REBORN My Second Life I Became The Villianess (Nyxara) novel Chapter 73

My office chair gave a soft, familiar squeak as I spun it back around to face the dual monitors on my desk. The hum of the Cipher Core server room two floors down vibrated faintly through the ground, keeping a steady rhythm that matched the ticking clock in the corner. I unlocked my phone, tossed it onto the blotter, and reached for the cold cup of black coffee I had abandoned twenty minutes ago when Dario and I split ways for the morning.

The screen on my left monitor lit up with a secure messaging window, courtesy of Eli. He worked fast when he had a target, and Nysa was about as easy to hack as a plastic lockbox.

Since my identity as the head of Cipher Core stayed strictly hidden from the public, nobody in the building knew who I really was. To the staff, I was just a consultant or an upper-level analyst who kept to herself in the corner office.

My phone vibrated on the desk with an encrypted call from Eli . I tapped the screen to pick it up.

"Talk to me, Eli," I said, keeping my voice light.

"Got her comms routed boss," Eli's voice came through the small speakers, sounding crisp and slightly distracted by the sound of furious keyboard clacking on his end. "Took about three minutes to bypass her local provider firewall. Turns out she isn't nearly as smart with her secondary burner accounts as she thinks she is."

"Did she mention anything ?" I asked, spinning my pen between my fingers.

"Mostly everything," Eli replied, a faint sound of amusement in his tone. "She spent the last hour blowing up her group chats with a couple of her high-society cronies. She's convinced he's on the verge of leaving his family to run back to her."

I let out a dry laugh, shaking my head. "She is delusional. Did she mention Carlton?"

"Briefly," Eli said. "She told her friend that Carlton is completely useless and distracted by his golf club buddies, so she has a clear field to handle Dario. But wait, it gets better. I pulled her recent browser history and social media drafts too. I'm pinging the screenshots over to Chloe right now so she can cross-reference the public feeds."

"Good. Let me know what Chloe finds on her end as soon as she runs the analysis," I instructed.

"Will do," Eli said. "I'll sync up with her right now and loop you back in once we have the full picture."

"Sounds good," I said , ending the call.

I tossed the phone onto the desk and leaned back, spinning the chair slightly toward the glass wall. Nysa was sitting across town right now, probably freaking out over her empty phone and trying to figure out her next move. Eli and Chloe were already on the clock from their end. Soon enough, we would know every single person she ranted to, and then we could drop the next piece of the trap.

My phone vibrated again a few minutes later, this time with a direct message notification from Chloe routed through our encrypted channel.

Got the files from Eli, Chloe's text read. She drafted a whole photo post for I*******m, trying to make it look like she's sitting at some high-end private club with a mystery man, cropping the frame so people would assume she's with Dario. But she never actually posted it. She kept saving and deleting it every two minutes because she was too chicken to pull the trigger.

I typed back a quick reply. She wants the clout and the illusion of winning so badly, but she's too terrified of looking foolish if someone calls her bluff.

Exactly, Chloe answered almost instantly. She's desperate for control. Every time things start slipping out of her grip, she invents a new reality in her head and tries to force everyone else to live in it.

I locked my phone and set it back down on the blotter. Down the hall, one of the actual corporate executives walked past my door, completely unaware that the eighteen-year-old sitting in the corner office was the one actually calling the shots for the entire tech firm. Cipher Core answered to me, and nobody outside of Dario, my dad, Uncle Pascal, and the rest of the family had any idea.

The first phase of the trap had snapped shut, locking Nysa in an echo chamber of her own paranoia. Next came the money. Once my dad and Uncle Pascal finished freezing her accounts from their end in the other city, she wouldn't even be able to pay her credit card bills without triggering an alert on our dashboard.

I leaned back in my chair, watching the cursor blink on my main monitor. Let her text her friends. Let her draft her fake photos. Every little lie she told herself was just another brick in the wall we were building around her.

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