I didn’t, because I had learned by then to think the way my father thought about the algorithm itself: that the value of a thing is not in having it but in when you deploy it.

A card played early is a warning.

A card played at the exact moment your enemies believe they’ve won is a checkmate.

So I waited.

I let Sena believe her espionage had been clean and her father believe his subsidiary’s efficiency was his own achievement.

I let them build their whole merger on top of the buried fact that both companies, the one being swallowed and the one doing the swallowing, were running on technology that belonged entirely to me.