In the darkness, my throat felt incredibly tight. My limbs were completely numb. The smell of gas was suffocating... If this went on, my parents and I would all die here. I fumbled in the dark, trying to stand up and open the window, but my knees buckled, and I collapsed onto the cold floor. Through the dim light, a pair of familiar, custom-made leather shoes appeared in front of me. My brother had arrived. It was Austin. "Austin... help me... please..." I had no strength left. I reached out, trying to grab the hem of his pants, but he raised his foot and slammed it hard onto my fingers, grinding them into the floor. Two years ago, my parents and I finally found Austin, who had been missing for eighteen years. We gave him everything he wanted—money, power, status. We practically handed the family business to him on a silver platter. We did everything to make up for the eighteen years we had lost. But I never would have guessed that my own flesh and blood wanted nothing but my life. "Does it hurt, Chloe?" Austin turned the gas valve to the absolute maximum. He knelt down, staring at my face with a cold, sadistic sneer. "When Lily died, she suffered a thousand times more than this!" "Dying the exact same way as her is your only chance to beg for her forgiveness in hell!" Who was Lily? Oh. The daughter of the adoptive family who raised him. Memories rushed back into my fading, oxygen-deprived brain. The excruciating pain of suffocation kept me from making a sound. Lily... Lily... Just for a toxic, calculating girl, you had the heart to murder your own biological sister! As his footsteps faded into the distance, my breath stopped completely. I became nothing but a cold corpse.
"Chloe! Chloe, sweetie, wake up! We have to go pick up Austin today!" A familiar voice echoed in my ears. I felt the powerful, steady beat of my heart. The sensation of blood flowing back through my veins and my body warming up was incredibly surreal. I opened my eyes and saw my parents sitting at the edge of my bed. "Our little girl is usually an early bird. What happened today?" "She was probably too excited to sleep last night, knowing she's finally meeting her brother!" I was reborn. I had gone back to two years ago—the exact day we were supposed to bring Austin home! After a long drive, we finally arrived at the house of the couple who had raised my brother for eighteen years. They held my parents' hands, putting on a show of fake warmth. "These eighteen years haven't been easy! But we've always treated Austin like our own flesh and blood!" The bedroom door creaked open. Austin walked out, holding the hand of a fragile-looking teenage girl. They stood right in front of us. Before my parents could even say a word, Austin fell to his knees with a loud thud. "Dad, Mom, Lily is pregnant with my baby. If you want to take me back, you have to take her too." The moment those words left his mouth, the expressions of both my parents and his adoptive parents completely changed. "What? What did you just say?" Mrs. Miller, who had looked so sweet a moment ago, rushed forward and slapped Austin hard across the face. "Lily is only sixteen! She hasn't even finished high school or taken her SATs yet! How could you do this to her?!" The girl named Lily, who was about my age, looked incredibly weak. Tears streamed down her face as she threw herself over Austin, shielding him from her mother's blows. "Mom, don't blame Austin! It's my fault." "We both drank too much that night... and then..." She didn't forget to cast a shy, loving glance at Austin through her tears. Then, sobbing like a delicate flower in the rain, she turned to my parents and bowed her head deeply. "Austin and I love each other. Please, Mr. and Mrs. Vance, please let us be together!" Seeing his wife play the bad cop, Mr. Miller stepped in to play the good cop. He looked at the two young lovers kneeling on the floor, and then turned to my parents with a deeply troubled expression. "Since it already happened, nobody wanted this." "How about this? Let Lily go back with Austin. She can have the baby first, and they can get registered once they are of age. What do you think?" I stood in the corner, sneering at the masterpiece of a show this family was putting on. *Treated him like their own son? True love?* What a family of actors. They didn't even blink while lying through their teeth. In my past life, this seemingly kind couple had found out that Austin was the long-lost heir of the multi-billion-dollar Vance Group. They immediately had their underage daughter seduce him to get pregnant, even faking a medical report just to force her way into our wealthy family. In this life, I would never let their scheme succeed. Watching Lily defend him so selflessly, Austin’s eyes filled with immense pain and affection. My parents, not knowing the truth, assumed it was Austin's fault. They hesitated, unsure of whether to agree to Mr. Miller's proposal. In my past life, I thought a teen pregnancy would ruin Austin’s reputation and destroy the family's image. So, I advised my parents to give the Millers a massive payout of one million dollars as hush money, rejected the marriage proposal, and asked