The silence in Suite 402 wasn't peaceful; it was a tactical pause.
Lu Sheng had finished the last stitch. He sat on the edge of the bed, a clean hotel robe hanging open over his bandaged ribs. He looked less like a dying man and more like a weapon being recalibrated. He didn't look at the door where Director Song had stood. He looked at me.
"Thirty days," he said. The rasp was mostly gone. "You didn't buy time, Lin Xiao. You bought a spotlight."
"I bought us a perimeter," I said, not looking up from the screen. "The Ministry is currently scrubbing the street-level feeds. Anyone from the Qin Group within three blocks is being detained on unrelated charges. We're in the only safe zone in the city."
"Safe zones are for people who intend to surrender." Lu Sheng stood up. He moved slow, but his balance was back. He walked to the desk, standing just far enough away to remain a threat. "The countdown on your phone. It's a bluff."
I stopped typing. I didn't turn around. "Is it?"
"A heartbeat script requires a dedicated uplink. You've been on the Hyatt's guest Wi-Fi for twenty minutes. If that money was actually going to dump at midnight, the Ministry's signal jammers would have tripped the fail-safe the moment they parked outside."
I turned the chair around. "You're smarter than you look, Lu Sheng."
"And you're more reckless than I thought." He leaned down, his palms flat on the mahogany desk, boxing me in. "The money isn't in a dead-drop. You froze the accounts before we even left the bunker."
"I did," I admitted. I didn't shrink back. "But I didn't do it for the Ministry. I did it to stop the Qin Group from tracing the flow. If I hadn't locked the ledger, they would have followed the hops back to the bunker in minutes."
Lu Sheng's eyes narrowed. "If the Ministry finds out the money is already stationary, they don't need a consultant. They just need your biometric key. They'll take your thumb and leave your body in the bathtub."
"They won't find out."
"Why?"
"Because the freeze is tied to a specific hardware ID," I said. I reached into the pocket of my hoodie and pulled out a small, cracked USB drive the one I'd recovered from his armory. "I didn't just lock the money. I encrypted the keys using the surveillance files I found in your hidden directory."
Lu Sheng went still. The air in the room turned lethal.
"The woman in the photos," I said, my voice flat. "The keys to $1.2 billion are now wrapped in her facial recognition data. If the Ministry tries to brute-force the accounts, they'll see her face. They'll find her apartment. They'll realize who she is to you."
The shift was instantaneous. Lu Sheng didn't reach for a gun. He reached for my throat, stopping an inch away, his fingers trembling with suppressed violence.
"You used her as a shield," he hissed.
"I used her as leverage," I corrected. "The Ministry wants the money. You want her safe. I'm the only one who can keep those two things from colliding. You aren't my protector anymore, Lu Sheng. You're my insurance policy. If I die, or if the Ministry takes me, the encryption breaks, and the State finds her."
He stared at me, his breathing heavy and rhythmic. He wasn't looking at a student. He was looking at the person who had just taken his only vulnerability and turned it into a tripwire.
He didn't pull away. He didn't apologize.
"You're not a ghost, Lin Xiao," he whispered, a dark, dangerous respect finally surfacing. "You're a parasite."
"Then you'd better make sure the host stays alive," I said.
I turned back to the monitor. The predatory shift was complete. We weren't hiding from the world. We were holding it hostage, and for the first time, Lu Sheng knew exactly who was holding the leash.