Thirty Days Before Our Wedding, I Found My Fiancé’s Secret Life—So I Turned Our Ceremony Into the Day He Lost Everything / Chapter 13 / 24

Chapter 13 - The Judas CodeTo catch a rat, you have to leave the cheese exactly where they expect it.

I knew my core team—Dr. Patel and the original Apex scientists—were incorruptible. They had bled for this company. The mole had to be one of the senior executives we absorbed during the Chimera Genetics acquisition.

At 2:00 A.M., I summoned Elias Thorne, the VP of Regulatory Affairs, to my office. Elias was a smooth, charismatic operator who had sworn absolute loyalty to me after Julian Croft’s arrest.

Elias walked in, looking appropriately groggy but impeccably dressed. "Elara? What’s going on? Why is the building on lockdown?"

"We have a catastrophic breach, Elias," I lied smoothly, projecting the exact image of a panicked CEO. "Genevieve Croft is threatening to leak our clinical data. I need to move the master decryption keys for our military subsidiary to an offline, encrypted cold-storage server before she initiates a cyber-attack."

I handed Elias a sleek, silver USB drive.

"This contains the only bridge to the master algorithm," I said, my voice trembling perfectly. "Lock it in the vault on sub-level four. Do not let it out of your sight."

"I’ve got it, Elara. You can trust me," Elias said, taking the drive. His eyes flashed with a microscopic glint of predatory triumph.

As soon as the heavy glass doors closed behind him, Adrian stepped out from the shadows of my private suite.

"You think he’ll bite?" Adrian asked, wrapping his arms around my waist from behind.

"A rat can never resist a free meal," I smiled, a dark, chilling expression.

We walked to the security monitors. We watched Elias step out of the elevator on sub-level four. He didn't walk toward the vault. He walked into an empty server room, pulled out a burner laptop, and plugged the silver USB drive into it. He was trying to upload the "master keys" directly to Aethelgard’s servers in Geneva.

"Got him," Adrian murmured.

I hit the intercom button, broadcasting my voice directly into the server room.

"Did you really think I was that stupid, Elias?"

On the monitor, Elias jumped nearly a foot in the air, his face draining of all color. He spun around, staring at the security camera.

"You didn't just plug in a master key," I said softly, my voice echoing like an executioner's bell. "You just plugged in a localized, highly aggressive Trojan virus. It is currently reverse-engineering the IP address you used to contact Genevieve, and it is wiping every single piece of stolen data on your hard drive."

Five minutes later, Elias was sitting handcuffed in my office, trembling violently as Adrian stood over him.