Coraline had left The Adonis.

The Vulpes returned.

Several hours had passed since the club’s doors had closed to the public, since the last beautiful drunk had been poured into a car, since the last flashbulb had popped outside the velvet rope. Now the building sat in the after-hours quiet of the Entertainment District, its glossy façade dimmed but not lifeless. Even closed, The Adonis did not look asleep. It looked like something with its eyes half-lidded, waiting for the next admirer to mistake stillness for safety.

Vulpes watched from the roof of a nearby building, crouched low against the cooling tar and gravel.

The city around her had thinned to its late-night bones. Delivery trucks. Street sweepers. Exhaust haze. The distant grind of music from less exclusive clubs still refusing to surrender the night. But here, above The Adonis, everything felt focused and sharp. Her red dress and socialite smile were gone. In their place came armor, cowl, yellow lenses, and the cold patience of the fox.

She removed a small receiver from her belt, drew out a thin cable, and plugged it into one of the fox ears built into her mask. The device clicked softly as she thumbed the dial, tuning through static, faint bursts of radio chatter, and the low electric hiss of the city until the signal synced with one of the listening devices she had planted earlier as Coraline.

A crackle.

Then sound.

Muffled at first, then clearer.

The background noise was exactly what she expected from a club after closing. Nothing dramatic. Nothing criminal. No villainous confessions made beneath chandeliers. Just the weary machinery of nightlife cleaning itself up after the performance.

Glasses clinking into racks. Chairs scraping. A vacuum starting somewhere, then cutting off when someone swore at it. Bottles being counted. A mop bucket rolling across tile. Staff voices, less polished now that the guests had gone.

“Whoever spilled champagne in booth four should be banned from ever holding glass again.”

“That was the councillor’s nephew.”

“Then his uncle can buy him a sippy cup.”

Vulpes adjusted the dial slightly.

Another feed came alive, probably the bug beneath the bar rail.

“Did you see that woman in red?”

“Which one?”

“The one with the other one. The black dress.”

“Oh, those two. Yeah. Half the room saw them.”

“Devon saw them.”

A pause, followed by a low laugh.

“Then they’ll be back.”

Vulpes went very still for half a second, but the conversation drifted immediately into less useful waters.

“Black dress was trouble.”

“Best kind.”

“You say that because she smiled at you.”

“She did more than smile.”

“She asked if we had a drink dangerous enough to justify its price.”

“That’s flirting.”

“That’s rich-girl boredom.”

“That’s flirting when rich girls do it.”

Vulpes let out a slow breath through her nose.

Nothing useful.

Not yet.

She tuned to the second device, the one near the VIP corridor. The sound there was cleaner, quieter, more intimate.

Two staff members were talking while something metallic clicked in the background. Locking cabinets, maybe. Or restocking a service cart.

“Serenity looked annoyed tonight.”

“Serenity always looks annoyed.”

“No, I mean actually annoyed.”

“Probably because Soren had Hayworth eating out of her hand.”

“She always does. Man has three companies, two divorces, and the spine of a cooked noodle.”

“You jealous?”

“Of Soren? Please.”

Vulpes filed away the names. Serenity. Soren. Hayworth. Breadcrumbs, maybe.

For now, though, it was gossip—well-dressed, chemically perfumed, vicious little workplace gossip.

She listened anyway. People rarely said the important thing first. They warmed up to it sideways, through complaints, jokes, envy, and exhaustion.

Another frequency.

More cleanup. More chatter.

“VIP two needs the upholstery steamed.”

“Again?”

“Again.”

“What happened?”

“You don’t want to know.”

“I absolutely want to know.”

“No, you absolutely do not.”

Laughter.

Then a different voice, farther away: “Someone check the mirror hall. Devon hates fingerprints on the east wall.”

“Devon hates fingerprints on anything.”

“Devon hates anything that’s not perfect.”

More laughter.

Vulpes watched the building below, expression unreadable beneath the mask. The Adonis, stripped of music and bodies, sounded smaller than it looked. Petty. Tired. Human. Beneath all the gold light and curated desire, it still required someone to mop floors, count bottles, clean stains, and complain about management.

That almost made it more unsettling.

A temple was still a workplace after midnight.

A predator still left dishes.

She kept listening.

