Chapter 7 - The Midnight AuditYou do not fight a billionaire predator by playing defense. By the time you build a wall, they have already poisoned the ground beneath it.
By midnight, my penthouse apartment had been transformed into a militarized cyber-bunker. Owen was safely asleep upstairs. Julian and I sat at the dining table with Elias, our elite cyber-forensics hacker, staring at the glowing monitors.
"Evelyn thinks she has us cornered with a forged document," I said, pacing the hardwood floor, my mind operating with surgical precision. "She expects me to fight her in civil court. We aren't going to do that. We are going to audit her entire life."
"Evelyn is old money," Julian noted, his brilliant mind dissecting the enemy. "She uses a decentralized offshore network to hide her hostile acquisitions. If she bought Graham’s debt, she had to route the funds through a shadow account."
"Elias," I commanded, stopping at the edge of the table. "I want you to trace the exact wire transfer that paid off Graham’s creditors. Find the origin node."
For six hours, the room operated on pure, high-stakes adrenaline. At 4:00 A.M., Elias hit the jackpot.
"I breached her secondary server in Zurich," Elias breathed, his eyes wide. "Claire... Evelyn didn't just pay off Graham. She’s running a massive international money-laundering syndicate. I’m looking at unredacted ledgers proving she has been defrauding her own investors to fund illegal arms trades in Eastern Europe."
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A profound, victorious fire ignited in my chest.
"Download the entire mainframe," I whispered, the fire in my veins turning to absolute ice. "Evelyn Sterling wants to play god with my company? I’m going to show her what happens when the devil wakes up."
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