Chapter 13 - The Digital Labyrinth
For the next forty-eight hours, the digital war raged in absolute, suffocating silence.
Victoria Sterling threw everything she had at us. She escalated the attack, attempting to leak fabricated compliance documents to federal labor authorities to get House of Laurent shut down. But Tới and Giang were flawless. The slink.live platform swallowed the attacks whole, creating a two-way mirror that fed Victoria fake success metrics while quietly devouring her digital footprints.
But Victoria was a predator, and when she realized the digital attack was stalling, she made a fatal, unforgivable mistake.
On the third morning, Gabriel’s phone rang. It was the head of his private security detail at our estate.
"Mr. Thorne," the security chief said, his voice tense. "There are drones hovering over the property line. Someone leaked a fabricated story online claiming your estate was purchased with embezzled cartel funds. They posted the GPS coordinates of your home on a dozen Facebook drama pages."
The temperature in the war room dropped to absolute zero.
Gabriel hung up the phone. His eyes, usually so warm and compassionate, were completely pitch black. Victoria hadn't just attacked my business. She had threatened our sanctuary.
I stood up, pushing my chair back. The woman who had once been a naive artist was completely gone. I was a force of nature, and Victoria Sterling was standing on the tracks.
"Tới, Giang," I said, my voice echoing with lethal, uncompromising authority. "I don't just want her digital receipts anymore. I want her physical location. We need a honeypot."
"Victoria wants the proprietary source code for Seedance 2.0," Gabriel noted, immediately catching on to my strategy. A thrilling, dangerous synergy sparked between us. "We are going to give her a backdoor right into a cloned, isolated server. A digital labyrinth."
Giang nodded eagerly on the video feed. "I can code the dummy server tonight. We will populate it with fake, highly encrypted files. When Victoria breaches the honeypot and attempts to download the files, the payload will activate."
"What’s the payload?" Gabriel asked.
"A hyper-aggressive, self-executing beacon," Tới grinned. "The moment the file touches her local network, it will bypass her VPNs, shatter her proxy shields, and ping her exact GPS coordinates directly to our dashboard."
At 2:15 AM, the alarms in our war room chimed softly.
"She took the bait," Giang whispered. "Victoria’s syndicate is breaching the honeypot. She is initiating the download of the dummy files."
We watched the progress bar on the massive monitor slowly fill. 50%... 75%... 100%.
For ten agonizing seconds, the screen remained blank. Then, a massive digital map of the globe materialized, zooming rapidly across the United States and slamming directly into Silicon Valley. A pulsating red dot appeared on the map, pinpointing a luxury commercial high-rise in downtown San Francisco.
"She’s operating out of a penthouse suite," Giang announced. "And Vivienne... tomorrow is the opening day of the Global Fashion Tech Summit at the Moscone Center."
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"Victoria isn't just hiding in San Francisco," I said, a cold, predatory smile spreading across my face. "She plans to announce her new AI tech firm using the source code she thinks she just stole from me. She wants to take my crown in front of the entire industry."
I looked at Gabriel. "Pack a bag. We are going to California."