One hour might pass with nothing useful. Two, if necessary. She had done stakeouts in colder places, under worse conditions, for less promising leads. Leo Ruso had pointed her here. The room had felt wrong. The staff moved too well, watched too much, listened too closely. Something was buried beneath the glamour.

But for the moment, all The Adonis gave her was the after-hours murmur of a club cleaning up its sins and laughing about them before sunrise.

“Man, I wish we could crack into that shit we’re keeping for the old Italian dudes.”

Vulpes went still.

There.

She adjusted the device by a hair, narrowing the pickup to the bug near the VIP corridor. Static thinned. The voices sharpened.

“You mean the pile of acid, shrooms, and Vitamin K?” another voice answered. Male. Young. Staff, maybe security, judging by the casual contempt. “Yeah, sure. Have a real party. Then Devon finds out and breaks your jaw with one of those fancy dance kicks of his.”

“Capoeira.”

“What?”

“It’s capoeira, dumbass. Brazilian. He kicked Owen so hard last month it cracked four ribs.”

A third voice laughed from farther off. “Owen deserved it.”

“Owen always deserves it.”

Vulpes lowered herself more firmly into her crouch, every ache from the evening forgotten. The city wind moved across the rooftop, tugging faintly at her cape, but she did not shift her weight. She barely breathed.

Old Italian dudes.

Leo had been telling the truth.

Or close enough to matter.

The first man spoke again, his voice dropping as if the walls might report him. Given what she had seen of The Adonis, that was not an unreasonable fear.

“I’m just saying, what’s the point of sitting on product like that if nobody gets to enjoy it? We’ve got enough down there to make the whole city see God.”

“Or see spiders crawling out of their teeth. That batch isn’t regular party trash.”

“Yeah, no kidding. Why do you think Serenity said gloves only?”

Serenity.

Vulpes filed it.

The second voice lowered further. “It’s not ours. It’s holding stock. Devon said nobody touches it until the buyer schedule is finalized.”

“Buyer schedule,” the first one muttered. “Listen to you. You sound like a damn accountant.”

“I sound like a man who likes his jaw attached.”

There was the scrape of something being dragged across the floor. A cart, maybe. Metal wheels over tile.

The third voice chimed in again, closer now. “Besides, you think that’s for us? That stuff’s going to private rooms, special events, and whatever freaks are paying Devon to make their brains melt pretty. We get paid to move boxes and keep quiet.”

“Old Italians pay good?”

“They pay Devon good. We get not fired.”

Laughter.

Vulpes’ eyes narrowed behind the mask.

Private rooms. Special events. Buyer schedule. Holding stock.

The shape was there now, ugly and unmistakable. The Adonis was holding psychoactive product for Italian criminals, and someone inside was organized enough to be scheduling distribution.

It was logistics.

The first voice groaned. “Fine, fine. Nobody touches the magic stash.”

“Smartest thing you’ve said tonight.”

“Still think it’s a waste.”

“You want to get high, buy from the regular tray like everyone else.”

“Regular tray’s watered down.”

“Regular tray doesn’t get you murdered by a man with cheekbones.”

More laughter, then the sound of footsteps retreating.

Vulpes stayed tuned in a few seconds longer, hoping for something more concrete. A room number. A code. A delivery time. A proper name. Anything that would turn suspicion into direction.

Instead, the conversation drifted back into nonsense.

“Did you see Vanhorn tonight?”

“Would ruin my life for eye contact.”

“And Penrose?”

“Different energy. Like she’d ruin your life legally.” 

“Honestly? Hotter.”

Vulpes closed her eyes for one long second.

Useful information had apparently reached its natural end.

She opened them again and swept the other devices. Nothing but chairs scraping, bins rolling, someone complaining about glitter on the bathroom floor, and another staffer insisting that if Devon wanted white upholstery in VIP rooms then Devon could personally pay for the therapy bills of everyone who had to clean it.

No more chemicals.

No more Italians.

Not yet.

Still, she had enough to justify the next move.

The Adonis was holding something. Something dangerous. Something Devon’s people were afraid to touch. Something connected, at least loosely, to the same Italian pipeline Leo had mentioned.

Vulpes unplugged the cable from her mask and coiled it back into the receiver with slow, precise movements.

She looked down at the darkened club.

The building was still beautiful from the outside, even at this hour. Especially at this hour. Glass and steel and gold accents under city light, its glamour stripped down to silhouette. A predator pretending to be architecture.

