The Bidding War

The sunlight was already gone when Ava slouched into her desk, setting her phone to silent in a futile attempt to stem the tide of notifications. She’d barely set her laptop down before her inbox pinged with a fresh subject line: Interest from NovaForge Capital.

Her heart leapt. NovaForge didn’t cold email. They were kingmakers—if you could stomach the trade.

She clicked through. Crisp, clinical prose: Impressed by SecureStack’s traction and technical edge. Would like to schedule meeting for preliminary diligence. Please confirm availability tomorrow, in-person. —Fiona Chao, Partner.

Raj appeared in the doorway, hair in disarray, holding the office’s dying coffeepot with both hands. “You see the NovaForge email?”

Ava nodded. “And three others. Arcadia Ventures. Merlin Equity. Even Brantley from FinSight—it’s like they all woke up at once.”

Raj perched on the edge of her desk, dark circles under his eyes. “They’re circling. They probably heard about Victor sniffing around. They know you’d rather take their money than his.”

Ava forced a smile. “Assuming their money doesn’t come with its own poison.”

Raj’s phone buzzed. He sighed. “Jonah’s pinging—‘critical bug on demo instance’—again. Says the endpoint’s throwing 500s. Jittery after the sabotage, maybe.”

Ava’s stomach contracted. “Is it just the demo? Or piloting clients too?”

“Hard to tell,” Raj muttered. “He needs me.”

Ava nodded. “I’ll handle investor calls. Iron out the demo.”

Raj hesitated before leaving, voice subdued. “If one of these outfits offers enough, maybe… maybe we should just take it. Sell, merge, whatever word they want. Get out before Victor or the mole kills us.”

Ava heard the unspoken weight: his mortgage, his family. But she couldn’t let that shape her next move—not with everything they’d built at stake.

Arcadia’s partner, Brandon Kim, chose the Ritual Cafe. He arrived two minutes late, stylishly disheveled, radiating relentless optimism.

He flashed a smile over his oat milk cortado. “We’re not like NovaForge. They grow companies into platforms—doesn’t always work for founders. We back teams. If you want to pivot, change focus, that’s fine.”

Ava studied him. “You’re saying you’ll go hands-off?”

He leaned in, all sincerity. “Not hands-off; hands-open. We’d like a board seat, veto on any cap table changes, splits on IP licensing, and channel partners from day one. And… drop the consumer feature set. Focus only on enterprise.”

It always came down to control. Ava forced another smile. “I’ll get back to you.”

Brandon shrugged. “Just don’t wait too long. In this market, someone else will.”

Two calls later, Merlin Equity’s proposal landed over Signal. Less board oversight, less check size. But their ‘growth partner’? A former Stone Labs PM—Victor’s company. Ava could practically smell his fingerprints all over the pitch.

By afternoon, Fiona from NovaForge swept in with diamond-hard efficiency.

“I’ll be blunt,” she said, folding her arms in a half-glass cube meeting room. “With Victor’s next platform rumored to be weeks from launch and your pilot clients shaky, you don’t have many shots left. We can lead a $5 million round—on two conditions: freeze all outbound demos until we complete code review, and replace your current CTO in ninety days.”

Ava stiffened. “That’s not an option.”

Fiona was unimpressed. “Every founder says that before they see their new funding wire. Do what you have to do. But be careful what you walk away from.”

Back at the office, Ava stumbled into a hornet’s nest. Maya hunched over her terminal, jaw tight, scrolling through error traces. Jonah hovered behind her, arms folded, face unreadable as a lock screen.

“It’s some kind of regression,” Maya said, voice brittle. “External queries to the threat-detection endpoint return null. Internals are clean; prod is borked.”

Jonah cut her off. “We pushed nothing since yesterday. I checked hashes. Someone rewrote the Dockerfile.”

Ava eyed them both. “Who had late access last night?”

Jonah shrugged. “Nobody but me. But the logs show Maya’s token pinged in at 3:14am.”

Maya bristled. “No way! I was sleeping—again.”

Ava worked hard to keep her tone even. “Nobody’s being accused. But no one works alone from now on. Pushes need in-person sign-off. Full monitoring stack—no exceptions.”

Jonah stared, offended. “You think we’re the ones—”

Raj emerged from the kitchen, face pale. “We lost uptime with Fortune client two. They’re threatening to yank the pilot.”

Panic fluttered in Ava’s gut. “Patch the regression with whatever’s stable. I’ll call their CISO. Tell him we were doing late-stage hardening and uncovered a legacy misconfig. Use the word ‘resilience.’”

It was a lie—but in war, the rules bent.

Raj nodded, defeated.

Ava ducked into the broom-closet sized phone booth and dialed the client. She spun the network failure into an act of vigilance: “...proactive defense, ongoing system improvements, industry best practices…”

The CISO sounded less than convinced, but relented. “One more incident and we’re gone.”

Ava’s pulse hammered. The stakes kept rising.

Her phone buzzed—a blocked number. She hesitated, then swiped to answer.

Heavy static, a hiss. Then: “Watch your push-trace. Jonah’s not what he seems. Check his ssh tunnel logs. Look where you haven’t. And be ready.”

A click, then silence.

Ava’s blood ran cold. Anonymous tips were never good news, but the voice was altered—machine-like, genderless. Not Victor. Not Karen. Someone on the inside, or close to it.

She stepped out, heart galloping.

She relayed the bug and the call to Raj in private over a can of warm juice. He listened, silent, jaw set.

“We can’t go full witch-hunt. But if SSH logs put Jonah at the scene…” Raj’s face was a war between fear and grim hope. “If he’s the leak, we need evidence. If the tip’s a setup, even more careful.”

Ava didn’t reply. Her head raced through Karen’s advice, through every short exchange with Jonah and Maya, who still glowered at one another across the bullpen.

Ava’s phone buzzed again—it was Brantley from FinSight: “Final decision: will you take $4 million for 51%? Board control, founder earn-outs. Offer expires tomorrow.”

She stared at the message. Board control. Loss of power in her own company. The meaning was clear: get rich, but step aside.

Raj saw the message over her shoulder. His voice, when it came, was tired, almost pleading. “This isn’t worth burning out. Take the deal. Walk away before everyone gets hurt—before we get hurt.”

But Ava saw everything crystal clear, for the first time. Take the money, lose the dream. Trust the wrong one, lose everything.

She forced her voice steady. “No. Not yet. We play it out. But we do it eyes open.”

In the dimness of the empty office, she dialed up the logs, SSH traces, commit hashes—suddenly sure the next move wouldn’t just decide their runway, but who would even remain at SecureStack when the dust settled.

Outside, the city hummed with endless opportunity and threat—a zero-sum game, where sometimes your enemy wore the face of your closest ally.