He Holds Off Marriage,I Make Him Beg For Code

Chapter 2 Master Access

At precisely nine o'clock the following morning, Katherine Byrd clicked her way into the office building wearing 4-inch stilettos.

The sharp, rhythmic snap of her heels instantly silenced the soft chatter across the open floor, and the clatter of typing noticeably died down.

She swept her gaze over the workstation bays like a monarch inspecting a territory, eventually coming to a stop right in front of my desk.

"So you're Joseph's ex-girlfriend?" she chimed, her voice deliberately carried across the room. "He and I are getting officially engaged very soon, so why are you still clinging onto this place?"

Her voice wasn't an outright yell, but it was pitched perfectly to ensure every employee within five rows caught every single syllable.

In an instant, mouse clicks ceased, fingers hovered frozen above keyboards, and an eager silence swept through the room as everyone listened intently.

"Since you come from such a mediocre background, you ought to know your place and act properly," she continued, looking me up and down with open disdain. "The way you cling so desperately to a man is honestly quite embarrassing to watch."

While she delivered this scathing speech, Joseph was standing merely two paces behind her.

I lifted my eyes slightly to look at him, but he deliberately shifted his gaze away from mine, keeping his eyes fixed on Katherine with a soft, accommodating smile playing on his lips.

He didn't say a word to defend me, nor did he even bother to knit his brows.

I lowered my eyes and said calmly, "You're entirely right, Ms. Byrd. I'll make sure to keep that in mind."

"At least you're smart," she snorted, turning on her heel and strutting away.

The sharp percussion of her heels echoed down the hallway, leading directly into the private corner office that had been hastily renovated specifically for her arrival.

Joseph followed closely behind her, the two of them chatting and laughing together in warm harmony.

Gradually, the familiar click of keyboards resumed around the room.

I retrieved my focus and returned my eyes to the screen, reviewing the unfinished lines of code before me, weighing how best to structure the remaining architectural logic.

I had spent three full months pouring my heart into this financial risk control system. The core architecture was fully established, the foundational algorithms had successfully navigated four rounds of rigorous stress testing, and the data convergence metrics looked flawless.

All it needed was another day or two to run the final battery of edge-case tests before the entire system could be packaged and deployed.

This project represented a massive investment of my energy, and I genuinely wanted to bring it to a pristine completion.

As I was deep in thought, a sudden shadow fell over my desk.

Joseph had slipped back over without me noticing.

He leaned down close to my station, bending close to my ear to whisper softly, "Thank you for not making a scene with Katherine just now, Addie. She's just straightforward and impulsive by nature, so please try to show a little extra patience with her.

"I'm only interacting with her because I have to manage the joint business interests between my company and her family's. Once this deal is completely sealed and settled, I promise I'll give you the status you deserve. You're the only woman I've ever chosen to spend my life with, so please don't make things difficult for me, alright?"

Had I not overheard his raw, calculated words in the bar last night, I might have been foolish enough to believe his smooth reassurances and willingly remain by his side as a quiet shadow.

I gave him a simple, placid nod. "Alright."

Satisfied with my response, he straightened up and walked away with a contented stride.

I stared at his retreating back for a brief second before toggling my focus back to the desktop monitor.

In the bottom right corner of the screen, a system notification quietly popped up: Permission Request Approved.

The application I had submitted early this morning for root-level master admin privileges on the core servers had been officially signed off by him.

When he hit approve, he likely hadn't even bothered to read the authorization title, his mind completely consumed with grand strategies to keep Katherine pleased.

Now that full administrative access was granted, I logged straight into the server cluster without losing a single beat.

Within moments, a specialized string of code was quietly injected into Wagner Tech's central server matrix.

I buried this line deep beneath layer upon layer of foundational architecture.

It didn't interfere with any current background operations, triggered zero system alarms, and appeared on the maintenance system logs as nothing more than a routine security patch.

Yet, when the moment arrived for me to invoke it, it would act as a master key turning inside a heavy vault lock.

Whether that lock remained open or slammed shut was entirely dependent on my mood.

Once the backdoor was impeccably disguised, I shifted my full concentration back to refining every detail of the financial risk control engine in front of me.

Before long, the sharp click of high heels resonated down the corridor once more, coming to a halt directly beside my workstation.

Katherine leaned over my shoulder, peering down at my screen with a critical eye.

"So this is the project you've been slaving away on?" she asked casually.

I glanced sideways at her without uttering a word.

She reached out a manicured finger, pointing carelessly at the screen while speaking in an offhand tone. "My family's engineering team phased out garbage like this three years ago. Running heavy data throughput on an architecture like this will probably choke and crash the system, won't it?"

I looked down quietly at the exact module her finger was pointing to.

That specific cluster was engineered explicitly to absorb massive data spikes during peak loads.

Choke and crash? Even under the highest concurrency load it had ever endured, it hadn't even consumed forty percent of the server's raw resource capacity.

She drew her hand back, adjusted her hair, and let out a light laugh. "Joseph kept praising your technical skills, so I thought I'd come over and take a look at what kind of genius could earn that much hype from him."

She dragged out her words with mock curiosity, her eyes lingering briefly on my face before casting a dismissive glance back at the monitor. "Is this really all there is to it? Doesn't look like anything special at all."

I offered no response, simply watching her performance in silence.

The sheer absurdity of her comment was equivalent to pointing at a commercial airliner and claiming its bicycle tires weren't round enough.

But there was zero need for me to waste my breath correcting her; she was free to chatter away to her heart's content.

Seeing that I gave her no reaction whatsoever, she quickly lost interest, turned on her high heels, and walked away.