Coraline Penrose had been invited in through the front.

The Vulpes would not be using the front door.

Vulpes launched her grappling gun.

The line shot across the gap with a soft metallic hiss, biting into a shadowed section of The Adonis’ roofline. She gave it one testing pull, then stepped off the edge of her perch and swung through the cold air between buildings. Below, the Entertainment District had thinned into the hour when glamour became litter, when the clubs still throbbed in the distance but the streets closest to dawn started to show the residue of everything night tried to hide.

She landed lightly in a recessed alcove near the roof’s edge, boots touching down without so much as a scrape. For a few seconds, she remained perfectly still.

Listening.

Watching.

The Adonis was a very different creature from above.

From the street, it was all seduction: glass, black steel, gold trim, velvet rope, controlled light. From the roof, it became what all buildings eventually became to a thief—angles, access points, blind spots, vents, cameras, locks, weak seams, and bad assumptions.

Vulpes crouched low, letting her yellow lenses adjust as she began casing the place properly.

The rooftop was cleaner than most, which told her something at once. No neglected gravel piles. No rusted maintenance junk left to rot. No obvious trash. Even up here, where almost no guest would ever look, The Adonis kept itself curated. Utility housings were hidden behind sleek black architectural screens. Ventilation units had been boxed in to preserve the building’s silhouette. The service hatch was modern, electronic, and probably alarmed three different ways. Two cameras covered the obvious approaches, both disguised as minimalist exterior fixtures. Too tasteful to be ordinary. Too neatly placed to be harmless.

She tracked their sweep patterns.

Short arcs. Slight delay between rotations. Good overlap at the roof hatch, weaker coverage near the decorative light rig above the rear façade. Someone had paid real money to make the rooftop secure, but someone else had paid even more money to make sure it stayed pretty.

That was always a mistake.

Pretty defenses had compromises.

She marked them in her HUD, then shifted toward a low parapet overlooking the service alley. Below, a rear door led into the staff areas. A camera watched the door. Another watched the dumpster lane. A third was angled high enough to catch anyone climbing from below, but not someone moving laterally from the adjoining roofline.

Useful.

She brought up the passive tracker she had left on the service tray. Its signal pulsed from somewhere inside the building, lower than the main floor. Basement or sublevel. Good. The tray had gone somewhere important after all.

She was about to start mapping a possible descent when one of her listening devices crackled back to life.

At first it was background noise again. A clatter. A laugh. Someone complaining about cleanup. Then a voice drifted through, casual and stupid enough to be useful.

“Way I hear it, we’re some kind of middleman. That shit’s for those lunatics in that new gang. What’re they called again? The Trippy Terrors?”

Vulpes paused.

Every nerve in her body sharpened.

She adjusted the receiver on her belt, narrowing the signal and feeding it directly into her mask. Static thinned. The voices clarified.

The next voice was Devon’s.

Calm. Controlled. Irritated in the way of a man forced to explain simple things to people he considered decorative mistakes.

“Tie-Dyed Technicolor Terrors,” he corrected. “And I can promise you, it is better that we play middleman. We stay useful to the Rusos, and we get on the good side of the Terrors. Two birds with one stone—provided your pea brains can comprehend something that complex.”

Vulpes went still.

The Tie-Dyed Technicolor Terrors.

She knew the name. Not as a fully mapped organization, but enough: a new and unstable gang orbiting Psychedelic’s growing influence. 

Another male voice laughed.

“Yeah, some of those girls in the Terrors are kinda hot for dirty hippies.”

Devon made a small scoffing sound, his tone turning slightly playful in its mockery.

“They are also so high they would sleep with anything that has a pulse, so you might actually have a chance, Gordon.”

There were a few chuckles.

Vulpes’ jaw tightened behind the mask.

Charming.

Another voice spoke up, less amused than the rest. “I don’t know, boss. The Terrors are fucking crazy even without the drugs. They say their boss is that crazy bitch who took a roller rink hostage a few months back. What’s her name? Psycho-Della?”

Devon sighed with theatrical exhaustion.

“Psychedelic. And yes, she is one crazy bitch. But the drugs she cooks are the best in Toronto.”

The name landed like a small blade under Vulpes’ ribs.

Psychedelic.

Lyra Sinclair.

Still out there. Still moving. Still painting the city in chemicals, panic, and impossible logic.

