Chapter 3

And just like that, Lily moved into the Vance mansion with Austin, completely unofficial.

At first, she tried to maintain a peaceful facade with me.

But slowly, her greedy and selfish nature began to show.

Whenever my parents weren't looking, she would bark orders at Maria, our housekeeper, like she owned the place.

"Maria, I already told you I don't drink cold tea. Go change it right now."

"I don't drink bottled water that costs less than ten dollars. It's bad for the baby."

As an art and design major, I was working on a clay sculpture in the living room one afternoon. She walked by, dramatically covering her nose, trying to start a fight.

"Oh my god, Chloe! Does this clay emit formaldehyde? That is extremely toxic for the baby!"

I didn't even bother looking at her. "If it were toxic, I'd be dead by now. Stop crying about it."

She immediately turned around and ran to complain to Austin.

Austin stormed in, took one look, and smashed my graduation project—which I had spent over a year working on—into pieces. He glared at me with pure disgust.

"Don't you know Lily is pregnant? Why are you still messing around with this garbage in the house?!"

This wasn't the first time she had picked a fight to ruin my relationship with Austin.

But I didn't care. My brain-dead brother was someone who, in my past life, was willing to murder his own sister for a girl. I already knew he was beyond saving, so I had zero expectations for him.

Since the day he came back, I never gave him a warm face.

Austin, on the other hand, put on the full pompous show of being the "rightful male heir." He treated me like his mortal rival, constantly trying to push me out of the Vance Group and put me down.

In my past life, because I wanted to make up for those lost eighteen years, I did everything I could to help him get familiar with the company.

Because of Lily's "death," he had worked tirelessly out of sheer spite and hatred. Powered by revenge, he actually managed to run the company quite well within a year.

But in this life, with his sweet underage wife by his side and a fake heir in her belly, he had become incredibly arrogant. He Picked fights with me every single day, learned absolutely nothing about actual business, and spent all his time doting on his wife, muttering nonsense like, "My primary duty as the heir is to protect the next-generation heir."

Today, we went to the headquarters for a board meeting.

The meeting was about whether to upgrade or shut down an outdated supply chain.

Austin raised his hand, speaking with immense confidence. "I believe any supply chain that can't keep up with technology should be shut down. Keeping it is just a waste of company resources."

That supply chain was indeed outdated. He wanted to cut the entire department to save costs and maximize profit.

On paper, it sounded great. But he completely ignored the lives of hundreds of factory workers and over a thousand employees in that division. How could that be a smart business decision?

I raised an objection. "I suggest we allocate a portion of the budget to upgrade the technology of the existing factories. This avoids the cost of building new ones from scratch. We save on recruitment and training costs while keeping our experienced workforce. What do you all think?"

The moment I finished, the board members relaxed and nodded in approval.

"Chloe, you are so young, yet you handle major corporate decisions so cleanly. You have a great future ahead of you!"

Before Austin came back, my parents had trained me as the sole heir. I had been running around the business world with them since I was a kid. Even though I was younger than Austin, I had far more experience.

When it came to handling tricky corporate issues, he was nowhere near my level.

So, he decided to target the company's newest, highly anticipated project.