Chapter 2

My engineering team' s group chat lit up almost immediately.

Messages of support, outrage, and a dozen different ways to say "what the hell?"

"Saw the post. Unbelievable."

"Fifty bucks? After that algorithm? She' s lost it."

"Julian? He barely knows what AI stands for."

Bella had made Julian' s hiring a spectacle, a communications major who' d dropped out of college, now our CBO.

He' d been with us barely two months.

She' d praised his "insightful contributions to the Series B pitch deck" in the all-hands meeting last week.

The same pitch deck I' d pulled all-nighters on for a month.

I remembered suggesting Dr. Aris Thorne for a senior research role, a Stanford PhD with incredible credentials.

Bella had waved it off. "We don't need more academics, Liam. We need people with real-world savvy, people like Julian."

Real-world savvy apparently meant knowing how to charm the CEO.

The company-wide email landed in my inbox the next morning: Monthly Performance Bonuses.

Julian Vance: Top Tier Bonus - $50,000.

The justification listed project milestones that were clearly, undeniably, the work of my team, my direct reports.

My name, and the names of my entire engineering team, were at the bottom.

Bonus: $0.

Worse, a sub-note: "Salary deductions for Q4 will be implemented for the engineering department due to inefficient resource utilization."

Inefficient resource utilization.

That was a new one.

It meant covering Julian' s new gaming consoles for his "creative pod," the imported ergonomic chairs, the weekly gourmet catering for his "branding brainstorming sessions."

The team chat exploded again.

"Salary docked? For what? Julian's PlayStation?"

"This is insane. She's bleeding the company dry for that leech."

"Liam, we can't stay. This isn't Innovatech anymore."

They were right.

The respect was gone, the vision clouded by Bella' s infatuation.

The work, our work, was being devalued, stolen.

This wasn't just about a bonus or a Tesla.

It was systematic.

It was about Bella choosing him, a fraud, over us, the foundation of the company.

The betrayal wasn't just personal anymore, it was professional, and it was costing all of us.