"Your monthly salary is five thousand, and you still dare to spend thirty thousand on a bag. Does your mom know you’re this vain?" I was just wearing the luxury bag I had saved up to buy for the company retreat, and my department manager, Karen Chen, openly mocked me in front of everyone. The company’s livestream camera was pointed at me the whole time, and she deliberately magnified my embarrassment in front of the camera. "Young people care too much about vanity. Just to buy a bag, you eat instant noodles for three months. If word gets out, people will think our company is exploiting its employees." What she didn’t know was that I bought this bag with money from my side hustle, and it had nothing to do with my salary. I stayed quiet and didn’t defend myself. Who knew that the next day, she would arrange for me to work overtime nonstop for three days and three nights, using her authority to step all over me and bully me, and even call it "building my stress tolerance." On top of that, she took all the results of the project I was responsible for, collected the five-hundred-thousand-dollar bonus at the company meeting, and only tossed out one light sentence: young people, more experience is always a good thing. I still didn’t say a word. Who would have thought that my tolerance wouldn’t make her back off, but only made her humiliate me even more. At the company annual party, in front of three hundred people, she projected the medical report showing I had been hospitalized for a bleeding stomach from working overtime onto the big screen, then smiled and said— "These days’ young people are really trading their lives for money. I really don’t know what they’re after." Under the endless laughter, I slowly stood up. "Manager Chen, since you care about me so much, let me tell you something—" "Your husband came looking for me in a hotel room last night, and he definitely didn’t comfort me like that."
In my third month after joining the company, we had a team-building event, and I carried a bag worth thirty thousand dollars. It wasn’t a big brand, just a niche designer piece, and I had saved up for half a year from my side writing work to buy it. The team-building event was at a resort outside the city, with four round tables set up in the private room, and as soon as everyone sat down, my bag caught people’s attention. "Nina, that bag is so pretty. How much was it?" "A little over thirty thousand," I said casually. As soon as the words left my mouth, someone across the table let out a sneer. Karen leaned back in her chair, twirling a knife and fork in her hand, and swept her eyes over me from head to toe. "Nina, how much do you make a month again?" "Five thousand." "Five thousand a month, and a thirty-thousand-dollar bag." She slapped the knife and fork onto the table. "Do your parents know you spend money like this?" The private room went quiet, and everyone’s eyes landed on me. I held back the urge to roll my eyes. "I earned this money myself. How I spend it is nobody else’s business." Karen didn’t answer. She pulled out her phone, took a photo of me, and lowered her head to type. I thought she was posting in the work chat, so I didn’t care. It wasn’t until a coworker at the next table quietly told me, "Nina, Manager Chen is livestreaming. Almost three thousand people are watching you right now..." I took the phone from my coworker and looked— A livestream platform, with the title: [What do you think about a girl making five thousand a month carrying a thirty-thousand-dollar bag?] The comments were flying by fast. "Vain." "Either her family’s loaded, or someone’s taking care of her." "Girls these days..." My face burned at once. Karen was still smiling at the phone screen in front of the camera, "I just think young people these days don’t really know how to plan. Their salary isn’t high, but they still want to buy luxury goods. That kind of spending mindset isn’t very healthy." I took a deep breath, handed the phone back, and said nothing. When the team-building event ended and we went back to the company, I thought that was the end of it. I didn’t expect that this was only the beginning. The next day at 8:30 a.m., I arrived at the company right on time. Karen stood by the time clock, holding a stack of files. "Nina, you’re late." "8:29. I’m not late." "I say you’re late, so you’re late." She shoved the files into my arms. "This is the first draft of next week’s bid proposal. I want it from you before tonight." I lowered my head and glanced at the thickness of the file. It was at least two hundred pages. "I’m not responsible for this project." "You are now. What, you don’t want to do it?" I looked at her and took the files. "Fine." When I got back to my desk and opened them, I froze— The data inside was a complete mess, the table format was wrong, and even the page numbers were off. This wasn’t a job where I just needed to work overtime and rush it. It was basically asking me to remake the whole thing from scratch. I looked up at Karen, and she was already back in the supervisor’s office, smiling at me through the glass. The meaning behind that smile was very clear: if you don’t like it, get out. I took out my phone, opened the chat box, and sent my mom a message. "Mom, when you told me to come work at your friend’s company to experience life, did you mean experience how people set traps for me?" My mom replied in seconds: "What’s