Vulpes kept breathing slowly.

She had expected the trail might bend this way. Hearing it confirmed did not make it easier.

“If she’s so good at cooking product,” Gordon asked, “why does she need this stash?”

There was a pause.

Not long, but thoughtful.

Vulpes imagined Devon considering the question, deciding how much answer his people deserved.

“No idea,” he said at last. “I’m not a chemist. What I care about is the cut we are getting and the reputation boost this gives us with the Ruso Syndicate and the Tie-Dyes.”

“The Tie-Dyes?” someone repeated.

“I am not saying that entire ridiculous name every time.”

More laughter.

Vulpes did not laugh.

So.

Leo had told the truth.

The Adonis was holding or moving product for the Rusos. Devon was acting as an intermediary. And the end buyer, at least for this shipment, was tied to Psychedelic’s people.

Close enough that the trail had teeth.

She stayed crouched in the shadowed alcove, listening as the conversation moved into other things: complaints about transport, someone asking whether the stash had to stay downstairs, Devon snapping that nobody was to touch it, another staffer joking and then going very quiet when Devon did not laugh.

Vulpes let the feed continue, but her mind had already begun assembling the new map.

Rusos. Adonis. Tie-Dyed Technicolor Terrors. Psychedelic.

A chain, not a straight line.

Below her, The Adonis sat beautiful and silent. 

The fox had found the scent.

Now she needed to get inside.

Vulpes looked back over the entry points she had already scouted and considered them with the cold patience of a thief casing a house worth robbing.

The obvious roof hatch was too obvious. Sleek, electronic, and probably wired to every silent alarm the club owned. The service door below would be watched, not just by cameras but by men who were paid to remember faces and break patterns. The ventilation housings were hidden behind decorative screens—pretty enough to please the architect, functional enough to betray the building’s secrets if she could get close. The rear façade had a narrow maintenance ledge, mostly concealed in shadow. The kind of thing designers included for access and then forgot anyone agile enough might use.

What she needed was not Devon Monroe.

Not tonight.

What she needed was the stash.

Find where they were holding the drugs. Confirm what was in them if she could. Tag them if she could not. Then follow the chain when it moved.

Part of her considered exposing The Adonis outright. It would have been satisfying. Devon Monroe, beautiful king of his mirrored little kingdom, dragged into daylight with his name next to drugs, mob ties, and whatever else his velvet-lined playground had been hiding. She could almost picture the headlines.

But satisfaction was not strategy.

She had seen who came through those doors last night: rich people, famous people, politicians’ children, corporate sharks, socialites, influencers, financiers, men and women with too much money and too much to lose.

Power had wrapped itself around The Adonis like armor.

Drug charges could evaporate.

Witnesses could forget.

Evidence could be mishandled.

Stories could be spun until Devon looked like a victim of scandal instead of a supplier of rot.

Coraline Penrose knew too much about the legal system to mistake exposure for justice.

No. If she struck at The Adonis now without understanding the full structure, she might only spook everyone involved. Devon would clean house, the Rusos would cut their losses, and the Tie-Dyed Technicolor Terrors would vanish back into whatever neon sewer Psychedelic had painted for them.

Psychedelic.

That was the real priority.

The Adonis was an intermediary. Devon was a gatekeeper. The Rusos were movers. But Psychedelic was the fire at the end of the fuse. If these drugs were going to her people, Vulpes could use the shipment to track the Terrors back to a lab, a stash site, a meeting point—maybe even to the woman herself.

That was the play.

Get inside. Find the stash. Tag it. Maybe take a sample. Leave no trace.

Let the shipment move.

Then follow the colors back to their painter.

She reached for her line again, testing the wind, the angles, the camera sweep, the dark slice of rooftop between two pools of light.

The Adonis thought it was beautiful.

Vulpes was far more interested in where it was vulnerable.

Vulpes turned toward a nearby vent.

Classic for a reason, she mused.

The decorative screen around the ventilation housing had been built to hide ugly machinery from anyone who might look down from a more expensive rooftop, but it had also created a shadow pocket almost perfect for her purposes. She crossed to it low and silent, then drew a compact tool roll from her belt. The fasteners were modern, flush-set, and designed to discourage casual tampering. They were not designed to discourage someone who had learned burglary from the Silver Fox.

