All Chapters of Betrayed, I Become The CEO'S Contracted Bride: Chapter 171 - Chapter 180

Elara laid the approach out on the kitchen island like a protocol, and Victoria knocked it down before the coffee finished brewing."So you fly in," Victoria said, "find a sixteen-year-old genius, and tell her the gift she's built her whole self around is a chemical her mentor's been feeding her. That's the plan.""That's the truth.""I didn't ask if it was true. I asked if it was the plan." Victoria pulled a stool to the island. "Because if you walk up to that kid and say your brilliance isn't yours, she hears one thing. An attack."Elara turned the page of her notes. "She has a right to know what's being done to her.""She has a right. She also has a sixteen-year-old's ears." Victoria tapped the counter. "At that age your gift isn't a fact. It's the whole load-bearing wall. You tell her it's fake and you're not handing her the truth, you're knocking the wall out and walking away while the roof comes down."Chen set a mug in front of each of them. "Victoria has a point about the fram

"You had a visitor yesterday," Reyes said, settling into the chair across from Mira with his tablet already open."I have visitors most weeks." Mira kept her eyes on her own screen. "You usually don't ask about them.""I ask about the ones who book a private room and skip the program office." He set the tablet flat. "Dr. Vance. Visiting fellow. She came to see you specifically and left without filing a report with anyone but you.""She brought me a problem." Mira shrugged. "I solved it. She left.""What problem.""A synthesis route with a dead fork. Real one. She hasn't cracked it." Mira finally looked up, and there was a small heat in it she rarely showed him. "She didn't talk down to me. That was new."Reyes smiled at that, an easy and practiced smile, and underneath it he started counting. A visiting fellow with an unsolved synthesis problem who knew to book around the office. A fellow who asked for Mira by name. A fellow whose problem happened to feature exactly the kind of fork t

"Pull the tech's access history. Not because I suspect them. Because the door went in somewhere and maintenance is the obvious somewhere." She lifted the casing free and looked at the board underneath, and there it was, small and patient, a component that had no reason to sit where it sat. "Here. Something was added during a window when the box was open and trusted."Alexander looked at the tiny addition. "A transmitter.""A receiver with a buffer. It holds a message until the machine wakes, then delivers it locally, so the box looks air-gapped because it is. Nothing comes in over a network. It comes in over the air to this, and this hands it over from the inside." She photographed it without touching it. "Elegant. He likes elegant.""Can you trace the signal that fed it," Chen asked."That's the thread." She set the board under a scope and pulled the buffer's log, the record of when the receiver had caught its payload and from which direction. The data resolved slowly, a timestamp, a

"How long have you been getting them.""A few months. They come when I'm working hard." Mira frowned at the page, defensive now. "It's just concentration. The work's getting harder so I push harder.""And the sleep," Elara said. "Do you sleep."Mira looked up sharply. "Why does that matter for a chemistry problem.""It doesn't. It matters for the person solving it." Elara kept the words plain, scientist to scientist, no alarm in them. "I ask because I had headaches at your age. Blinding ones, right behind the eyes, worse when I was thinking fast. And I stopped sleeping, not from worry, the way the counselors all assumed, but because my head wouldn't slow down enough to let me. I'd lie there and the work kept running without my permission."Mira had gone still, the page forgotten under her hand. "That's exactly it. The not slowing down. They keep telling me to relax and they don't understand that I can't, that there's no switch, that it just keeps going whether I want it to or not.""T

I can use mine as the scaffold and adjust for the differences in her dose, because his compound on her is a refinement of his compound on me."Alexander stepped closer to the screen. "How long to build it.""That's the wrong question." She put a single number on the wall, an estimate with error bars wide enough to be honest. "The right question is how long I have. Her symptoms put her two to four weeks from a locked architecture. Once it locks, the stabilizer's useless. There's nothing to hold at a baseline because the build is finished. After that, she's where I am. Self-sustaining. Permanent. Free of the dose and stuck with the result forever.""And the build itself," Chen pressed. "Realistically.""Realistically, a stabilizer this specific takes months." She let the number sit. "I have weeks. The first synthesis path I try will fail, because they always do, and I don't have the runway to fail the normal number of times."The room held that for a moment. Chen took off his glasses an