They Plot Against Me, I Ruined Them

Lia Jordan, the CEO of a publicly traded company, was mindlessly scrolling through street-style snaps when she stumbled across a shot so salacious it made her blood run cold: her husband was cheating on her, clear as day. And the other woman plastered all over him, kissing him like she had no shame? None other than her adopted daughter. To make the whole thing even more absurdly enraging? This was all a plot her ex-husband had strung together, all to bring her career crashing down. "You think you have the balls to mess with me? Nice joke. I'll go off the rails and burn every last thing to the ground!" ***** Even CEOs need to cut loose and slack off sometimes. It was Monday, and I'd spent the entire day stuck in back-to-back meetings. It was 4:30 in the afternoon, two hours before the dinner I'd arranged to have with my husband, Von Owens. Today was our first wedding anniversary, and I'd booked out the entire best Japanese restaurant in the city to celebrate. I still had a little work left to wrap up, but I was so drained I couldn't bring myself to deal with another single work task. I slouched back in my chair, bored out of my mind, and decided to boot up my computer to catch up on the latest gossip. Right as the startup screen popped up, my secretary Chloe came barreling into the office in a total panic. "You didn't even knock? You're getting more and more careless with the rules these days." Chloe Amber was always on top of her game, super reliable and never one to cut corners, but today she didn't even seem to realize she'd messed up. She rushed straight over to my desk, frazzled. She was gasping for air, her face bright red. "President Jordan, I need to talk to you. It's urgent." I kept typing to pull up a webpage as I listened. "Spit it out." "President Jordan, don't look at your computer first, okay? This is really serious. You can't do two things at once right now... just listen to me, please." Oh, so now she's telling me what to do? My stubborn streak kicked in hard. I didn't bother answering her, just focused on pulling up a news site. "President Jordan! It's about that, um, the thing—" Chloe practically flew across the room in three big steps and slammed my monitor shut right as I was mid-click! I was just about to tear into her when she cried out, her voice cracking with desperation, "President Jordan! I'm begging you! Don't go online!" Clunk. Chloe dropped to her knees right in front of my desk, tears already welling up in her eyes, her voice shaking as she held back sobs. All I was gonna do was scroll on my computer. 'Is that really that big of a deal?' 'What, is she here to stage an intervention for my internet addiction or something?' Chloe had stuck by my side through thick and thin ever since I first started this business, like a little sister to me. Seeing her eyes glistening with tears, ready to spill any second, I couldn't bring myself to chew her out even though I had no clue what was going on. 'Fine, whatever. I'll just pack up my stuff and head out early.' Right then, my phone screen lit up. It was an app push notification. "President Jordan, just listen to me!" Chloe lunged forward, trying to snatch my phone out of my hand. I grabbed it a split second before she could get to it. Oh, I get it now. She must have forgotten to send out the PR announcement I gave her yesterday. She's scared I'll find out, huh? Well, the alert's already popped up on my phone. Good luck hiding this one. A street photographer captures steamy footage of Cube Technology CEO Lia Jordans' husband cheating. The second I read those words, cold sweat beaded on my forehead, and I tapped open the notification with a trembling finger. In the clip, my husband Von was walking straight toward the camera, arm slung around a woman in a strapless dress. The woman was nibbling on a cup of grape ice. Von had one arm wrapped around her shoulders, and the other was carrying a Dior shopping bag. They were so wrapped up in laughing and chatting with each other, totally oblivious to the camera pointed right at them. Von's hands were too full to grab a bite himself, so the woman tilted her head up and fed him the grape ice she already had in her mouth directly, lip to lip. I'm not exactly a stranger to chaos and high-stakes messes. Even though I trusted Von, my husband cheating on me wouldn't have been enough to shock me. But that video made my mouth fall open in a perfect O. The woman hanging off my husband was my adopted daughter. My secretary dropped her head, trying to avoid my gaze, but her eyes landed right on the family photo sitting on my desk. Her face turned pale. My mind went completely blank for a second, then a flood of old memories came crashing back… "I still can't wrap my head around how you and Von ended up married!" Back then, everyone said the exact same thing to me. And honestly? Fair enough. Von and I were polar opposites in every single way imaginable. Von was so good-looking he could give A-list male celebrities a run for their money. He had a soft, gentle way of speaking, and was so classically beautiful he could have been plucked right off a movie screen. Me? I was as plain as they come, a tough-as-nails girl who got things done sharp and fast, no dilly-dallying. I was 36 at the time. Von was 26. On top of that, I was the CEO of a publicly traded company, with a personal net worth in the tens of billions. My husband Von, on the other hand, was just a small-town guy with a community college degree. If you had to dig for something we had in common, it was this: we'd both been divorced before. Von's ex-wife was a single mom older than me. She'd gotten pregnant as a teenager, and she already had a daughter when she married Von. No one saw it coming, but that poor woman died unexpectedly in a car crash later on. To his credit, Von stepped up. He didn't abandon his ex-wife's daughter, he formally adopted her and raised her as his own. That girl was Noemie Owens. She'd just turned 19 when Von and I got married. She had kidney failure, and needed long-term dialysis that racked up sky-high medical bills. So on top of his regular day job, Von worked a ton of side gigs to cover the costs. That's how we met, at the bar where he was working a part-time shift. I was a regular at that place. It was super high-end, the kind of spot where all the big shots in the business world came to unwind. Normally, someone with his level of education wouldn't have landed a job there. But he'd majored in English, and paired it with that jaw-droppingly handsome face? He landed the job, and that's how we first crossed paths. We'd known each other for exactly 33 days when we tied the knot in a whirlwind marriage.