Chapter 3

By the next morning, the office Slack was ablaze.

Linda posted an announcement, tagging `@channel`.

*A reminder to all staff: Vance Global client data is strictly proprietary. Certain interns need to learn their place and remember that youth and a pretty face won't save you from basic ethics.*

Her sycophants jumped on it within seconds.

Jake replied first: *Completely agree with Linda. Some people need a serious reality check.*

Another of Linda's inner circle, Brenda, chimed in: *Barely in the door and already cutting corners. Rumor has it she spends more time clinging to male colleagues than actually working.*

*Right? Wonder how she even passed the interview.*

My phone buzzed constantly as the notifications piled up. No one named me directly, but everybody knew who the target was.

Then came the leaked screenshots.

They were cropped text messages between me and Leo Miller, taken completely out of context from when we were collaborating on the Apex project.

*"Working late tonight?"*

*"I'll come find you."*

The caption added by an anonymous burner read: *Look at this intern. Begging male coworkers to 'work late' together every single night. Wonder what kind of 'work' they were doing?*

The gossip exploded.

*Gross.*

*No wonder Leo got shipped off to the warehouse. She dragged him down with her.*

*Why hasn't HR escorted her out yet?*

I locked my phone and set it face-down on my desk.

Around me, the atmosphere had turned toxic.

Nobody invited me to lunch.

Nobody let me speak in team syncs.

Whenever a workflow involved my desk, people went around me, waiting hours for Linda to sign off rather than exchanging a single word with me. I was treated like a walking plague.

Two days later, someone snapped a photo of me walking outside the Vance Global headquarters tower. Walking right beside me was our CEO, Ethan Vance.

The photo was dropped into a private departmental chat, and Linda got her claws on it instantly. She forwarded it across multiple internal channels with a vicious caption:

*Well, well. Look at our ambitious little intern. Done with the entry-level boys, now setting her sights on the corner office. All dressed up to rub shoulders with Ethan Vance himself. Lousy at work, but great on her knees, huh? Quite the promotion strategy.*

Within hours, the photo had gone viral across the whole building.

Whenever I walked down the hall, whispered giggles trailed behind me.

"That's her, right? The girl from the picture?"

"Unbelievable. An intern shooting that high."

"Who knows what kind of favors she's trading."

When I walked into the breakroom to fill my water bottle, three women talking by the counter went completely dead silent. As I turned to leave, snickers erupted behind my back.

I kept my chin up and kept walking.

Back at my desk, my phone buzzed with another screenshot forwarded from a side group:

*A thief AND a gold-digging side-chick? How is she not fired yet?*

Followed by a string of laughing emojis.

I muted my phone.

That afternoon, I walked past Leo's old cubicle. It was completely cleared out—just a bare desk and an empty plastic bin. He had been exiled to the dark basement storage rooms for an entire week just because he had stood up for me during the initial Apex project handoff.

I stood there for a long time.

No one dared to stand near me. No one dared to defend me.

I sat back down at my computer and opened a secure cloud folder.

There were hundreds of hateful messages, vicious memes, and targeted attacks.

I took high-resolution screenshots of every single one. I logged the timestamps, the user IDs, the specific Slack channels, and the names of the senders.

I didn't cry.

Tears don't fix corporate garbage. Solid, undeniable evidence does.

My screen pinged with a direct tag from Linda.

*Nia Sterling: You are assigned to event setup for the Apex Project Victory Gala tomorrow evening. Don't be late.*

I stared at the message for five seconds.

The victory gala.

I wrote the entire strategy. She stole the credit. Mark took the executive bonus. And now they wanted me to work as an unpaid banquet hand to celebrate their theft.

I typed two words: *Understood. Received.*

Then I went right back to compiling my evidence file.

*Keep going, Linda,* I thought coldly. *The higher you climb on stolen ground, the harder you're going to break when you hit the bottom.*