Chapter 2

I walked out of the award ceremony. The cool night air hit my burning face. I ignored the perfect, desperate PR show happening behind me.

I got into my car. The radio was playing a live broadcast. Richard's voice came on. It sounded sickeningly gentle and sad.

"Evelyn is under a lot of stress. I will help her through this hard time," he lied flawlessly to the press.

My hands gripped the steering wheel tight enough to turn my knuckles white. He was terrifyingly good at this. He always played the perfect husband. He always pinned the "crazy and out of control" label squarely on me.

A violent urge to scream flared in my chest. I wanted to crash the car. But I just drove.

I went straight home. I opened the door and walked directly down to the basement studio. He always casually called this room a "storage space".

Thousands of my intricate sketches covered the walls. He never truly understood those complex drawings. The air smelled like old paper and cold coffee. It was the permanent perfume of my burned-out youth.

I did not cry. I was far too tired to shed tears. Twelve years of hiding in the dark would not just build his peak. They would serve as the bricks for his beautiful grave.

Ding.

The sharp noise of the printer broke the silence. A piece of paper popped out.

I walked over and touched the printed sketch. It was my precise design. But my name was entirely gone. Someone had clumsily typed "Sienna Brooks" over my work.

I stared hard at the fake name. A cold, hollow laugh escaped my throat. It echoed loudly in the empty room. They were ravenously greedy. They could not even wait a single night to steal my files.

My phone suddenly buzzed wildly on the desk. It was Richard.

I answered the call. His voice was instantly cold and bossy.

"Why are you making a fuss?" he demanded. "Don't forget. You are just a shadow behind the scenes. Without me, you don't have a single client."

A year ago, those manipulative words would crush my self-esteem. I would apologize immediately. I would work even harder to prove my worth. But not tonight.

"Is that so?" I said very quietly.

My voice was completely dead and flat. I sounded exactly like a judge passing a death sentence.

"Let's wait and see," I said.

I pressed the end button without another word.

I left the basement and walked upstairs to Richard's study.

He had already changed the system passwords. He arrogantly thought a new password could lock up my twelve years of hard work.

He conveniently forgot one crucial detail. I wrote the core code for this entire system. I typed every single line of it myself.

I sat at his computer. A cloud sync note instantly popped up on the bottom right of the screen.

Sienna Brooks uploaded 3 documents.

I watched the screen in silence. Sienna was actively stealing my unpublished drafts right now. She did not just want my husband. She wanted to steal my whole identity.

Surprisingly, I did not feel angry. Instead, a dark, thrilling sense of control washed over me.

My fingers flew across the keyboard. I bypassed his basic passwords entirely. I went straight into the backend server. I tracked all of his digital footprints.

Line after line of time stamps rolled down the screen. They looked exactly like the hard evidence I needed.

Then, my eyes stopped on one specific record.

My breath caught painfully in my throat. A sharp physical pain hit my chest.

The first access record was not from today.

It was from three years ago.