Bitcoin Billionaire: I Regressed to Invest in the First Bitcoin!-Chapter 258: Agent Lilian Greaves

The rest of the executive team — Rachel, Sandy, Kara and Amelia evacuated the Meeting Room, leaving Darren and the unsmiling Lilian Greaves sitting on opposite chairs.

Darren had a penetrative look on his face, a challenging gaze. But Lilian didn’t react outwardly. Her posture remained ramrod straight, hands clasped loosely before her, a statue carved from bureaucratic resolve.

Inside, however, a familiar cold focus settled, the kind honed over years of chasing ghosts in spreadsheets and transaction logs.

Lilian Greaves hadn’t stumbled into the Department of Financial Integrity by accident. Her path was forged in the white-hot crucible of 2008.

Ever since she was little, she had dedicated herself to being the pure description of success.

At first, she was a bright-eyed economics major, interning at a mid-tier investment bank in Manhattarn. But she hated how she was being looked down on.

Senior traders patted her head almost everyday and called her ’kid’. When it wasn’t that, it was the desperate, hushed calls and coded language masking colossal fraud.

Two weeks later, she was holding her father’s hand in their suddenly too-quiet Kings apartment as he stared blankly at the foreclosure notice.

His pension which he had saved over thirty years as a machinist, had evaporated into the complex, deliberately opaque schemes those men had created.

Seeing her father sad and depressed, betrayed by the very people meant to protect people like him, it broke something inside of her.

And to make it worse, he’d taken his own life three years later, a quiet exit that felt like a final indictment of the world that failed him.

In the end, it only fueled her to become ruthless in her goal for true success.

But this time, she had her eyes set on something else: the government. She was going to become the change she wanted in the world, and being part of the government was the only way she could.

She joined the military, and not many years after, she found herself in the Department of Financial Integrity.

The Department became her armor and her weapon. She learned the labyrinthine regulations, the subtle art of forensic accounting, the way money could bleed through digital walls and reappear continents away.

She developed an almost preternatural ability to spot the anomalies, the tiny fractures in narratives that hinted at larger structural flaws.

She pursued financial predators not both righteous fury and chilling, meticulous preciseness. No one was going to get past her doing anything illegal.

Darren Steele, to her, was another potential malignancy. His rise had been meteoric, shrouded in the mystique of cryptocurrency – a world she viewed with profound suspicion.

But Bitcoin was pure trash if anyone wondered about her opinion.

It wasn’t what she cared for. It wasn’t what bothered her.

What bothered her was the culture it fostered: the Wild West mentality, the disdain for established oversight, the celebration of opacity as ’privacy’.

She’d watched the news, she’d read papers about him. Steele was charismatic, undeniably brilliant, and built an empire mining digital gold out of silicon and code.

But to Lilian, he represented a new breed of alchemist, turning complex algorithms and regulatory grey zones into staggering wealth and power, potentially replicating the systemic risks that had shattered her world. freёnovelkiss.com

The digital market was to never grow. Never.

She would be the last line of defence when it came to stopping trash and digital businesses like Bitcoin from expanding.

So for Darren Steele, and that smug look on his face. She saw his calm defiance as the arrogance of someone who believed the rules didn’t apply to him. He was precisely the kind of ghost she’d dedicated her life to exterminating.

He would be destroyed, especially now she had her sights set on him.

"I have a question about the Navarro facility. The operational status. What are the current power consumption metrics?"

Darren leaned back, steepling his fingers. "You have no idea how misinformed you are, Agent Greaves. The Navarro warehouse facility has not even been launched. It is still in the commissioning phase. Final stress testing. Power draw fluctuates significantly during that process. Hardware manifests are proprietary, and network topology... Well, that is a security concern." He delivered it calmly, reasonably. "I can’t just give it to you."

Lilian didn’t look like she gave half of a fuck. "Your objection is noted and overruled under Section B-2, subsection 7, pertaining to infrastructure supporting high-risk financial instruments. Proprietary status does not supersede federal oversight authority in this context. Provide the data."

"We’ll need clarification on the specific scope requested to avoid unnecessary exposure of sensitive IP."

"All documentation related to the facility’s operational capacity and connectivity," Lilian stated, her gaze never leaving Darren. "Including logs of any test transactions run through its systems during the commissioning window."

Darren was expressionless. This was turning into a cold gaze competition. "Test transactions are just that – tests. Meaningless data packets. Simulated loads."

"Simulations can be instructive," Lilian countered. "They reveal patterns, methodologies. They can also," she paused deliberately, "be used as camouflage for live transfers. The flagged activity coincides precisely with your ’testing’ window at Navarro."

Darren chuckled, genuinely amused by her speculations. "Correlation isn’t causation, Agent. Network spikes happen during commissioning."

"Spikes that perfectly mirror the timing and volume of anomalous BTC aggregations traced to an LLC linked to this building?" Lilian clapped back flatly. "R. Talmor. Who is that, Mr. Steele? A contractor? A silent partner? An alias?"

Darren shrugged. "How am I supposed to know? Steel Investments deals with numerous vendors and partners globally. I’d need to consult internal records to identify that specific reference."

"Convenient," Lilian murmured, almost to herself, but loud enough to carry. She opened a slim folder, extracting another sheet. "This is a warrant authorization, signed this morning, granting me full, immediate access to your core network logs, including all administrative access records and encryption key histories. Your IT department," she glanced at the door, "will facilitate this. Now."

"Well the legitimacy of that warrant is still in question."

"It’s signed by the government."

"And we were notified barely minutes before you appeared here. That calls for questioning."

"Oh. Oh. You are just so smart, aren’t you?"

"I suspect we both are."

They stopped talking, gazing straight into each other’s eyes, angrily... Or almost.

"Let’s talk about intent, Mr. Steele." Lilian said, breaking the glare off. "Why build such... redundancy into your systems? Why the complex routing? Why the need for entities like ’R. Talmor’ if your operations are entirely above board?"

"Who says ’R. Talmor’ is my entity? I just told you I have no idea who that is."

Lilian ignored that and leaned forward slightly, the first hint of real pressure. "Was it always the plan? To build a mining empire on the edge of compliance? To exploit the lag between innovation and regulation?"

Darren met her intensity with a calm that felt unnerving. He studied her face – the lines of tension around her eyes, the rigid set of her shoulders that spoke of years of bearing institutional weight.

’What a brilliant, annoying woman.’

"Exploit?" Darren repeated softly, almost musingly. He let the word hang for a beat. "Or adapt? The system you represent, Agent Greaves... it moves slowly. Sometimes it breaks. Sometimes," his voice dropped, becoming colder, sharper, cutting through the room’s tension like ice, "it breaks people. Irrevocably. People like your father."

Boom.

Stunning silence followed that.

Lilian Greaves froze. Her meticulously controlled expression didn’t crack, but a terrible stillness settled over her. The blood drained from her face, leaving it ashen beneath the harsh fluorescent lights.

"Wha— what did you just say?"