He Took My Room For Her, I Left For Revenge

Chapter 3

The air inside the conference room froze solid in the blink of an eye.

But when Ethan looked at me, not a single flicker of doubt crossed his eyes. "Since you say Vera does not have enough experience, let her take charge of that cross-border project with Westmeria," he said. "It will be good experience for her."

A soft scrape of a shifting chair sounded right beside me.

Out of the corner of my eye, I caught sight of our youngest designer, his knuckles white where he clenched his fists.

Everyone in this room knew this cross-border deal was a brutal tough nut we had cracked after pulling nearly a hundred all-nighters and scrapping more than a dozen drafts of our proposal. At that moment, we were only one signature away from locking the contract in.

Yanking the project out from under us at the eleventh hour was outright theft.

"Fine," I heard my own voice say, steady and cold as an emotionless machine. "Leon, pack up all the project files and hand them over to Miss Lane within half an hour."

"Miss Hayes!" project manager Leon Shaw could not hold it in any longer. He shot up from his seat, his face tight with suppressed anger.

But one sharp glance from Ethan was all it took. He gritted his teeth, then dropped back into his chair with a heavy thud.

Vera stepped up to me, holding out her hand. That faint timid air she always carried was long gone, replaced by bright, unmasked glee. "Yara, do not worry," she said. "I will study hard. I will not let you down."

I did not take her hand. I just set the project USB drive down on the table and offered her a polite warning. "We are already at the one-yard line, but do not get careless," I said. "Their legal team and assistants are total trouble to deal with."

Vera snatched up the drive right away. I could not tell if she had even heard a word I said.

Ethan walked out with Vera, and he even paused to murmur a gentle reminder not to overwork herself on the way out.

The moment the conference room door clicked shut behind them, I heard a chair crash over, followed by the low, angry curses of my team members.

Everyone's morale deflated instantly, just like a balloon pricked with a pin.

I picked up my pen and tapped it against the conference table. The sharp, crisp tap-tap echoed through the whole room. "Everyone, attention," I said. "Let us move on to our next project."

"Delron Group's Asia-Pacific strategic upgrade project," I continued. "Double the budget, and we have eight months to pull it off."

A sea of blank stares swung my way. No one could process what I had just said.

I curled my lips into a faint smirk and kept speaking. "They reached out to me personally last week," I said. "I sat on the news because we had to finish chewing through that tough project we just wrapped up first."

"Now that someone else has volunteered to take that one off our hands," I added, "we get to focus on sinking our teeth into this far bigger piece of the pie."

Every single one of my team members' eyes blew wide and lit up instantly.

"One more thing," I said. "That Elyndor trip I promised you all at last year's year-end gala? Admin has already got the approval process rolling."

The next second, the dead-silent conference room exploded into noise and cheers.

I let my gaze drift over every face in the room. Every single person here was a top-tier talent I had handpicked myself. "So take the next half hour to blow off steam," I said. "Thirty minutes from now, I want our first round of brainstorming for the Delron project ready to go."

When the meeting wrapped up, I headed straight back to my office. I tucked a few stray strands of hair I had picked up into two separate sample bags, then called a friend who worked at the local hospital.

The moment the line connected, his shocked voice came through the speaker. "What is wrong?" he asked. "Did that Hayes guy lay a hand on you again?"

I replied, "I need you to arrange a rush paternity test."