Chapter 3
I quickly shut the lid of my modded liquid-cooled rig and kicked it under the bed. I popped the lid off a Cup Noodles on the desk, crushed a few cold pills, and dusted the powder onto my collar. Finally, I set a beat-up laptop with a shattered screen on the desk, its display glaring with aggressive red pop-ups from predatory payday loan collectors and job rejection emails.
Only then did I throw on my pilled, worn-out flannel robe and drag my feet to the door, affecting a weak, unsteady gait.
"Harrison..." My voice was raspy, my eyes darting away like a frightened mouse.
Harrison frowned as he stepped over the threshold. His bespoke Italian Oxfords made a disgusted, sticky sound against the grimy linoleum floor. He glanced around, his gaze finally landing on my pale, haggard face and the Cup Noodles reeking of cheap artificial flavoring.
"The access logs for Vance Holdings' core codebase flagged a pivot IP, and it traced back to an old computer you used to use." He stared dead into my eyes, his tone dripping with undisguised scrutiny. "Sloane, you better give me a damn good explanation."
I froze, then let my eyes well up with tears. I gripped the hem of my robe so hard my knuckles turned white. "I can't even afford next month's rent. I'm surviving on clearance-aisle groceries. Where the hell would I get the money to buy elite residential proxies? Harrison, are you really trying to force me to sign that postnup waiving my share of the marital estate by throwing this kind of mud at me?"
I spun around and shoved the cracked laptop screen right into his face.
"Look closely! My FICO score is 300. I can't even unlock a Citi Bike! How the hell am I supposed to hack Vance Holdings' firewall?!"
The eerie blue light from the screen washed over my face, reflecting the despair and breakdown in my eyes. Those dense, aggressive collection texts were like resounding slaps, beating down Harrison's suspicion.
His eyes lingered on the glaring red pop-ups for three seconds. The doubt in his eyes finally dissipated, replaced by a condescending sneer.
"Right. Trash is always trash." He scoffed, pulling a few crisp Benjamins from his wallet and tossing them onto the desk. "Buy some real medicine. After the NASDAQ IPO bell-ringing tomorrow, sign the papers. The Vances won't leave you out in the cold."
Just then, the phone in his pocket started vibrating frantically.
Harrison answered it, and his impatient expression instantly froze at the very first words he heard.
"What did you just say?! The foundational training data for the Nexus AI model is locked?!"
His voice spiked, veins bulging on his neck like a rabid beast. "The roadshow is in five hours! Without the core data, our valuation gets slashed in half! Investigate! Seal every computer in the tech department and find the mole!"
The CTO on the other end was clearly trying to explain something, but Harrison cut him off brutally. "I don't give a shit about ransomware! I want the data! We sunk $80 million into R&D. How am I supposed to explain this to the SEC? With your head on a platter?!"
He hung up violently, his chest heaving. When he looked back at me, the scrutiny was completely gone, replaced by pure, unadulterated anxiety.
The word "mole"—he had probably already pinned it on a rival firm or a rogue executive. He would never believe it was the abandoned wife standing in front of him, a woman who couldn't even pay off her payday loans.
Without leaving a single word of explanation, he turned on his heel and stormed out, slamming the door behind him.
The second the door clicked shut, the pathetic facade melted off my face completely.
I walked over to the window, watching Harrison's Maybach merge into the night traffic, a cold smirk tugging at the corner of my lips.
The Nexus AI model. The star project Vance Holdings had poured $150 million into to rush their NASDAQ listing, and the core pillar of their S-1 valuation. Once that data was gone, Vance Holdings' tech empire would collapse in an instant.
I turned, dragged the liquid-cooled rig out from under the bed, and plugged it back in.
My fingers flew across the keyboard, and the Nexus AI data streams flooded the screen. The logic bomb I’d planted had already finished rewriting the foundational architecture. Right now, at ten gigabytes per second, it was encrypting the model parameters—trained with countless hours of blood, sweat, and compute power—line by line into gibberish.
The progress bar skyrocketed.
90%, 95%, 100%.
*Beep—*
System prompt: Data lockdown complete. Encryption keys shredded.
Vance Holdings' prized tech empire was, at this exact moment, completely worthless.
I leaned back in my chair and let out a long, slow breath.
Before I could even pick up my water glass, the burner phone on the nightstand buzzed again.
The screen lit up, the eerie blue glow illuminating a second bank deposit notification.
[Account ending in 8842 received a deposit of $850,000.00 USD. Memo: Liquidation proceeds.]
$850,000.
My hand jerked, water sloshing over the rim of the glass and splashing onto the back of my hand, ice-cold.
That number was like a precision scalpel, cutting straight into the most disgusting, rotting piece of flesh in my memory.
Three years ago, Chloe threw a massive tantrum, crying and demanding to open a luxury boutique. My mother-in-law, Eleanor, used the excuse of "family doesn't keep score" to strong-arm me into "lending" her the SoHo retail space from my Bridal Trust.
Later, they secretly transferred the deed into Chloe's name. I had checked the comparable commercial real estate comps and the capitalization rates at the time. Liquidated at market value, down to the exact penny, that space was worth $850,000.
The first transfer of $185,000 was for the Art Deco Emerald Bracelet Eleanor had taken.
The second transfer of $850,000 was for the retail space Chloe had stolen from my endowment.
This apex predator lurking in the shadows wasn't just using me to short Harrison. He was using this deeply unsettling method to "return" my Bridal Trust assets to me, one by one.
Who the hell was he?
I set the glass down, immediately switched back to my computer, and pulled up the backend logs of my traceback script to trace the money trail of this $850,000.
Unlike the first payment that was routed through dark web crypto mixers, this money was impossibly clean. It hadn't been washed through any underground shell companies. Instead, it was wired directly into my account as "legal investment returns" from an offshore family trust based in the Cayman Islands.
The trust company's firewall was tighter than I expected. I had to hijack three botnet nodes as proxies and spoof an SEC routine audit probe just to tear open a small crack and slip into the account's metadata layer.
Code cascaded down the screen like a waterfall, the blue light reflecting in my pupils.
Suddenly, a string of hexadecimal characters hidden deep within the handshake protocol caught my eye.
[0x4A_0x54_0x2D_0x30_0x39_0x31_0x32]
