Chapter 361
Her voice was terrifyingly calm.
“Isolde, he stole your core concept,” Arland argued, his brow furrowed.
“And they will have tweaked it just enough to avoid a direct copyright infringement,” she replied, staring at the wall. “Grayson has an army of corporate lawyers and billions in liquid capital. We have a startup budget. A lawsuit would take five years and drain every cent we have. We would bleed to death in court.”
She turned back to her computer. Her fingers moved across the keyboard, bypassing firewalls and searching public domain registries until she found the InnoTech teaser website. She clicked the link.
T𝗁𝗈𝘶ѕ𝗮𝗇𝘥𝗌 𝘰𝖿 𝘳𝘦𝘢𝗱𝖾𝘳ѕ о𝗻 g𝖺𝘭𝗻о𝘃e𝘭s.𝘤𝗈𝘮
The screen filled with a slick, high-budget video. Elegant, minimalist text faded into view: The Future of Living. Visionary: Belle Escobar.
Isolde clicked play.
A stunning 3D rendering bloomed across the screen — a modular city, buildings snapping together like elegant, futuristic puzzle pieces.
It was her city. The exact design she had sketched on those napkins.
Belle’s breathy, over-produced voiceover filled the room. “I dreamed of a world that builds itself. A world without limits.”
A surge of hot, violent rage tore through Isolde’s body.
She grabbed the heavy metal stapler from her desk and, with a raw scream, hurled it across the room.
Crash.
It smashed into the drywall, leaving a deep dent before clattering to the floor.
“She dreamed it?” Isolde’s chest heaved. “She can’t draw in basic perspective. She doesn’t know the difference between load-bearing steel and decorative aluminum!”
Arland watched her, his expression grim. “So what do we do? Let them win? Let her take the credit for your genius?”
Isolde walked to the floor-to-ceiling window and pressed her hot forehead against the cool glass. She stared out at the towering skyscrapers of Manhattan, and gradually the fury crystallized — cooling, hardening, sharpening into something cold and lethal.
“No,” she said softly. “We destroy them.”
She turned around. The frantic panic had left her eyes entirely. Only the predator remained.
“They have the concept, Arland,” she said, crossing back to her desk. “They have the pretty pictures. But they don’t have the math.”
Arland frowned. “What do you mean?”
“The files he stole contained the base framework — the architectural drafts,” Isolde explained, pressing two fingers to her temple. “But they don’t have the dynamic stabilization code. The thousands of lines of proprietary algorithms that handle non-linear stress and harmonic resonance. It’s all up here. I never uploaded the core engine to any shared server.”
She leaned over the desk, her eyes locking onto Arland’s.
“Without my math, their buildings are a house of cards. They will collapse.”
Arland’s eyes went wide as the realization struck him. “My god.”
“We let them launch,” Isolde said, her voice dropping to a ruthless whisper. “We let them spend Grayson’s billions on marketing. We let Belle stand on stage and call herself a genius.”
“And then?” Arland asked.
.