"I returned from my overseas trip a day ahead of schedule, only to discover my bride-to-be pinning my mother against the kitchen counter.

The following morning, I invited Chloe back to the house. I had sent my mother on a luxury, two-week vacation to a private resort in Tuscany, surrounded by elite security. She was safe, pampered, and entirely out of the crossfire.

When Chloe walked through the front door, she was cautious, testing the waters.

"Is Margaret here?" she asked softly, looking around.

"No. She's traveling," I replied smoothly, handing her a cup of coffee. "I thought about what you said. We've been under a lot of stress. I want to move past this."

Chloe’s eyes lit up with triumph. She hid it quickly, replacing it with a look of overwhelming gratitude. "Oh, Alexander. Thank you. I promise, I'll make it up to you. I love you so much."

"I know you do," I said, taking a sip of my black coffee. "In fact, to show you how much I trust you, I've decided to move my home office out of the locked wing. I want our home to feel open."

Over the next week, I executed my trap. I purposefully left my private laptop open on my desk. I left "confidential" files sitting on the printer. I became the careless, trusting fiancé she thought I was.

But the files were a meticulously crafted poison.

The Artemis Project was my company's most guarded secret—a revolutionary AI algorithm for predicting global market shifts. I had my lead engineers create a shadow version of the code. It looked completely authentic. It possessed the same complex architecture. But buried deep within its core was a catastrophic flaw. If integrated into a live trading system, it wouldn't predict the market; it would intentionally execute disastrous trades, hemorrhaging capital at a terrifying speed.

Three days later, my security system alerted me. At 2:00 AM, while I was supposedly sleeping, Chloe crept into my office.

Through the hidden camera in the smoke detector, I watched my beautiful fiancée plug a high-capacity encrypted flash drive into my laptop. She spent twenty minutes copying the shadow files of the Artemis Project.