Chapter 3

3

The car pulled up in front of the desolate warehouse.

This used to be my private headquarters.

Three years ago, to devote myself entirely to Chloe, I disbanded my team and retired my alias as the legendary genius hacker, "L."

I had locked away all my top-tier hardware, convincing myself that domestic bliss mattered more than my empire.

How laughably stupid I had been.

Pushing open the heavy, dust-covered iron doors, the familiar scent of ozone, flux, and cold metal washed over me.

I walked to the deepest section of the workshop and tore away a massive tarp.

Beneath it sat rows of high-performance servers and a command center with over a dozen ultra-wide monitors.

I flipped the master power switch.

Low hums vibrated through the room as screen after screen flared to life, casting an icy blue glow over my face.

I sat down, my fingers dancing across the mechanical keyboard.

The complex code and subroutines I had buried for three years woke up instantly beneath my fingertips.

I needed to find out what game Jace Mercer was really playing.

That pregnancy report under the name "Lexi Wells" smelled like bullshit.

A man as arrogant as Jace wouldn't act so smug yet desperately possessive if he had genuinely found the love of his life.

Tonight had been a calculated performance designed to reassert his ownership over Chloe while crushing my pride.

Within minutes, I cracked an encrypted medical database.

Lexi Wells's profile popped onto my screen.

She was Jace's current girlfriend, an obscure aspiring model.

Her public profile seemed completely spotless.

However, I quickly caught a glaring inconsistency.

Her latest social media post from a month ago showed her rocking a flat, toned stomach on a beach in Cabo.

Yet the ultrasound report claimed she was already twelve weeks along.

Three months pregnant. The timeline was impossible.

I dug deeper, pulling her financial records and location logs from the past quarter.

There wasn't a single transaction linked to prenatal care.

Her most frequent destination was an exclusive cosmetic surgery clinic in Beverly Hills.

A cold smirk tugged at the corner of my lips.

As expected, it was a scam.

I breached the clinic's internal network and easily retrieved Lexi's medical records.

She wasn't pregnant at all.

She had gone there for a liposuction and body contouring procedure.

As for the doctor who signed that fake ultrasound report, his bank account had received a wire transfer of fifty grand yesterday morning.

The sender was Jace's executive assistant.

The puzzle was complete.

Jace had fabricated the whole thing from start to finish.

He hadn't found true love; he just wanted to manipulate Chloe and humiliate me.

He wanted to prove that even if he threw Chloe away, she was still his obedient puppet.

And Chloe, my devoted wife, had willingly played along with his pathetic farce to make a fool out of me.

I compiled all the evidence, encrypted the package, and uploaded it to a secure cloud server.

By the time I finished, dawn was breaking over the horizon.

Leaning back in the ergonomic chair, watching the cascading streams of data, the burning fury inside me solidified into pure resolve.

Three years of sacrifice and devotion had been repaid with humiliation and deceit.

They thought I was a harmless doormat they could stomp on forever.

Jace. Chloe.

Did you really think Logan Drake was someone you could mess with?

I shut down the monitors and stood up.

Morning light pierced through the dusty warehouse windows.

The real show was about to begin.

I was done playing the martyr.

I was going to make them pay for every ounce of pain they caused me.

I'd show Chloe exactly what she had thrown away.

And I'd teach Jace that sometimes, the quiet gardener wields the sharpest scythe.

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