The CEO Chasing his EX-Wife.

Chapter10: “Elena’s Stand

Elena’s hand trembled as she slid the key into the lock of the new office door.

Not from nerves—she’d long since outgrown that—but because the door felt too light.

White metal, freshly painted with Moore Insights in clean sans-serif letters, the lacquer still soft to the touch.

She’d signed the lease three days ago, paid six months upfront with every lunch skipped, every taxi refused, every “I’ll treat myself later” deferred. Now, finally, she could put we on a door instead of whispering it into silence.

“The first profitable quarter,” she said aloud, testing the sentence like a stone dropped into a well. “Forty thousand course sales. Ad contracts through Q2 next year. Bank account finally in the black.”

She stepped inside, tossed her bag onto the lone desk.

Outside, Nanjing’s sky hung pale blue after rain. The scent of chili oil drifted up from the noodle shop below. She smiled, opened her laptop, and hovered over i********:.

Caption drafted: From a shared apartment to our own office—we made it this far.

Then the screen went black.

Not a crash. A full power cut. Emergency lights flickered on two seconds later. Neighbors’ AC units sputtered back to life.

She rebooted. Alerts flooded in—unauthorized server access, database encryption, ransom note delivered.

She clicked the attachment.

An audio file.

A woman’s voice, slow and syrupy, like a lullaby: “Go home and cook, darling. This world isn’t for you.”

Elena didn’t scream. Didn’t throw the laptop. She played it once. Then again. A third time. Then dialed Kevin Zhao—the freelance dev who’d once trolled her livestream with, *“Your backend looks like my grandma’s knitting,” and got blocked for it.

“Kevin,” she said, flat. “I’ve been hacked.”

Silence on the line. Then: “Sophia?”

“How do you—?”

“I don’t *know her. But I know that tone. Like sugar over a knife.” He exhaled. “Don’t call the police. Cops take days. You don’t have hours. I’ll help.”

By 2 a.m., Elena sat on the floor, back against the printer, chewing a cold scallion pancake. The office wasn’t empty anymore. Kevin crouched by the router, cables snaking around him like ivy. Hannah Li—investor’s assistant, quiet, observant—came up from the convenience store with two paper cups of bitter coffee. Chen, the part-time designer, curled on the couch, redrawing UI mockups on her lap.

“Thirty-seven percent data restored,” Kevin muttered. “They bounced through six nodes. But the final decryption request? Came from a flat in Gulou. Registered to Li Wei—Sophia’s assistant.”

Elena stared at the address. Then laughed—short, sharp. “She’s scared.”

“Of course she is,” Hannah said, handing her coffee. “You spoke about the ‘invisible tax on women founders’ last week. Two million views. My father shared it. People like her don’t fear your success. They fear you making their cruelty *visible.”

Elena didn’t answer.

She opened her livestream app, pointed the camera at herself—no makeup, hair tangled, shadows under her eyes—and hit Go Live.

“Hi,” she said. “I’m Elena. Tonight, someone attacked my company. They encrypted all our customer data. Demanded 200K. Left a message telling me to go home and cook.”

The chat exploded.

【WHO DID THIS?】【CALL THE POLICE!!!】【DON’T YOU DARE GIVE UP】

She shook her head. “I’m not calling the police. Not yet. Because I have a business to run tomorrow. But I can tell you this—I know who’s behind it.”

She uploaded the IP trace, the audio, Li Wei’s lease agreement. Posted it to Weibo. Tagged Sophia’s legal team.

Caption: *Next time, I’ll sue directly.

The stream lasted forty-seven minutes. When she ended it, the internet moved like water finding cracks. Devs wrote recovery scripts. Designers rebuilt assets. A professor in Shanghai added her course to a gender economics syllabus. A Discord channel—*#SaveMoore—popped up, then a GitHub repo, then a donation pool for server migration.

By noon on day three, the system was back.

Kevin became their first full-time engineer. Salary: modest. Conditions: he must wear his “I Love Bugs” T-shirt every day. Hannah didn’t leave. She slipped Moore Insights into her boss’s due diligence queue—*just as a footnote*, she said. But she made sure the footnote was bold.

Elena stood by the door, watching her reflection in the glass.

She hadn’t won. Sophia was still out there. Nicholas hadn’t spoken. The funding hadn’t cleared. But she was still standing—not because someone let her, not because she got lucky, but because a handful of people who owed her nothing chose to show up. Because she kept the camera on.

She posted a new photo. Same caption as before. One word changed.

*From a shared apartment to our own office—we refuse to be unseen.

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