Chapter 1

After hanging up, a violent force ripped the phone from my grip.

I turned around and met Matthias’s icy dark eyes.

Behind him stood a crowd of employees, their faces painted with malicious sneers.

Matthias ended the call, suppressed rage flickering in his eyes.

"All this over a gift, Gianna?" His voice dropped low, dripping with a dangerous, icy authority. "You're the CTO of this company, and I've never been stingy with your annual bonus! Yet you actually stormed over to HR to throw a fit over a holiday perk? If word gets out, people will think Serena is bullying you."

A bitter laugh nearly burst from my throat.

I had simply gone to ask a routine administrative question, yet he was this frantic over protecting Serena’s reputation.

For a whole year, his employees had dragged my name through the mud, calling me a pathetic, delusional mistress.

Every time I brought it up, he would only sigh, wrap me in his arms, and coax me with the gentlest tone.

"Gianna, this is all temporary. Please, just endure a little longer for our happiness."

I had always been soft-hearted enough to believe him, only to be met with the next humiliation.

Seeing Matthias’s anger, the surrounding employees acted as if they had received a signal, competing to attack me.

"Ms. Moretti, has a man never bought you a gift in your entire life? Is that why you're throwing a temper tantrum here?"

Two other employees whispered nearby, sizing me up with mocking eyes.

"She looks just like a desperate, clingy fox. Mr. Caro stays away from her just to avoid rumors, yet she still forces herself on him."

"A personalized gift is for beautiful, elegant girl like Serena. What right does an aging, bitter coder have to covet it?"

"Shut up! Who allowed you to say such things in the office?"

Matthias barked a low reprimand, his brow furrowing. The crowd fell silent, though none of them showed a shred of remorse toward me.

If this were in the past, I might have thought he was protecting me.

But now, I wouldn't be stupid anymore.

I used to think that way. But I gradually realized that every time something similar happened, he reacted like this—yet he never actually punished a single person.

He was merely maintaining his authority as the boss.

I looked at the man I had been secretly married to for three years, my voice calm yet cold to the bone. "I am an executive of this company, as well as an employee. What's wrong with asking for the holiday perks I rightfully earned?"

Catching the sudden, icy resolve in my eyes, Matthias’s expression softened slightly, a fleeting look of guilt washing over his face. "Gianna, if you wanted a gift, you could have asked me in private."

However, before I could explain, Serena suddenly burst through the crowd, tears brimming in her eyes in a staged performance. In her had was that bespoke custom fragrance.

"Mr. Caro!"

"It's all my fault! I'm just an intern, I don't deserve this gift. Ms. Moretti, if you want it so badly, just take it!"

Seeing the tide turning, one of Serena's close friends stepped forward immediately, pointing right at my nose to accuse me:

"Mr. Caro! As soon as Serena received her gift this morning, Gianna ordered her to manually print and archive a thousand pages of highly encrypted system logs within an hour! Serena stood by the heavy-duty printer all morning until her back was nearly broken. And everything that printed out was just gibberish trash! This is blatant workplace bullying!"

Matthias glanced at the stack of printed documents on the adjacent desk. Aside from dense, immensely complex hexadecimal characters, there was nothing else.

His brow furrowed deeper, his voice turning a degree colder than before.

He let out a cold laugh, grabbed the printed manuscripts, ripped them in half, and hurled them into the air, letting the paper scraps shower down on my head like rain.

Matthias roared, his tone laced with absolute disgust. "Caro Tech has always built its culture on respecting its employees. A vicious woman like you who abuses company authority to torment her subordinates has no place in my company."

Behind the swirling cloud of shredded paper, Serena flashed a triumphant, glaring smirk at me.

And those so-called "gibberish" papers were the culmination of five years of my blood and sweat—the completed ultimate decryption algorithm. The only reason I had Serena print a hard copy was so I could personally deliver it before the federal bidding committee closed, thereby securing that multi-billion-dollar defense contract for Caro Tech once and for all.

"Apologize to Serena. Right now!"

I slowly knelt down, calmly gathering the scattered, priceless technical manuscripts from the floor. I raised my head, looking up at him with eyes as cold as a dead winter.

"She deliberately missed the print deadline this morning just to show off her gift, delaying our federal security filing. The person who needs to apologize is her."