wrong, baby?" I thought about it and still put the phone down. My parents’ company would eventually be mine to take over, but before that, I wanted to try relying on myself. If I couldn’t even handle one Karen, how was I supposed to manage hundreds of people later? I started organizing the files. At noon, a coworker named Jordan came over and lowered his voice. "Nina, did you piss off Manager Chen? Ever since she livestreamed your thing yesterday, the whole company chat has been talking about you." "What are they saying?" "That you... are keeping a sugar daddy." I almost laughed. If I had a sugar daddy, would I still be sitting here getting bullied by a department manager? "Forget it. I’m not going to bother with her." Jordan looked like he wanted to say more, but in the end, he left. I worked overtime until ten at night and redid the entire bid proposal. When I sent it to Karen, I thought it was over. The next morning, Karen slammed the proposal onto the table in the morning meeting. "Nina, what the hell did you make? The data is all wrong, and even the company name is wrong. Where on earth are your eyes?" I picked up the bid proposal and looked at it— The company name really was wrong. But that wrong character had been handwritten, with a black ballpoint pen, and the handwriting was exactly the same as the pen on Karen’s desk. "Manager Chen, I didn’t write this. I submitted the electronic version. There’s no way it would have handwriting after printing." "Then you’re just making excuses." Karen kicked her chair back and stood up. "The bid proposal has a problem, the client is going to walk, and you want to take responsibility for that?" The whole room fell silent, and everyone looked at me. I clenched my fists so hard my nails dug into my palm. "Fine, I’ll redo it." "Have it on my desk by two this afternoon." "Okay." I turned back to my desk and redid the proposal. At noon, I sent it to her. At 1:50, she sent it back with more than ten red marks on it. I changed them one by one. At 1:59, I turned it in. At exactly 2:00, she walked out of her office and shouted from the hallway. "Nina, you don’t need to do it anymore. I already gave it to someone else." "What do you mean?" "What I mean is, you’re not capable enough. You’re off this project." I stood at my desk and looked at her. Standing next to her was Jordan, and he was holding the very proposal I had just revised. Jordan didn’t dare look at me and kept his head down. Karen patted Jordan on the shoulder. "Young people need to be steady. Don’t be so impatient, and don’t use spending to show off." She was saying that to me. I didn’t say anything. Back at my desk, I started writing my resignation letter. Halfway through, I stopped. Why? What exactly had I done wrong? I put down my phone and deleted the resignation letter.
Over the next month, Karen pushed things even further. She dumped all the hardest projects in the company on me, calling it "training." Those were all projects nobody else could handle and had thrown away, with difficult clients, tiny budgets, and tight deadlines. I stayed silent and took them all on in silence. I ran around meeting clients during the day, revised proposals at night, and was still at the company on weekends. Even the coworkers couldn’t stand it and tried to talk me out of it: "Nina, of all people, why did you have to offend her? Her husband is the company vice president. You can’t beat them." Her husband was the vice president? No wonder. I checked the company’s org chart. Karen’s husband was named David Brooks, and he had been in charge of operations for eight years. Karen had only been in the company for two years, and she’d gone from an ordinary employee all the way up to manager. Her promotion speed was really fast. But I didn’t have time to care about any of that. The client for my current project was a very difficult middle-aged woman. Three previous project managers had all failed to handle her. I ran around for two weeks straight, showing up every day outside her company, and finally I got to meet her. The first time we met, she rejected my whole proposal. The second time, she cursed me out for half an hour and said I clearly didn’t understand her industry. The third time, she started cursing Karen. "Your company’s manager Chen promised me a rebate when I signed the contract last time, and in the end I got nothing. Go back and tell her this deal can be done or not, but don’t think I’ll ever trust anyone in your company again." I immediately caught the word rebate. "The rebate you’re talking about is...?" "What, playing dumb? Isn’t your company always like this? Five percent of the contract amount gets privately kicked back to the client contact. That’s exactly how she talked to me back then." On the surface, I didn’t show any reaction, but inside, my heart was already pounding out of my chest. "You mean the person who handled you before?" "The one surnamed Chen. She said her husband was the vice president, and she got to call the shots at the company." I silently memorized everything the client said. But I didn’t make a scene. I just kept working on the proposal. After another week of running around, the client finally gave in and signed the contract. The contract value was twelve million dollars. It was the biggest deal the company had this year. I brought the contract back and handed it to Karen, thinking she would finally shut up. I never expected