Chapter 13 - The Suspenseful Script
For the next forty-eight hours, the digital war raged in absolute silence. Evelyn Vance pumped every illicit cent she had into her shadow campaign, desperately trying to shatter our defenses. But Tới and Giang were flawless. The slink.live platform swallowed every single malicious hit without a flinch. The fake news stopped trending. Meta’s compliance bots, no longer receiving spam reports, paused their deletion protocols.
But a digital shield wasn't enough. I needed to lure Evelyn out into the light, where I could destroy her permanently.
"She is actively trying to sabotage our international expansion," Marcus noted, reviewing the intercepted data packets Tới had sent over. "She filed anonymous, fraudulent complaints with the foreign labor authorities, attempting to block the Nội quy lao động compliance documents we need to officially register our new representative office."
"She wants to choke us in red tape while bleeding our reputation dry," I murmured, staring at the panoramic view of the Manhattan skyline. "She wants a public execution. We just need to give her the right stage."
To bait the trap, I leveraged my own unparalleled expertise in ad copywriting and market manipulation. I sat at my laptop and drafted a highly confidential, utterly fabricated internal memo. I wrote it like a suspenseful drama script, utilizing massive curiosity gaps and desperate, panicked phrasing designed to trigger Evelyn's predatory greed. The memo stated that APT Vietnam was completely insolvent due to Marcus's "embezzlement," that my engagement was broken, and that my only hope was a desperate, multi-million-dollar emergency acquisition deal.
The fake memo specified that I would be finalizing the signatures on Friday night at a prestigious, highly exclusive Global Innovators Gala hosted at the St. Regis in San Francisco.
I had Giang quietly drop the encrypted memo into a server pathway we knew Evelyn’s cyber-mercenaries were still monitoring.
Evelyn took the bait instantly. Within hours, Tới intercepted text messages between Evelyn and her shadow board of directors. She was planning to crash the gala, armed with her fake deepfake data on a flash drive, to publicly humiliate me in front of the acquiring executives, expose Marcus, and buy my distressed assets for pennies on the dollar.
She thought she was walking into my funeral. She didn't realize I had built her guillotine.
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"Are you ready for this?" Marcus asked as we stood in the foyer of our penthouse suite in San Francisco on Friday evening. He looked incredibly handsome in a classic black tuxedo, adjusting his cufflinks.
"I've been ready since the day her brother tried to ruin me," I whispered, adjusting the neckline of my backless, crimson silk gown. It wasn't the dress of a victim; it was the armor of an apex predator.
