He Only Saw His Stepsister

Chapter 2

Noon the next day, I was grabbing lunch in the company cafeteria.

Lily carried her tray over and sat down across from me, then plopped a braised pork right into my bowl.

"Olivia, Daniel worked until three in the morning last night, so I booked a room at the hotel right next to the construction site for him to rest. You aren't mad, are you?"

I took a bite of the pork, but didn't say a word.

Here she was, telling me to my face that she'd gotten a hotel room with Daniel.

So. f*****g. Thoughtful.

Lily kept going, "The body wash at that hotel smelled absolutely terrible. My hair felt all rough and tangled after I washed it. Good thing Daniel brought his own shampoo, so I borrowed some."

As she spoke, she leaned her head right toward me.

"Smell it, Olivia. Doesn't this scent smell amazing? It's the brand Daniel has used forever."

I did smell it, clear as day.

A faint, crisp scent of cedar.

It was exactly the same scent that clung to Daniel's clothes every day.

Suddenly, the chopsticks in my hand felt heavy as lead.

"Olivia?" Lily tilted her head and blinked at me. "You're actually upset, aren't you?"

"No."

"Then come eat dinner with us tonight! Daniel said he'd get off work early. We're going to that Japanese food."

"I can't. I already have plans with someone."

"Who'd you make plans with?"

I didn't answer her. I just picked up my tray and walked away.

Daniel and Lily had been onsite overseeing the old city renovation project nonstop for over a month.

The client was breathing down their necks. They'd slashed the budget to the bone, and the whole structure was riddled with hidden hazards.

I'd brought it up to Daniel once, told him the amount of steel reinforcement in the beams and columns for that building was way too low, and sticking to their current plan would be risky.

Back then, he'd been hunched over the new elevation drawing Lily had just finished, and he never even lifted his head.

"You're just a drafts person. What the hell do you know about structures?"

I opened my mouth to argue, but no words came out. I let it drop.

Just a draftsperson.

In his eyes, everything I said was just as worthless as my job title.

One afternoon, a full week later, I was hunched over my desk working on a drawing when a colleague suddenly yelled across the office.

"The project's on the news! There was an accident during construction!"

It wasn't a massive disaster, just a partial scaffolding collapse, but two workers still got hurt.

The institute called an emergency meeting and decided to send me and a few other colleagues out to the site first to draw up a reinforcement plan.

I was packing up my things to head out when Daniel stepped out of his office.

"Where are you going?"

"Southside. To work on the reinforcement plan."

"Lily has already started working on the reinforcement plan, you don't need to go."

"The firm sent me."

Daniel's brow furrowed deeply, but he didn't argue any further.

When I arrived at the construction site, Lily was already there.

She stood right beside the cracked load-bearing wall, deep in discussion with the construction team.

The second she spotted me, she flashed me a bright smile.

"Olivia, what brings you here? I've got everything handled over here."

"The firm sent me."

"Fine then," she shrugged carelessly. "Why don't you double-check the measurements for me while I go check on the other side?"

I pulled out the blueprints and started going over the data for the wall, line by line.

The more I checked, the worse my gut feeling got.

This wall's reinforcement ratio was wildly off from the original design.

At this shoddy construction standard, it couldn't even handle its basic load. One more little tremor would be enough to take the whole thing down.

I fished my phone out of my pocket to call Daniel, but there wasn't a single bar of signal.

I lifted my head to look for Lily, and spotted her arguing with the construction team not far off.

I hurried over to her.

"Lily, this wall is structurally unsound. We need to evacuate everyone right now."

The words were barely out of my mouth when the ground rumbled beneath my feet.

A brand new c***k split across the face of the wall in an instant, snaking all the way from the foundation up to the roof.

It looked just like a pitch-black snake.

"Get out now!" I screamed.