Lily to get an abortion and start over. The Millers happily took the money, staged a fake suicide scene of Lily "dying of grief," and secretly sent her abroad with the cash. Austin, completely brain-washed by love, believed that my parents and I had said something horrible to Lily, driving her to commit suicide with their unborn child. From that day on, he hated me, and he hated our parents. While Lily was living her best life in Europe with our one million dollars, my parents and I were ended up dead or ruined because of Austin's baseless hatred. This time, I walked over before anyone else could speak. I gently helped Lily up and glanced at her perfectly flat stomach. Lily flinched, taking a half-step back. Out of the corner of my eye, I caught the flash of panic on Mrs. Miller’s face. *Afraid I’ll find out the pregnancy is fake? Desperate to climb the social ladder?* "Dad, Mom, let's just bring Lily home with us," I said, smiling warmly. "I actually really like her. I'm sure she and I will have so much to talk about." Hearing my words, Lily let out a visible sigh of relief. She smiled, grabbing my hand, and spoke in a sugary-sweet voice. "Thank you, Chloe. We are going to be the best of friends!" I sneered inwardly, though my face maintained a perfect, sweet smile. *I'd love to see how long you can hide your little secret right under our noses.*
And just like that, Lily moved into the Vance mansion with Austin, completely unofficial. At first, she tried to maintain a peaceful facade with me. But slowly, her greedy and selfish nature began to show. Whenever my parents weren't looking, she would bark orders at Maria, our housekeeper, like she owned the place. "Maria, I already told you I don't drink cold tea. Go change it right now." "I don't drink bottled water that costs less than ten dollars. It's bad for the baby." As an art and design major, I was working on a clay sculpture in the living room one afternoon. She walked by, dramatically covering her nose, trying to start a fight. "Oh my god, Chloe! Does this clay emit formaldehyde? That is extremely toxic for the baby!" I didn't even bother looking at her. "If it were toxic, I'd be dead by now. Stop crying about it." She immediately turned around and ran to complain to Austin. Austin stormed in, took one look, and smashed my graduation project—which I had spent over a year working on—into pieces. He glared at me with pure disgust. "Don't you know Lily is pregnant? Why are you still messing around with this garbage in the house?!" This wasn't the first time she had picked a fight to ruin my relationship with Austin. But I didn't care. My brain-dead brother was someone who, in my past life, was willing to murder his own sister for a girl. I already knew he was beyond saving, so I had zero expectations for him. Since the day he came back, I never gave him a warm face. Austin, on the other hand, put on the full pompous show of being the "rightful male heir." He treated me like his mortal rival, constantly trying to push me out of the Vance Group and put me down. In my past life, because I wanted to make up for those lost eighteen years, I did everything I could to help him get familiar with the company. Because of Lily's "death," he had worked tirelessly out of sheer spite and hatred. Powered by revenge, he actually managed to run the company quite well within a year. But in this life, with his sweet underage wife by his side and a fake heir in her belly, he had become incredibly arrogant. He Picked fights with me every single day, learned absolutely nothing about actual business, and spent all his time doting on his wife, muttering nonsense like, "My primary duty as the heir is to protect the next-generation heir." Today, we went to the headquarters for a board meeting. The meeting was about whether to upgrade or shut down an outdated supply chain. Austin raised his hand, speaking with immense confidence. "I believe any supply chain that can't keep up with technology should be shut down. Keeping it is just a waste of company resources." That supply chain was indeed outdated. He wanted to cut the entire department to save costs and maximize profit. On paper, it sounded great. But he completely ignored the lives of hundreds of factory workers and over a thousand employees in that division. How could that be a smart business decision? I raised an objection. "I suggest we allocate a portion of the budget to upgrade the technology of the existing factories. This avoids the cost of building new ones from scratch. We save on recruitment and training costs while keeping our experienced workforce. What do you all think?" The moment I finished, the board members relaxed and nodded in approval. "Chloe, you are so young, yet you handle major corporate decisions so cleanly. You have a great future ahead of you!" Before Austin came back, my parents had trained me as the sole heir. I had been running around the business world with them since I was a kid. Even though I was younger than Austin, I had far more experience. When it came to handling tricky corporate issues, he was nowhere near my level. So, he decided to target the company's newest, highly anticipated project.
