Chapter 17 - The Judas ProxyBy 7:00 AM the next morning, I wasn't just awake; I was preparing for a slaughter.
I bypassed my usual tailored business suits and opted for a sharp, midnight-black blazer and stiletto heels. I looked exactly like what I was: an executioner. I kissed a sleepy Leo on the forehead, squeezed Harper’s hand, and walked out to my matte-black SUV.
The drive to my secondary office location in the city was a blur of calculated rage. I had spent the night dissecting the malicious Python script. Whoever wrote it was smart. They had used PyInstaller to convert the automation bots into executable files, hiding them deep within routine software updates distributed to our page management teams. But they weren't smarter than me.
I pushed through the glass doors of the office right as the morning shift was settling in. The low hum of chatter instantly died. My staff knew my schedule, and they knew I never showed up unannounced unless the sky was falling.
"Nobody touch their keyboards," I announced, my voice slicing through the open-plan office like a razor. "Step away from your desks. Now."
Thirty faces stared back at me in stunned silence. I didn't look at the junior content creators or the video editors. My eyes locked onto the glass corner office belonging to Marcus, my Director of Publishing Operations.
Marcus was thirty-two, wore expensive imported suits on a company salary, and had always possessed a subtle, grating arrogance. Right now, he was standing behind his desk, staring at me through the glass partition. His face was entirely devoid of color.
I walked straight into his office, closing the door behind me. I didn't sit.
"Evelyn," Marcus started, attempting to plaster on a confident, bewildered smile. "What’s going on? Is there a server issue?"
I pulled a sleek, encrypted flash drive from my pocket and dropped it onto his desk. It landed with a heavy, final thud.
"You got sloppy, Marcus," I said, my voice dropping to a terrifying, quiet register. "You routed the stolen Facebook traffic through residential proxies to mask the origin, but you forgot to clear the cache on the AI image generation tools you used to create the fake ad banners on Dreamina. The metadata led straight back to your personal workstation IP."
His fake smile vanished, replaced by a desperate, cornered panic. "Evelyn, you don't understand. The APT syndicate approached me before you took them down. They offered me a failsafe. A 50% revenue split if I kept a backdoor open."
"You sold out my company for a ghost?" I laughed, a cold, humorless sound. "APT is dead, Marcus. You are holding a match in a room filled with gasoline, and you don't even have the leverage to strike it."
"I have the master passwords to the three largest US pages," he hissed, his desperation turning into venom. "I’ve locked you out. You fire me, or try to call the police, and I wipe the pages. Millions of followers, completely gone. I want ten million dollars wired to an offshore account by noon, or your publishing empire burns."
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I looked at him, feeling absolutely nothing but pity for his profound stupidity.
"You think you're holding me hostage," I whispered, leaning over his desk until I was inches from his face. "But you're just locking yourself in the vault with the monster."
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