Chapter 8 - The Ghost of Mistakes PastThe court hearing was a spectacular, public slaughter.

Grant’s lawyer, a bargain-bin attorney who clearly hadn't been paid his retainer, sat in stunned silence as Marcus presented a towering stack of undeniable, heavily verified digital evidence. We didn't just prove Grant had fabricated his claim to my property; we proved he had committed perjury on his initial financial disclosures during the divorce.

The judge hit him with severe sanctions, completely revoking his attempt at an injunction and ordering him to pay all of my legal fees.

I was celebrating with a glass of vintage champagne in my home office that evening when a notification popped up on one of my secondary monitors. My automation scripts, constantly scraping the web for brand safety, had flagged a bizarre anomaly.

Someone was trying to sell my company's proprietary ad copy and AI-generated promotional banners—the exact ones we designed on Dreamina for our top-tier clients—on a dark-web forum.

I set my champagne down and cracked my knuckles. I booted up a deep-dive Selenium trace, bypassing the forum's crude proxy walls in minutes. The digital footprint was remarkably sloppy. It didn't take a genius to follow the breadcrumbs back to a public IP address at a cheap motel on the outskirts of the city.

I ran the registered guest list through my database.

Tessa.

The mistress who had abandoned Grant when the money dried up was now trying to peddle stolen digital assets she must have lifted from his laptop before she fled. She was trying to pawn my intellectual property for quick cash.

I didn't call the police. The police were too slow.

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I opened a command terminal and executed a complete, catastrophic wipe of the cloud drive she was attempting to access. Then, I forwarded her IP address, her physical location, and the evidence of her attempted corporate espionage to the massive tech conglomerate whose ad copy she was trying to fence.

Let Tessa deal with a multi-billion dollar corporate legal team. She wanted to play in the deep end; I just tied an anchor to her ankle.