She worked slowly enough to be silent and quickly enough to be gone before the next camera sweep. One screw. Then another. A gentle pressure check to make sure the panel would not shift suddenly. A sliver of adhesive gel at the edge to keep metal from scraping metal. Then the vent cover came free in her hands with barely a whisper.

She set it aside and paused.

No assumptions.

From a narrow bottle on her belt, she sprayed a thin mist into the opening. It drifted through the air in a fine silver veil, catching briefly against nothing. No invisible laser tripwires. No motion grid. No clever little beams waiting to punish the obvious entry point.

Either Devon’s security trusted the rooftop cameras and hatch system too much, or the building’s original ductwork was old enough and awkward enough that no one had bothered threading it with anything more delicate.

Good.

She slipped inside feet first, folding herself into the duct with practiced control. It was a tight fit, but not impossible. The metal was cool beneath her gloves, and the faint vibration of the building’s systems hummed through her knees and elbows as she pulled the vent cover loosely back into place behind her. Not fully secured. Just enough to look undisturbed to a passing glance.

Then she began to crawl.

The air in the ducts carried stale perfume, cold metal, dust, and the lingering ghost of alcohol evaporating somewhere below. Every few feet, she paused to listen. The Adonis had gone quieter, but the quiet was layered. Pipes. Fans. Distant footsteps. Elevators settling. A low thump from some sound system still running on standby. Voices drifting up through grates in fragments.

She passed over one corridor and looked down through a vent slat.

A cleaner in black gloves pushed a cart past a mirrored wall, earbuds in, lips moving to a song Vulpes could not hear. A camera watched the hallway from a recessed corner, its housing disguised as a small, elegant wall fixture. Tasteful, naturally. Everything here had to be tasteful, even the surveillance.

She kept moving.

Another grate. Two security men below, jackets off now, ties loosened, both still irritatingly handsome. One was checking a tablet, the other locking a side door. Their weapons were not visible, which meant they were either very confident or very well concealed.

Another turn.

She found a junction where three ducts met and paused to orient herself against the map she had built from the rooftop and her earlier visit as Coraline. Main floor above and behind. VIP corridor ahead. Service section below. The passive tracker signal pulsed faintly through her HUD, lower and farther inward.

She followed it.

The duct narrowed, forcing her to slow. Her shoulder brushed the metal once with a faint scrape, and she froze, counting heartbeats.

No shout.

No movement toward her.

She exhaled silently and continued.

Below, through another vent, she caught a glimpse of staff lockers and a small break area. Someone had left a half-eaten sandwich on a table beside a fashion magazine. Two employees argued quietly about whether Devon had noticed a scratched mirror panel. One said yes. The other said if Devon had noticed, they would already be dead socially, professionally, or possibly literally.

Vulpes filed that away.

Not evidence.

Atmosphere.

Atmosphere mattered.

She crawled past them and deeper into the building.

The next chamber below was different. Not a lounge. Not a staff corridor. Storage. Her lenses caught stacked cases, reinforced shelving, liquor crates, folded linens, sealed boxes, a few refrigerated cabinets humming against the far wall. More importantly, there were men inside.

Three of them.

Not cleaners. Not bartenders.

Security or handlers, dressed down after hours but moving with the heavier awareness of people trusted near something valuable. One shut a cabinet. Another checked a clipboard. The third stood by the door, scrolling through his phone with a bored expression and a shoulder holster just visible when his jacket shifted.

Vulpes went still above the grate.

The passive tracker signal was close now.

Very close.

One of the men spoke. “That all of it?”

“Yeah. Monroe said nothing moves until tomorrow unless Serenity says otherwise.”

“Good. I’m done babysitting boxes.”

“You say that like the boxes don’t pay better than you do.”

“Boxes don’t talk back either.”

The men laughed, then began filing out. One killed most of the lights, leaving only a low utility glow. The man with the clipboard locked the door behind them with a keypad code Vulpes caught through the angle of his shoulder and the reflection in a metal shelving unit.

Seven. Three. Nine. One. Star.

Useful.

She waited.

Footsteps faded.

One minute.

Two.

Three.

Only then did she remove the vent grate. This one was easier than the rooftop cover, held by two internal latches and years of being opened by maintenance workers who did not want to fight the building. She lowered it carefully to the storage room floor, then slipped down after it, landing in a crouch between two stacks of liquor cases.

