She Thought She Was Alone in the Penthouse—But the Billionaire Saw the Choice That Changed Both Their Lives

Abby didn't go upstairs to cry. She went to her executive office. If Julian was going to play war, she wasn't going to sit on the sidelines. She booted up her terminal. She might not have been a master coder, but she was a master of logistics, contracts, and finding the paper trail.

She began digging into the HVAC maintenance logs she had found earlier. She traced the shell companies that had hired the maintenance crew. Layer by layer, she tore through the corporate camouflage. It took her six hours of relentless, manic searching, but she finally found the weak link: a physical server location hidden in an abandoned warehouse in Brooklyn, leased under a subsidiary Vance controlled.

She ran down to the bunker. Julian was staring blankly at the screen, a defeated look on his face. The deadline was only four hours away.

"I found him," Abby panted, slamming a flash drive onto the desk.

Julian’s head snapped up. "What?"

"Vance. He’s routing his communications through a physical server in Brooklyn. He needs a local hardline to bypass your latency checks." Abby pointed to the screen. "Your counter-virus won't work remotely. His firewall will catch it. But if we upload it directly into his local server..."

Julian's eyes widened as he processed her words. He looked at her, truly looked at her, seeing not a damsel in distress, but a queen ready to command an army.

"Abby... it's too dangerous. He'll have men there."

"You have Reynolds and a team of ex-special forces," Abby shot back, her voice laced with steel. "You go to the warehouse. Upload the virus. I will stay here and initiate the fake transfer to keep him distracted. We hit him from both sides."