEO. Let the internet do the rest."
"And your husband?"
"Dorian's irrelevant. He's a prop. She used him. He used her. They deserve each other. But she's the one with the platform. The followers. The PR team. She's the one who needs to fall."
Julian nodded slowly.
"I can do that. But it has to come from outside. Not from me. If it's traced back to Croft Security, it looks like corporate retaliation."
"It won't be traced."
"How?"
I pulled out Sloane's personal phone. The one I'd taken from the hotel.
"I have her phone. Her email. Her social media drafts. Everything. We release it from anonymous accounts. Burner emails. VPNs. The data speaks for itself."
"You've thought about this."
"I've had time. Forty-eight hours of it."
He looked at me for a long moment.
"Okay. Let's do it."