Chapter 3 - The Midnight Audit
The AURELIA skyscraper was a ghost town at 2:00 AM. Only the soft hum of the servers and the neon glow from the city below illuminated the executive floor.
Evelyn bypassed the elevator and took the executive stairwell down to the R&D level. She wore black trousers and a cashmere turtleneck, moving like a shadow.
Dr. Aris, the brilliant but eccentric head chemist, was sitting at his station, his face illuminated by a bank of computer monitors. He looked exhausted, his lab coat stained with coffee.
“Dr. Aris,” Evelyn said, stepping into the light.
The chemist jumped, nearly knocking over a beaker. “Ms. Sterling! I—I was just running the diagnostic logs on the servers. Someone bypassed the firewall, but the entry point wasn't external. It was local.”
Evelyn’s eyes narrowed. “Local? You mean someone plugged a physical drive into the mainframe?”
“Yes. Here, at terminal four.” Aris pointed to a sleek computer tucked away in the corner of the lab. “Two nights ago. At 3:15 AM.”
“Pull the security footage,” Evelyn ordered.
“I tried. The cameras on this floor were looped during that ten-minute window. Whoever did this knew our security protocols perfectly.”
Evelyn stared at terminal four. Only executives had access to the security protocols. Only Julian, Chloe, and the Board of Directors.
“Aris, is there any way to alter the Lumière formula now? To make our product noticeably superior to the stolen generic?”
The chemist ran a hand through his thinning hair. “In a week? Impossible. But… there is the Beta-compound. The experimental variant. It’s twice as potent, but we haven’t finished the standard three-year stability testing. It could cause skin irritation in five percent of users.”
“Five percent,” Evelyn repeated. In the cosmetics industry, a five percent failure rate was a public relations nightmare waiting to happen. But if they launched the stolen formula, AURELIA was dead anyway.
“Prepare the Beta-compound for mass production,” Evelyn said coldly.
“Evelyn, the FDA—the liability—”
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“I don’t care about liability right now, Aris. I care about survival. Make the switch. And do it entirely offline. No networks. No digital trails.”
She was going to let the thieves steal the original formula, only to render it obsolete on launch day.
