He Holds Off Marriage,I Make Him Beg For Code

Chapter 4 Activating the Encryption Lock

On the morning of the third day, Katherine abruptly called an urgent, cross-departmental meeting.

When I entered the conference room, over twenty people were already packed along the edges of the long table. Personnel from R&D, finance, legal, and operations were all present, filling the air with an uneasy tension.

Joseph sat at the head of the table, while Katherine stood confidently beside the projector screen, a thick stack of printed documents spread out before her.

Once everyone settled into their seats, she cleared her throat and began distributing the papers one by one down the table.

"These are records of Adelynn's correspondence with our direct competitors," she announced, her voice echoing sharply. "She has been leaking our core risk-control technology and selling off proprietary project data. She has betrayed this entire company."

When a sheet was slid in front of me, I picked it up and gave it a cursory glance.

The documents were riddled with painfully obvious signs of forgery—even the timestamps on the emails failed to align logically. Furthermore, the recipient domain name was an address that had only been registered two short months ago.

Anyone who spared these papers a single, critical glance would realize the evidence was a total fabrication. Yet, no one chose to look closely.

Instead, everyone kept their heads lowered, flipping through the pages with faces carefully frozen into expressions of grave, orchestrated solemnity.

Joseph didn't even bother looking at the so-called evidence.

He slammed his hands flat onto the table, pushing himself up from his seat at the head of the room. He leaned toward me and raised his voice loud enough for people in the hallway to hear.

"Adelynn, I never imagined you could be this kind of person! The company trusted you with its resources, and this is how you repay us? By selling our core technology?"

I met his gaze, staring back at him with absolute detachment.

There wasn't a shred of desire in his eyes to verify the truth. What I saw was a carefully manufactured, theatrical rage.

I knew him far too well. He was putting on this display of righteous fury purely because he believed he held all the cards.

He didn't care in the slightest whether I was being framed. He was simply operating under the assumption that I couldn't survive without him or this job—he expected me to panic, to break down, to plead for mercy, and to cry out in frantic self-defense.

He was using this absurd farce to intentionally grind me down, all to curry favor with Katherine.

Joseph's face hardened, his voice dripping with calculated coldness. "I'm choosing not to involve the police solely out of respect for our past history. Sign your resignation paperwork right now and get out."

Katherine let out a sharp, mocking sneer. "People who cling on desperately like this are truly pathetic. The proof is right here. Why haven't you packed your things yet?"

The conference room fell into a deathly, suffocating silence.

More than twenty pairs of eyes pinned themselves onto me.

Out of everyone present, not a single soul dared to speak up or object. There was only a cowardly, deafening quiet. Every person in the room was offering their silent complicity to this blatant frame-up.

If this had happened in the past, I might have felt wronged, weeping and desperate to argue my innocence.

But now, the sheer absurdity of it only struck me as comical.

I lifted my gaze, looking directly into the depths of Joseph's eyes with a strange, unprecedented serenity. My voice was light, almost conversational. "Are you absolutely certain you want me to leave?"

The question seemed to catch him off guard, stalling him for a split second before a wave of intense irritation rushed to replace his confusion.

He tilted his chin upward, forcing a single, low word through his clenched teeth. "Get out."

A faint, cold smile touched my lips. Perfect. That was just what I needed.

Reaching into my bag, I pulled out the resignation letter I had drafted and prepared three days ago. I uncapped my pen and signed my name in one swift, elegant motion, without a single shred of hesitation.

The moment the ink dried, I gently slid the document into the center of the table.

"As you wish."

I stood up, turned my back on them, and walked out of the conference room.

The instant my foot crossed the threshold of the doorway, my hand dipped into my pocket and firmly pressed a predetermined key on my phone.

A heartbeat later, the server arrays across the entire building erupted into a piercing, deafening shriek.

The frantic blare of the emergency alarms cut clean through the walls, plunging the conference room into immediate, chaotic uproar.

Engineers were frantically mashing their keyboards, their faces turning a ghostly, bloodless pale.

"The entire backend is completely locked down!"

"The risk-control system won't open! The project architecture is entirely frozen! All the source code has been encrypted!"

The strand of code I had planted three days ago had just awakened.

Every single structural framework I had personally built, every algorithm I had painstakingly iterated, and every system I had perfected carried my own exclusive, proprietary encryption lock.

The version I had left for them to play with was nothing more than a superficial shell. The true lifeblood and core architecture of the system had remained firmly in my grasp all along.

The color drained entirely from Katherine's face. Abandoning any semblance of her poised, aristocratic demeanor, she bolted from her chair and screamed frantically at me. "Adelynn! Stop right there! Hand over the decryption key!"

I didn't break my stride. My shoulders remained straight and unyielding, and I never once looked back. "The key is currently in the hands of my legal counsel. If you wish to unlock it, you can follow standard legal procedures."

Behind me, the heavy thud of an object being violently slammed against a desk echoed out, accompanied by the chaotic clatter of tumbling chairs.

Joseph's furious, desperate roar followed closely on its heels.

"Find someone to c***k it immediately! She built everything using the company's legacy frameworks. Hire external contractors—c***k that encryption lock no matter what it costs!"

He remained as arrogant and self-deluded as ever, genuinely believing that a mountain of cash could smooth over any obstacle.

What he failed to realize was that the nested, closed-loop encryption system I had engineered was mathematically impossible to break without my specific key.

I stepped into the elevator. As the doors slid shut and the cabin began its smooth descent, I pulled out my phone and accessed the lock configuration menu for the financial system.

A confirmation prompt materialized on the screen: Confirm activation in 72 hours?

I tapped the screen, confirming the order.

Let them waste their time scrambling for expensive contractors. Let them harbor the delusion that they can decipher my code. Let them cling to a desperate, false hope.

Only when they think they were close would I ensure their fall was absolute.

The elevator chimed as it reached the lobby, the doors parting smoothly.

Just beyond the grand glass entrance of the building, a sleek, black Maserati sat waiting at the curb. The rear passenger door was open, and my father was sitting quietly inside.

I slid into the seat beside him. He offered me a single, quiet look, asking for no explanations or details. He spoke just two simple words: "Welcome back."

His voice was calm and steady, carrying the exact same measured tone as his parting words a decade ago when I first walked out the front door. Back then, he told me, "Go on then."

Yet, those brief words were powerful enough to catch and anchor everything I had suppressed over the last three days—and the last ten years.

"I'm back," I replied softly.

In that single moment, I finally shed every ounce of the meek compliance and agonizing compromise that had defined my life, severing the final tie to a past built on misplaced devotion.

My father looked at the profound sense of relief washing over my face, his expression turning solemn. "Good. Now, there is a major announcement we must officially make to the world."