that at the company meeting, in front of everyone, she would say— "This deal was landed because I laid a ton of groundwork in advance. Young people like her just do the running around. The real tough parts were all handled by me." After she finished speaking, the whole room erupted into applause. I sat in the corner, watching Karen on the stage, holding up the contract I had spent a month getting signed, smiling with pride. The project bonus was five hundred thousand dollars, and all of it went into her pocket. I didn’t get a single cent. After the meeting, I went to her privately. "Manager Chen, I handled this project on my own from the early stages all the way to the signing. The bonus..." "The bonus?" She leaned back in her chair and rolled her eyes. "Who pays your salary? The company gave you a platform, so what more do you want? Young people shouldn’t be so petty." "I’m not being petty. I just want to know why my work achievements got..." "Your workachievements?" she cut me off. "Is your name on the contract? Does the client even know you? You’re just a small employee on the execution side. Don’t think so highly of yourself." I took a deep breath. "Fine, I understand." "Then get out." I turned and left. Back at my desk, I opened my phone and sent the client a message. "Ms. Turner, about the rebate you mentioned last time, I’d like to know the exact amount." The client replied in seconds: "Why are you suddenly asking about that? Isn’t your company always doing it that way? That time it was five hundred thousand." Five hundred thousand. The contract was twelve million dollars, and a five percent kickback was exactly six hundred thousand. She took the client’s rebate and pocketed my project bonus too. I started organizing the evidence. Chat logs, transfer records, project files, company accounts... I found that after David Brooks was promoted to vice president, the reimbursement process for multiple projects in the company changed. The expenses that originally needed layer after layer of approval would move insanely fast as long as they went through Karen’s department. And all those projects had one thing in common—the client contact had changed. I sorted through each clue one by one and saved them on a USB drive. Before I could make my move, Karen made hers first.
That night I worked until midnight. When I left the company, I found my car had been smashed. The windshield was shattered all over the ground, and four big words had been spray-painted in red across the car body— "Gold digger, get lost." This was a gift from my parents when I joined the company, a three-hundred-thousand-dollar car, and I had driven it for less than three months. I stood beside the car, shaking with anger. After a while, the police came, and after checking the surveillance footage, they found that it was done by a woman wearing a hat. The footage was blurry, and her face couldn’t be seen clearly, but I recognized her instantly from her height and the way she walked. Karen. I told the police about my discovery, and they said they needed clearer evidence. The next day at work, I deliberately didn’t mention the car. When Karen saw me, she was all smiles. "Nina, did you sleep well last night?" "Pretty well." "That’s good. Young people need to pay attention to their health and not work too hard." I looked at her and suddenly smiled. "Manager Chen, did your husband rest well at home?" She froze for a second. "What do you mean?" "Nothing. Just asking." She stared at me for a few seconds, then turned and left. I didn’t alert her. I kept collecting evidence. For the next week, Karen kept targeting me even harder. She canceled all my time off and made me come to the company even on weekends. She transferred me to a position where I could only copy documents and serve other people, calling it "rotation training." She posted a screenshot in the company chat, a photo I had uploaded to social media three years ago, with the caption: "Nina’s image back then and now is pretty different. Looks like she’s really ‘grown’ a lot." The comments below were full of "if you know, you know." Jordan found me in private, his eyes red. "Nina, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to take your project. She forced me to. She said if I didn’t help her, she’d fire me..." "It’s fine. I know." "You... you’re not angry?" "I only get angry at people worth it." Jordan hesitated for a moment, then handed me a USB drive. "These are some things she told me to save. You can look at them yourself." I opened the drive, and inside was a backup of the chat logs between Karen and David Brooks. I read through them one by one, and a cold sweat broke out on my back. Karen and David had used their positions to fake project costs, pocket client rebates, and take kickbacks from suppliers. In two years, they had siphoned at least three million dollars from the company. Part of that money was sent into accounts belonging to David’s relatives, part was laundered through procurement channels, and part was transferred directly to Karen’s personal card. And the reason the company had never found out was because Karen’s department handled a huge number of projects, the amounts were large, and with David helping cover things up in operations, finance couldn’t trace anything. I packed up all the evidence and saved three copies. One was on the USB drive, one in the cloud, and one was mailed to my mom.
