Chapter 360
She didn’t wait for a response. She walked out of the conference room, and the moment the door swung shut behind her, she broke into a run.
She sprinted down the hallway, heels digging into the carpet, and burst into her private office. She slammed the door and locked it.
Leaning against the wood, she tried to slow her breathing. The physical portfolios — the leather-bound volumes holding her hand-drawn schematics for Phoenix — she hadn’t seen them since the day she had fled the penthouse. In the chaos and the pain, she had grabbed her laptop, Effie’s things, the bare essentials. She had left her past behind. She had left her genius sitting in a cabinet in his library.
Panic clawing at her chest, she scrambled to her desk and hammered her password into her laptop. She pulled up the deep-storage cloud drive she and Grayson had used for joint projects — a legacy system tied to the Lancaster Corp infrastructure. She had changed her passwords long ago, but she knew Grayson held a master administrator key, a backdoor baked into the family’s corporate architecture that she could never fully erase without triggering a system-wide security alert.
She clicked on the folder labeled Phoenix_Concept_Civilian_Adaptation.
She checked the access logs.
Last accessed: 4 days ago. User: Admin_GL.
Isolde stared at the glowing screen.
The betrayal was absolute — a physical weight pressing down on her chest. Grayson hadn’t only cheated on her body. He hadn’t only broken her heart. He had broken into the vault of her intellect, stolen her life’s work, and handed it to his mistress like a shiny new toy to play with.
A colder fear crept in beneath the rage. The Phoenix project was more than a concept — it was a signature. Anyone in the high-stakes world of architectural engineering who studied those designs would connect them to one name: Sophia. The identity she had buried to become Mrs. Lancaster. This wasn’t simply theft. It was a potential unmasking.
The door handle rattled.
𝗬𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗱𝗮𝗶𝗹𝘆 𝗱𝗼𝘀𝗲 𝗼𝗳 𝗻𝗼𝘃𝗲𝗹𝘀 𝗼𝗻 𝗴𝗮𝗹𝗻𝗼𝘃𝗲𝗹𝘀.𝗰𝗼𝗺
“Isolde?” Arland’s voice came through the wood, muffled but urgent. “Lewis is waiting.”
Isolde stood, crossed the room, and unlocked the door.
Arland stepped inside. He took one look at her face and stopped dead. She was pale as chalk, but her eyes burned with a dark, terrifying fire.
“Isolde, what is it?” he asked, his voice dropping low.
“They stole it, Arland,” she whispered, her voice trembling beneath the weight of her rage. “They stole Phoenix.”
Arland frowned. “What?”
Isolde looked past him, her gaze fixed on the Manhattan skyline beyond the glass walls.
“InnoTech,” she said — the word tasting like poison on her tongue. “It is built on my dreams.”
The silence in Isolde’s office was heavy and suffocating.
Arland stared at the server logs glowing on her laptop screen, tracing the digital footprint left by Grayson’s administrator account.
“This is actionable,” he said, his voice hard. “It’s blatant intellectual property theft. We can sue them into the ground. I’ll call the lawyers right now.” He reached for his phone.
Isolde reached out and pressed his hand down. She shook her head slowly. “No.”
.
.