My parents wanted to invest in a new luxury maternity and baby care brand, offering a premium, all-in-one service from pregnancy to postpartum care. Since Austin was a guy, he obviously had no advantage here. My parents handed the project proposal directly to me. That night, while I was brainstorming ideas for the project, I walked past Austin and Lily's bedroom. I heard some very explicit sounds coming from inside. *I guess a fake pregnancy is convenient—you don't even need to worry about birth control.* After some heavy panting, I heard their pillow talk. "Austin, I really want to help you with the business." "Your sister is the one your parents love. You saw how they treated her at dinner today." "If we don't grab the power now, it’ll be too late once your parents hand the company over to Chloe!" Lily’s voice was incredibly soft and manipulative. She knew exactly how to trigger Austin's insecurity. "So, what do you want to do?" "Well, I'm pregnant. Why don't you let me run the new maternity brand?" Holding his sweet girl in his arms, my brother probably forgot his own name. He agreed instantly. "Okay, okay. I'll beg Mom and Dad tomorrow to make Chloe hand the project over to you." At the breakfast table the next morning, Lily smiled warmly at my parents. "Chloe has never been a mother before. But I'm literally carrying the next-generation Vance heir! This project is just so much more fitting for me!" She grabbed my mother's hand and placed it on her completely flat stomach. "Mom, feel that? Your grandson can't wait to make you proud!" "If I can build a successful brand while carrying him, he’s going to grow up to be so smart!" My parents smiled warmly, saying all sorts of sweet things. In a situation like this, it was almost impossible for them to say no. She kept calling them "Mom" and "Dad," using her fake pregnancy to guilt-trip my parents and force me out of the project. *Do you really think you can fly that high? Sure, let me help you fly all the way to the sun.* I smiled sweetly, wrapping my arm around her shoulder in a show of sisterly love. "Let Austin and Lily do it, Mom. I really don't mind." "I can't wait to see how smart the baby is when he's born, either." Seeing that I didn't object, my dad went along with it and handed the project over to Lily. Since I had always been highly competitive, my mother noticed something was off. She came to my room that night to talk to me. "Chloe, if you don't want to give it up, I can get it back for you." "This is the company's biggest new launch in five years. It's a massive opportunity!" Of course, I knew how valuable the opportunity was. But my graduation exhibition was just around the corner, and I was busy restoring the sculpture my idiot brother had smashed. In my past life, Lily had been sent to Europe, so she had some basic education. But in this life, with Austin's promise of making her a "wealthy billionaire's wife," she had dropped out of high school. She knew absolutely nothing about business. With a person like her at the wheel, even a mountain of gold would turn to trash. I didn't need to worry about her threatening my inheritance at all. There would be a thousand other business opportunities, but graduation only happened once. I wasn't going to let them ruin my chances of graduating with honors. I gladly handed the maternity project to her. I wanted to see what kind of mess this fake-pregnant girl would make. With Austin’s help, Lily actually managed to make the maternity brand look quite successful initially. I wasn't sure how things were running internally, but her marketing campaigns and celebrity endorsements certainly created a massive buzz. The brand was trending on Instagram and TikTok, and several competitors even started copying their aesthetic. It looked like a highly mature brand. But how could competitors be copying them when they hadn't even established a solid customer base yet? How exactly did she achieve this?
From the very first day Lily moved into our house, I had been quietly keeping tabs on her. I didn't care about my idiot brother, but I couldn't let her harm my parents or ruin the foundation of the Vance Group. After Austin came back, my parents gave him a monthly allowance of $150,000. Almost all of it went straight to Lily, who immediately wired it to her parents' bank accounts. I knew that human greed was a bottomless pit. Giving them $150,000 a month would only make them crave millions. I needed to make my parents realize what was happening. Or better yet, cut off her cash flow completely. I started spending money lavishly. I bought my mom a $150,000 Hermès bag and ordered a limited-edition luxury watch for my dad. "Lily has no job, but she just bought her parents a brand-new luxury car." "Since I actually earn my own money at the firm, it's only right that I spoil my parents too!" My parents' faces turned incredibly stiff. I knew they had never liked Lily's background. Given Austin's status, he could easily marry a wealthy heiress, not a girl from a cheap, manipulative family. They had spent decades building their empire from scratch. If there was one thing they hated, it was freeloaders. Before Lily was officially married into the family, they would never tolerate Austin funding her entire family's lifestyle with our money. That night, my parents called Austin into the study with extremely stern expressions. I didn't know the details of their conversation, but Austin walked out with a pale face. Later that night, I could hear Lily sobbing in their room. Austin's $150,000 monthly allowance was officially canceled. My parents gave him a low-level desk job with a fixed monthly salary of just $5,000. Austin knew I was the one behind it, and he refused to look me in the eye for months. Not that I cared. I didn't need to lock eyes with a dog who had murdered me in my past life. I was afraid his sheer stupidity would rub off on me. But to my surprise, he and Lily actually managed to pull off a massive win with the new maternity brand. Thanks to the massive hype surrounding the launch, the Vance Group's stock price surged. My dad was full of praise for them during dinner. "Lily has never studied business, but she's running this new launch beautifully!" "She's even sharper than Chloe!" I smiled, chiming in with my parents. "Of course! How could my little skills compare to Austin and Lily?" "It must be the baby in her belly bringing us good luck. That's why the project is going so smoothly." As I spoke, Lily’s expression froze for a fraction of a second. *Of course there's no baby. In a few months, the truth will come out.* Seeing the happy atmosphere, I struck while the iron was hot. "Since things are going so well, why don't we throw them an engagement party?" "We can celebrate the brand's success and finally make Lily's place in the family official!" My parents were extremely pleased with Austin’s performance. They officially appointed him as the CEO of the new maternity subsidiary, and made Lily the VP and legal representative. Overnight, Austin became the star of the company, overshadowing me completely. Whenever he walked down the hall, employees bowed and greeted him as "Mr. Vance Junior." As we walked out of the office one afternoon, Austin intentionally shoved his shoulder into mine. "Chloe, don't you dare try anything at the engagement party." "With the resources I have now, taking full control of the entire group is only a matter of time." "When that day comes, crushing you will be as easy as stepping on an ant." What a wonderful brother. Not even married yet, and he was already threatening his sister for his wife. The idiot still had no idea that Lily’s pregnancy was fake, and that she was using him. I let out a soft, amused laugh. "Don't worry, Austin. I promise your engagement party will be absolutely unforgettable."
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