On the third day, the company held its annual party. More than three hundred people filled the entire banquet hall. Karen wore a red evening gown and stood on stage hosting the event, her voice sweet and her smile polished. "Over the past year, our company has achieved excellent results. Thank you all for your hard work..." I sat in the corner, holding a glass of water, watching her. "Especially our department. This year, we completed one of the company’s core projects, with a contract value of as much as twelve million dollars..." The big screen started playing a PPT presentation, showing each department’s performance. Karen’s department was listed at the top. "This achievement couldn’t have been made without the trust of company leadership, and it also couldn’t have happened without every single person on the team’s effort..." She paused and looked toward our table. "Of course, there were also some young employees who exposed certain problems in their work. For example, unhealthy spending habits, unprofessional personal conduct, and so on. But these are all little bumps in the process of growth. I believe they will mature slowly." Everyone’s eyes landed on me again. I knew she was talking about me. The big screen flipped to the next slide, which was an "Employee Spotlight" display. It wasn’t showing performance. It wasn’t showing work photos. It was showing my medical report. It said: stomach bleeding, hospitalized for treatment, advised to stay in bed for one week. The date was two months ago, from the time I was sent to the hospital after working until three in the morning. The hall went quiet. Standing on stage, Karen smiled and said, "These days’ young people are really trading their lives for money. I really don’t know what they’re after. They push their bodies beyond their limits to chase a lifestyle they can’t actually afford, and in the end, the one who suffers is still themselves." Some people in the audience laughed along, and some lowered their heads without saying a word. I looked at the medical report on the big screen for a long time. Then I stood up. The chair made a harsh screech, and everyone turned to look at me. Karen looked at me too, her smile unchanged. "Nina, do you have something to say?" "Yes." I walked onto the stage and took the microphone from her. She stepped aside naturally, thinking I was about to say something about thanking the company. I turned around and faced everyone. "Manager Chen, since you care about me so much, let me tell you something." "What is it?" "Your husband came looking for me in a hotel room last night, and he definitely didn’t say that to comfort me." The entire room went dead silent. The smile on Karen’s face froze. I looked at her. "You thought I didn’t know?" "What are you talking about?" "I’m saying your husband, David Brooks, asked me to meet him at a hotel next to the company at eight last night and said he wanted to talk about ‘work arrangements.’" "You’re lying!" "I have the chat logs on my phone. Want to see them?" I pulled my phone out of my pocket, opened the chat screen, and handed it to her. On the screen, under David Brooks’s profile picture, it clearly said— "Nina, are you free tomorrow night? Let’s talk about your next step. I’ll pick the place. It’ll be the hotel next to the company, and I’ll send you the room number later." Time: yesterday at 3:00 p.m. Karen’s face changed. Her hands started to shake. "This... this can’t be..." "You can call him and ask." Karen pulled out her phone and dialed David Brooks’s number. She turned on speakerphone. "Hello? What is it?" David’s voice came through the receiver, carrying a hint of irritation. "Did you ask Nina to meet you at a hotel last night?" Silence for three seconds. "Who told you that?" "Did you or did you not?" "She’s lying! I didn’t!" "Then check your phone. You messaged her at three yesterday afternoon." Silence again. This time, it lasted a long time. There were more than three hundred people in the room, and no one said a word. Karen hung up and looked up at me, her eyes red. "You... you did this on purpose?" "I didn’t do it on purpose. I did it deliberately." I put my phone away and turned to face everyone. "Manager Chen and Vice President Brooks have more than one issue. Over the past two years, they have siphoned more than three million dollars from the company through their positions." The crowd exploded. "Bullshit!" Karen rushed over to grab the microphone. I dodged her and kept going. "I have three million dollars’ worth of transaction records, chat screenshots, and client testimony, all backed up." "Also, after the company’s travel reimbursement process was simplified, every project handled by Karen’s department had costs inflated by an average of fifteen percent. Finance can verify all of it." Karen went insane. She lunged at me and slapped me across the face. I didn’t dodge. The sharp sound spread through the entire hall. Security rushed up and pulled her away. She was still yelling, her voice sharp and harsh. "You bitch! You seduced my husband and now you’re slandering me! I’m going to sue you!" I held my face and looked down at the crowd. "Call the police."
? Continue the story here ?? ? Download the "NovelMaster" app ? search for "467160", and watch the full series ✨! #NovelMaster