Chapter 4: The Code Was Leaked—Everyone Blamed Me
979 Words
We walked out of the conference room in silence. Lu Chen’s shoulders were tense, his jaw set so hard I could see the muscles working in his jaw. The hallway was empty, but I could feel the eyes of every employee peeking through their office doors, watching the humiliated heir and his reckless new employee.
Six months of his life, stolen in a single sentence. I knew how much this project meant to him—not just for the power, but for the dream he had been chasing since he was a teenager.
Back in the R&D department, I poured him a glass of warm water and set it on his desk. “Don’t worry, Mr. Lu. The patents are in your name. They can’t move forward without you. We still have the upper hand.”
He looked up at me, his dark eyes filled with guilt. “I’m sorry, Su Nian. You got dragged into this mess because of me. If you want to resign now, I’ll write you the best recommendation letter in the industry. You deserve better than this.”
I laughed, pushing the technical blueprint across the desk toward him. “Resign? I just got here. And besides, I told you I was going to help you make this project a success. A little corporate theft isn’t going to scare me off. Lu Mingyu can have the contract. He can’t build anything without our code.”
A faint smile tugged at the corner of Lu Chen’s mouth, the first real smile I had seen from him. For a moment, the ice around his heart melted just a little.
That night, we stayed late at the office, working on optimizing the core algorithm. The entire building was dark except for our two desks, the only sound the soft tapping of keyboards. I glanced up at one point and caught him staring at me, his eyes soft in the dim light. When our eyes met, he quickly looked away, his ears turning pink.
By two in the morning, I had finished the final optimization. I saved the file to an encrypted USB drive and backed it up on my work computer, locking it in my desk drawer. Only Lu Chen and I had the keys to the drawer.
Lu Chen walked me downstairs to my car, waiting until I drove away before heading home himself. I watched his tall, lonely figure disappear into the night in my rearview mirror, my heart fluttering.
I had no idea that by morning, everything would fall apart.
When I arrived at the office the next day, a crowd had gathered outside the R&D department. Lu Mingyu stood in the middle, surrounded by executives and lawyers, his face twisted with triumph. When he saw me, he pointed directly at me and screamed.
“There she is! The traitor! She stole the core code and sold it to me!”
I froze in my tracks. “What are you talking about? I never gave you any code!”
“Liar!” He threw a stack of printed papers at my face. The pages scattered at my feet, and I stared down at them in horror. It was the exact code I had written the night before, line for line.
“Last night you were the last one in the office,” Lu Mingyu shouted, his voice carrying over the crowd. “Only you and Lu Chen had access to the code! It wasn’t him, so it must have been you! You’ve been a spy this whole time, working for me to bring him down!”
The crowd erupted in whispers. All eyes turned to me, filled with judgment and contempt.
“I knew it! A new graduate would never dare to stand up to Vice President Lu unless she was working for him!”
“What a snake! Lu Chen trusted her, and she betrayed him!”
“She should be arrested for corporate espionage!”
I looked past the crowd, searching for Lu Chen. He stood in the doorway of his office, holding the same USB drive I had given him the night before. His face was cold, his eyes filled with a pain that cut deeper than any insult.
“Su Nian,” he said, his voice like shards of ice, “did you leak the code?”
My heart shattered. He didn’t believe me. The man who had stood in front of me and protected me just yesterday now looked at me like I was a stranger.
Before I could answer, the security director ran into the room, his face pale. He held up a tablet, and the security footage from last night played on the screen for everyone to see.
At three in the morning, Lu Mingyu’s personal assistant used a spare key to open the R&D department door. He walked straight to my desk, plugged in a USB drive, and copied the code before slipping out again.
The room went dead silent.
Lu Mingyu’s face turned white as a sheet. “That’s not me! I had no idea what he was doing!”
I stepped forward, staring directly at him. “If you really wrote this code, tell me what line my personal encryption marker is on. I put a unique watermark in every algorithm I write. Only the real author would know where it is.”
Lu Mingyu opened and closed his mouth, unable to say a single word. He couldn’t even read code, let alone find an encryption marker.
Lu Chen walked past him, his eyes never leaving mine. He pulled me into his office and closed the door, shutting out the crowd.
He stood in front of me, his hands shaking. “I’m so sorry, Su Nian. I should have believed you. I just… I was so scared that you would leave me too.”
- Writer
