The line went dead silent. She had hit the nerve.
Ayla didn’t wait for him to recover. She ended the call.
She looked up at Chloe. “We can’t fight this in court. He owns the board.”
“Then what do we do?” Chloe asked, her voice tight with panic.
“We destroy his credibility,” Ayla said, opening her laptop. “If the public thinks he’s a monster, the judge won’t touch his petition with a ten-foot pole.”
She logged into a ghost IP address and opened a blank Twitter account.
It was time to burn his empire to the ground.
Ayla’s fingers flew across the keyboard.
She uploaded the fifteen-second video she had recorded outside the VIP lounge at the Moscone Center – the footage of Axel aggressively kissing Kristal. She didn’t write a lengthy caption. Just a single hashtag: FarrellTechScandal.
She routed the post through a bot network she had built years ago, blasting it directly into the mentions of the top fifty tech journalists and gossip bloggers in the country.
Within forty-five minutes, the internet exploded.
The video was slightly grainy, but Axel’s face and Kristal’s red dress were unmistakable. The hashtag rocketed to the number one trending spot on Twitter. Wall Street forums erupted with mockery. The “ultimate devoted husband” had been exposed as a hypocrite.
Ten minutes before the Nasdaq opening bell, Farrell Group’s pre-market stock price plummeted by 2.5%.
Three thousand miles away, in the penthouse office of Farrell headquarters, a ceramic coffee mug shattered against the bulletproof glass window.
Axel stood with his chest heaving, his face purple with rage.
Jared, his assistant, sprinted into the office holding an iPad like a live grenade. “Sir, the PR department is in total freefall. The phones won’t stop ringing.”
“Issue a denial!” Axel roared, grabbing Jared by the collar. “Tell them it’s a deepfake! Tell them it’s AI-generated extortion!”
“They tried, sir!” Jared stammered. “But without Ayla’s script templates, the statement was full of holes. Three major tech outlets already ran forensic analysis on the video and confirmed it’s one hundred percent authentic. The denial only made us look guilty.”
Axel’s private phone began to ring. It was the chairman of the board.
He ignored it. For the first time, cold panic pierced through his arrogance.
He grabbed his phone and dialed Ayla’s number.
Ayla sat in a cheap Manhattan diner, sipping black coffee. She ignored the morning talk show murmuring from the corner TV and watched the stock market’s opening bell on her tablet. A bright red line for FATECH nosedived the moment trading began.
Her phone buzzed. She answered it.
“Ayla,” Axel gasped, his voice trembling. “Post a picture of us on your Instagram right now. Say we have an open marriage. Say anything – if you fix this, I’ll rip up the conservatorship papers. I swear to God.”
Ayla let out a soft, chilling laugh.
“Your PR department’s statement was pathetic, Axel,” she said, her voice dripping with professional disdain. “They used the word ‘fabricated’ in the first paragraph but ‘misunderstood’ in the third. You contradicted your own timeline. It’s amateur hour. Looks like you’re finally seeing what happens when the adults leave the room.”
Axel’s stomach dropped. With horrifying clarity, he understood for the first time that the genius behind his invincible public armor had always been her.
“Ayla, please,” he begged, his pride shattered. “We’re husband and wife. I was just confused.”
“I have three years of your buried scandals ready to go,” she said, her voice ice-cold. “If that conservatorship petition ever reaches a judge’s desk, you should pray I remain silent. Otherwise, Farrell Group’s stock drop will be far worse than 2.5%.”
Axel stopped breathing.
“Axel,” Ayla whispered, delivering the final blow. “You just became your own worst PR crisis.”
She hung up. She pulled the SIM card from the burner phone, snapped it in half, and dropped it into her cold coffee.
In California, Axel collapsed into his leather chair, staring blankly at the collapsing stock numbers.
Ayla stood up and left a five-dollar bill on the table. She walked out of the diner, the wind whipping her trench coat around her legs, and hailed a yellow cab.
“Where to, miss?” the driver asked.
Ayla looked out the window at the towering skyscrapers of the financial district, her eyes burning with ambition and a dangerous thrill.
“The Gilliam Group headquarters,” she said. “I have a delivery to make.”
She had won the first battle. Now she was taking her resume to the man in the shadows. Spin Doctor A was about to offer Cassius Gilliam a weapon he couldn’t refuse.
The yellow cab crawled through the heavy, rain-slicked traffic of the Manhattan financial district.
Ayla leaned her head against the cold glass of the window, watching the towering skyscrapers blur past. Her heart beat with a steady, dangerous rhythm. She had just crippled Axel’s stock price. Now she was on her way to the Gilliam Group to finish the job.
She was only a few blocks from the Gilliam tower – a spire of black glass that seemed to cut the sky in two – when a flicker of movement in the side-view mirror caught her eye. A familiar, brutish black Cadillac Escalade, two cars back.
Her blood ran cold.
She leaned forward quickly. “Driver, take a left at the next light. Now.”
It was too late. The Escalade surged forward with a low, predatory growl.
The cab driver slammed the brakes. Tires screeched against the wet asphalt. Ayla’s body jerked violently forward, the rough nylon seatbelt biting hard into her collarbone and knocking the breath from her lungs.
The Escalade had swerved aggressively across two lanes, cutting the cab off and forcing it to a dead stop in the middle of the street.
Ayla’s stomach dropped. She unzipped her leather handbag and wrapped her fingers around the hard plastic cylinder of her pepper spray.
The heavy door of the Escalade swung open. Jared, Axel’s executive assistant, stepped out into the freezing rain without bothering with an umbrella. He jogged straight toward the cab, his expensive suit soaking through in seconds.
He stopped at Ayla’s window and rapped his knuckles sharply against the wet glass.
Ayla kept her hand on the pepper spray and pressed the button to lower the window exactly three inches. Cold air and the smell of car exhaust rushed in.
“Are you trying to cause a pile-up in the middle of Wall Street, Jared?” she asked, her voice flat and devoid of emotion.
Jared wiped a mixture of rain and sweat from his forehead. He looked exhausted, but his eyes held the familiar, arrogant obedience of a man executing orders without question. He reached into his wet jacket and pulled out a black velvet box, shoving it through the narrow gap in the window.
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