Chapter 17 - The Digital Siege
By midnight, my corner office was transformed into an impenetrable war room.
Mark had driven into the city the moment I called, bringing an aura of fierce, protective calm that instantly grounded my racing heart. He stood behind my chair, his hands resting heavily on my shoulders, as we stared at the cascading analytics dashboard. The red warning banners were flashing like a digital apocalypse.
"She’s operating a decentralized botnet," Mark said, his jaw clenched tight as he analyzed the data traffic. "Morgan isn't just buying VIA clones; she owns the farm. She’s pumping millions of dollars of her father's offshore crypto into this siege."
I didn't bother calling our corporate attorneys. I needed the ghosts in the machine. I initiated a highly encrypted video link. Within seconds, my two most brilliant, off-the-books digital architects—Nguyễn Xuân Tới and Nguyễn Trường Giang—appeared on the massive monitor.
"We are under heavy fire," I said, bypassing all pleasantries. "Morgan Vance has hijacked our Seedance 2.0 protocols. She is using an illicit traffic arbitrage network to flood our platforms with fake news and malicious routing."
Tới adjusted his glasses, his eyes instantly scanning the raw code on his end. "The penetration is incredibly sophisticated, Claire. She bypassed your standard firewalls by spoofing the IP addresses of your authorized ad agencies."
"Can we sever the connection?" Mark asked, his voice a low, commanding rumble.
"If we just sever it, she will pivot to a secondary attack vector," Giang explained, his fingers flying across his mechanical keyboard. "We need to trap her. We need to deploy the slink.live platform."
"Set the digital sponge," I commanded, a ruthless smile touching my lips. "I want slink.live to absorb every single malicious hit. Reroute her botnet traffic into a phantom server, and silently scrape the digital signatures of the crypto wallets she’s using to fund the VIA accounts."
For the next forty-eight hours, the digital war raged in absolute, suffocating silence.
Morgan Vance threw everything she had at us. She escalated the attack, attempting to leak fabricated nội quy lao động compliance documents to Asian labor authorities to get APT Vietnam shut down. But Tới and Giang were flawless. The slink.live architecture swallowed the attacks whole, creating a two-way mirror that fed Morgan fake success metrics while quietly devouring her digital footprints.
But Morgan was a predator, and when she realized the digital attack was stalling, she made a fatal, unforgivable mistake.
On the third morning, Mark’s phone rang. It was the receptionist at his pediatric physical therapy clinic.
"Dr. Mercer," the receptionist was crying. "There are protesters outside the clinic. Someone leaked a fabricated story online claiming this clinic is a front for illegal medical billing. They posted pictures of our building. They posted pictures of Liam and Lily."
The temperature in the war room dropped to absolute zero.
Mark hung up the phone. His eyes, usually so warm and compassionate, were completely pitch black.
Morgan hadn't just attacked my business. She had threatened my husband’s practice. She had threatened my children.
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I stood up, pushing my chair back. The woman who had once cowered in fear was completely gone. I was a force of nature, and Morgan Vance 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. I am going to destroy her."
