Introduction

The flickering TV in my dingy motel room was the only light, illuminating the peeling wallpaper.

On screen, Ethan Vance, my ex-fiancé, smiled his perfect, camera-ready smile, touting 'EvolveAI' and his "future-defining" Prometheus algorithm.

Reporters swarmed him; he was the king of Silicon Valley, the brilliant mind behind the world' s most advanced AI.

My world. My code. My future. He had stolen it all. Everything.

I remembered the day he left, his eyes cold and empty, my three years of coding on a hard drive in his bag, a venomous "You were always just... holding me back."

He didn't just take the code; he took my savings, my reputation, blacklisting me from an industry I helped build, all while Bethany Cole, my best friend, stood arm-in-arm with him, eyes gleaming with triumph.

They left me with nothing but eviction notices, forcing me to sell everything I owned, living as a ghost under pseudonyms, cleaning up security flaws for companies that would never hire Scarlett Hayes.

The pain of that betrayal was a constant, suffocating darkness, a deep pit I couldn' t climb out of, trapped by unseen enemies and their whispers of my failure.

But watching him on that screen, basking in my stolen glory, a cold, sharp rage began to burn through the despair.

In that cheap motel, I swore a vow: I would get justice, I would take back what was mine, and he would not build his empire on my ruins.

My chance came weeks later: a vulnerability in his IPO network led me to a familiar digital signature-a back door I'd built into 'Prometheus,' a failsafe only I knew. He was arrogant, so certain he' d erased me he never looked for the ghost I' d left behind.

He was on the verge of becoming a billionaire. And I had the key to his kingdom.

A slow smile spread across my face. The game wasn't over. It had just begun. I wasn't going to be a victim. I was the storm he never saw coming. I would let him climb to the peak of his triumph. And then, I would burn it all to the ground.