Chapter 14 - Checkmate in the BoardroomAt 10:00 AM, the video conference initiated.
I sat at the head of my mahogany boardroom table, wearing a razor-sharp crimson suit. Julian appeared on the massive screen, sitting comfortably in his San Francisco penthouse office, surrounded by three of his top tech executives. He looked like a man who had already swallowed the canary.
"Evelyn," Julian smiled, sipping a green juice. "I received the MoU. Sensible decision. It’s always difficult for founders to know when they've been outplayed."
"I assume your team is reviewing the technical handover files?" I asked, keeping my voice perfectly neutral, projecting the image of a defeated woman.
"My CTO is executing the verification tool on our main proxy server as we speak," Julian bragged, gesturing to a man typing rapidly on a laptop next to him. "Once we confirm the administrative tokens, we will wire the absolute minimum acquisition fee to your account."
I watched the screen intently. I waited for the exact moment the CTO hit 'Enter'.
Ten seconds passed.
Suddenly, the lights in Julian’s background flickered. The CTO stopped typing, a look of utter confusion washing over his face.
"Sir," the CTO stammered. "The program... it’s not verifying the tokens. It’s executing a mass overwrite protocol."
Julian frowned, leaning toward the laptop. "What does that mean? Stop it."
"I can't!" the CTO’s voice spiked into a panic. "It’s bypassing our administrative blocks. It’s locking us out of our own ad accounts! Sir... it’s rewriting our outbound traffic links. Every single click on our network is being redirected!"
Julian whipped his head toward the camera, his smug composure completely obliterated. "What the hell did you do, Evelyn?!"
I leaned forward, resting my elbows on the mahogany table, a cold, predatory smile finally breaking across my face.
"I accepted your invitation to play in a billionaire's sandbox, Julian," I whispered, my voice echoing with lethal authority through his speakers. "The executable you just ran didn't hand over my pages. It injected a localized virus that hijacked your entire proxy network. Right now, every single ounce of traffic your billion-dollar conglomerate generates is being routed directly into my Google AdSense accounts."
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"Shut down the servers!" Julian screamed at his executives, pure terror in his eyes.
"If you shut them down, you lose millions," I replied smoothly. "If you leave them on, I make millions. You tried to use cheap bot tactics to destroy my sanctuary. Now, I own your revenue streams. By the time your engineers scrub that payload from your mainframes, your board of directors will have your head on a spike."