The storage room smelled of cardboard, chilled air, expensive alcohol, cleaning chemicals, and something faintly sharper beneath it all.

She straightened slowly.

Cases and crates filled the room in organized rows. Some were clearly legitimate: champagne, imported gin, premium vodka, garnish supplies, linens, glassware. Others were less obvious. Unmarked black cases. White insulated shipping containers. Two sealed plastic bins with no commercial branding. A stack of medium crates marked only with inventory codes and colored tape.

She had no idea if anyone would be back in five minutes or fifty.

That meant she had to work fast without looking like she had worked at all.

Vulpes did not start by opening boxes.

Professionals read the room first. 

She swept her gaze across the storage area, letting the contents organize themselves into patterns. The legitimate stock was easy enough to understand. Liquor by brand and value. Glassware near the bar carts. Linens stacked according to service rotation. Cleaning supplies kept where staff could reach them quickly. Decorative event pieces boxed and labeled with the kind of dull precision that belonged to inventory managers and bored assistants.

Then there were the things that did not belong.

Not because they looked suspicious. Because they were being treated carefully enough to be suspicious.

A stack of matte-black catering cases sat near the service elevator, close enough to move quickly but not so close they would be the first thing seen from the door. Their labels were boring, almost aggressively so: Private Event Glassware. The sort of bland designation that discouraged interest by sounding like someone else’s problem.

But glassware was rarely stored like that.

Glassware clinked. It needed separators, foam sleeves, cardboard dividers, something to keep expensive crystal from becoming glitter in transit. These cases sat too dead, too dense, with no telltale shift of fragile contents when she nudged one lightly with her boot.

More important, they were cleaner than the stock around them.

Not polished. Not brand-new. Just handled. The dust around them had been disturbed recently, but not carelessly. Faint smears marked the sides where gloved hands had gripped the edges. No bare fingerprints that her lenses could catch. No casual drag marks either. Whoever had moved these lifted them properly, spaced them evenly, and left them where a cart could take them straight to the elevator.

Gloves only.

Serenity had said that, according to the staff.

Coraline’s eyes moved to a shelf nearby. A box of nitrile gloves sat half-open behind a stack of napkin sleeves. Beside it, a roll of tamper-evident tape and several unused desiccant packs.

There.

She crouched beside the first case and checked the seal.

Clean. Fresh. Too careful for club glassware.

She opened it just enough to look inside.

Actual glassware.

Of course.

Expensive, custom-etched, packed neatly. Not the stash. But still interesting enough that she photographed the packing label and the shell company name attached to it before closing it exactly as she had found it.

The second case held small sealed bottles—premium imported bitters, rare syrups, luxury cocktail nonsense. Legal, probably. Overpriced, certainly. She photographed that too. Some of the import labels looked strange enough to be worth John’s time later.

The third case gave her something nastier: sealed packets of unidentified pills tucked beneath legitimate bar stock, not the chemical cache she was hunting but enough to confirm the club’s private menu included more than champagne and vanity. She snapped quick photos, logged the position, and left it untouched. She did not need small fish tonight.

The fourth case was different before she even opened it.

It had a temperature strip on the inside edge of the lid.

That made no sense for glassware.

She studied it for a moment, then checked the seams. Vacuum-sealed inner packaging. Foam inserts. Cold-chain insulation. Desiccants tucked into every spare corner. Someone had known what they were doing. This was not a rave idiot’s stash in plastic baggies. This was controlled storage: dry, cool, organized, protected from light, moisture, heat, and careless hands.

LSD degraded under heat and light. Psilocybin mushrooms needed to stay dry. Ketamine, especially in medical-grade vials or crystalline form, needed clean packing and careful handling if one intended to keep it viable and valuable.

Whoever had packed this had not been sloppy.

That made it worse.

Vulpes eased the lid open.

Inside, the case was packed in layers.

Vacuum-sealed sleeves of blotter paper sat in lightproof envelopes, each one marked only by tiny coded stickers. Thick mylar bags held dried mushrooms, desiccant packs pressed alongside them to keep moisture from ruining the product. Foam-lined compartments housed small medical vials and sealed packets of crystalline powder, each nestled as carefully as jewelry. There were no street names, no cartoon labels, no flashy nonsense.

Just quantity, care, and profit.

Vulpes grimaced.

The street value had to be obscene.

