Chapter 13 - The Poisoned Bait
For the next forty-eight hours, the digital war raged in absolute, suffocating silence.
Vivian Vance threw everything she had at us. She escalated the attack, attempting to leak fabricated compliance documents to federal labor authorities to get APT shut down. But Tới and Giang were flawless. The slink.live platform swallowed the attacks whole, creating a two-way mirror that fed Vivian fake success metrics while quietly devouring her digital footprints.
But Vivian was a predator, and when she realized the digital attack was stalling, she made a fatal, unforgivable mistake. She hired a private investigator to take photos of Leo at his preschool, posting them anonymously on a dark web forum with our home address.
Ethan’s eyes, usually so warm and compassionate, turned completely pitch black. Vivian hadn't just attacked my business. She had threatened our son.
I stood up, pushing my chair back. The woman who had once been broken was completely gone. I was a force of nature, and Vivian Vance was standing on the tracks.
"Tới, Giang," I said, my voice echoing with lethal, uncompromising authority. "I don't just want her digital receipts anymore. I want her physical location. We need a honeypot."
To catch a ghost, you have to give them something worth materializing for. I sat down at my laptop and utilized the exact skills that had built my empire. I wrote a highly confidential, fake internal manifesto. Using my expertise in ad copywriting, I drafted suspenseful drama scripts and clickbait headlines, leveraging massive curiosity gaps designed to bait the algorithm and maximize the click-through rate.
The fake document claimed that APT was completely insolvent and that the Seedance 2.0 master source code was being transferred to an unsecured server for liquidation.
Giang nodded eagerly on the video feed. "I coded the dummy server. When Vivian breaches the honeypot and clicks the file you wrote, the payload will activate."
"What’s the payload?" Ethan asked.
"A hyper-aggressive, self-executing beacon," Tới grinned. "The moment the file touches her local network, it will bypass her VPNs, shatter her proxy shields, and ping her exact GPS coordinates directly to our dashboard."
At 2:15 AM, the alarms in our war room chimed softly.
"She took the bait," Giang whispered. "Vivian’s syndicate is breaching the honeypot."
For ten agonizing seconds, the screen remained blank. Then, a massive digital map of the globe materialized, zooming rapidly across the United States and slamming directly into Manhattan. A pulsating red dot appeared on the map, pinpointing a luxury commercial high-rise in the financial district.
"She’s operating out of a penthouse suite," Giang announced. "And Sarah... tomorrow is the opening day of the Global Marketing & Tech Summit at the Waldorf Astoria."
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"Vivian isn't just hiding in New York," I said, a cold, predatory smile spreading across my face. "She plans to announce her new AI tech firm using the source code she thinks she just stole from me. She wants to take my crown in front of the entire industry."
I looked at Ethan. "Pack a bag. We have a gala to crash."
