Chapter 211

Chapter 211:

He glanced back at the sleeping woman, seeing not the polished socialite who he had first approached with her scheme for revenge, but something altogether more dangerous— a woman with nothing left to lose, who viewed her sister’s happiness as a personal affront, a final insult that demanded blood.

Herod had wanted Victoria Kane’s empire, her power, her legacy. He had never signed up for the madness that now slept in his bed, the unpredictable fury that might consume them all.

A week until the Grid launch. A week to either contain Rose’s volatile rage or to extricate himself from her entirely.

A week that suddenly seemed far too short, and the path ahead far too uncertain.

The Phoenix Grid control room hummed with activity. Massive screens displayed real-time data from thousands of connection points throughout the city. Engineers moved between workstations, checking and rechecking every system.

Hannah Zhao stood in the center, tablet in hand displaying the checklist. Three days until the official launch, and the pressure weighed on her shoulders.

“Junction forty-three, status?” she called.

“All green,” came the response. “Power flow nominal, security protocols active, redundancy systems standing by.”

Hannah marked it off her list. They had been working for twenty hours straight, methodically testing every component. The sabotaged systems that Walsh had compromised required particularly careful attention.

Camille entered, immaculate in a tailored suit despite the early hour. Only the shadows under her eyes betrayed her exhaustion.

“Progress report?” she asked, moving to Hannah’s side.

“Eighty-seven percent complete,” Hannah replied, handing over her tablet. “Western sector is fully operational. Northern at ninety-three percent. Eastern and southern at eighty-two and seventy-nine.”

“And the corrected systems?”

Hannah lowered her voice. “All fixed. We’ve replaced every component Walsh tampered with, updated all compromised software. The Grid is clean.”

Relief flickered across Camille’s face. “Show me.”

Hannah led her to a workstation where thermal imaging displayed the entire Grid. Each junction point glowed green, power flows represented by pulsing blue lines.

“We’ve triple-checked the western junction,” Hannah explained, zooming in on the area they had deliberately marked as vulnerable in the false information fed to Walsh. “It’s actually our most secure point now. Extra monitoring, independent backup systems, manual override capabilities.”

“And the trackers we embedded in the files Walsh copied?”

“Active. When Rose and Herod access those files, we’ll know exactly where they are.”

A technician approached. “Dr. Zhao? We have an anomaly in junction twenty-nine.”

Hannah frowned. That junction wasn’t among the compromised systems they had identified. “What kind of anomaly?”

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