Not just because of the volume, but because of what this could become in the right—or wrong—hands. LSD in that quantity could flood half the city’s nightlife. The mushrooms were premium, dried and stored with care. The ketamine alone would be worth enough to make certain men start smiling in ways that ended with bodies in the lake.

No wonder the Italians were happy to move it.

No wonder Monroe was happy to play middleman.

And no wonder Psychedelic’s people wanted it.

This was not simply a party stash. This was raw material for escalation. In the hands of the Tie-Dyed Technicolor Terrors, it could become anything: rave supply, control mechanism, experimental batch, aerosolized nightmare, some new chemical sermon from the woman who thought reality was a coloring book.

Vulpes fought down the old guilt that rose at the thought of Lyra Sinclair.

No time.

She pulled a microcamera from her belt and took photographs of every layer: packaging, codes, positioning, the temperature strip, the desiccants, the foam compartments, the labels that were not labels. Then she drew out a tiny sample kit. Nothing dramatic. A few fibers from one mushroom stem. A microscopic scraping from the edge of a powder packet’s exterior residue. A photo of the blotter code rather than removing the sheet. Enough for John to analyze. Not enough to be noticed.

Then came the tracker.

She selected a passive wafer beacon, no larger than a thumbnail, matte black and nearly flat. Active signals were too easy to detect if someone swept properly. This one would sleep unless pinged from close range, then answer in a whisper. She slid it beneath the inner foam lip of the case, where the adhesive would bond to the structural seam rather than the removable packaging.

If they moved the case, she could follow.

If they split the contents before moving it, she still had photos and samples.

If they discovered the tracker, she had learned something about their security discipline.

She closed the case carefully, smoothing the seal back into place and aligning it exactly as she had found it.

Then she stood and looked over the other cases.

One stash found.

Not the whole story.

But enough.

The fox had her scent now.

The storage-room door opened.

Three men entered with the bored confidence of people expecting everything to be exactly where they had left it. One carried a clipboard. Another had a phone in hand, thumb still scrolling. The third paused just inside the room and looked around with the heavy-lidded suspicion of someone who had been told to guard valuable things but not paid enough to enjoy it.

The room was quiet.

Empty.

Untouched.

Or so it seemed.

The cases still sat exactly where they belonged. The seal on the fourth crate looked undisturbed. The gloves, tape, and desiccant packs remained where staff had left them. No drawers hung open. No boxes had shifted. No obvious sign of intrusion spoiled the room’s carefully managed order.

Above them, the vent cover had been slid silently back into place.

The Vulpes was already gone.

She moved through the ductwork in reverse, slow where the metal threatened to creak, fast where the fans drowned out any sound. The samples were secured. The photographs were stored. The tracker was asleep inside the case, waiting to whisper back when called. She did not look back. A clean exit was part of the work. A thief who admired her own handiwork too long eventually became a cautionary tale.

Behind her, one of the men muttered, “Everything still here?”

Another answered, “Yeah. What, you think the stash sprouted legs?”

A third snorted. “With this batch? Wouldn’t surprise me.”

Their laughter followed her faintly through the vents, distorted by distance and metal.

Vulpes kept crawling.

She reached the rooftop access point, eased the vent cover open, and slipped back into the cold night air. The city greeted her with wind, distant sirens, and the grey-black edge of approaching dawn. She replaced the exterior cover with meticulous care, tightened the fasteners, and erased the last small signs of her presence.

Only then did she let herself breathe fully.

Below her, The Adonis remained beautiful and unaware.

The case was tagged. The trail was live.

She was one step closer to finding out what Psychedelic wanted with that much product. One step closer to the Tie-Dyed Technicolor Terrors. One step closer to finishing what she had started months ago when Lyra Sinclair’s own creation had turned its teeth back on her.

The guilt still lived there, tucked under her ribs.

It probably always would.

She could tell herself the decision had been right. That lives had been at stake. That Lyra had built the weapon, chosen the line, pulled the trigger on her own downfall. All of that was true.

It just wasn’t enough to make the guilt quiet.

Vulpes crossed the roof in a low, swift run and fired her grappling line toward the neighboring building. The hook caught. She tugged once, then launched herself into the open air.

For a moment she hung above the sleeping street, cape snapping behind her, Toronto spread beneath her in glass, asphalt, and secrets.

The fox had gone into the predator’s den.

Now she would follow the colors home.