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Chapter 12: The Cut and the Climb - Betrayal & Beginnings
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2025-10-07 00:00:16Shylie's POV: The Knife Beneath the Smile
Lunch was meant to be a pause. A chance to breathe when everything else was smothering you. But the second Shylie opened her locker, her breath caught.
On top of her books was a white envelope. Sealed. So clean, so precise. Too perfect to be true. Sharp and sterile. A knife wrapped in paper. Her hands were trembling when she ripped it open. Photocopies spilled out—pages of her project notes, fragments of her code scrawled over in a different hand, and then…worse. A page from her journal. Words she'd never shared with anyone. Not even Darren. Her throat closed. Whoever had done this, had rifled through her things. They had touched her most private, intimate, thoughts and taken them and turned them into a weapon. On the bottom of the packet was a cover sheet. The project had been turned in to the board. And the name sc
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Restart My Life: The CEO's Second Chance Chapter 30: The Breaking Point
The incubator was deathly silent.Lights had been dimmed, neon glows filtering across the floor, leaving long shadows in their wake. The room was empty and still, only the low buzzing of ventilation systems punctuated the void, the silent, methodical rhythm of a world that moved without her.She sat in one of the sound-proof presentation rooms alone, watching the faint blue light of the simulation terminal.Keyboard keys clicked softly, repetitive and unobstructed. But her fingers remained suspended above the keys, no movement at all. She had not typed a word in hours.Her mind wandered, far away from this antiseptic plastic reality, somewhere else.His voice haunted her.Memories reflected on her consciousness, the clipped edges of his mouth bouncing around in her head, louder than the drone of the machine in front of her, louder than any stimuli she could manufacture."You cut yourself off so completely..
Restart My Life: The CEO's Second Chance Chapter 29: Cracks Beneath Control
The incubator was silent, too silent. The overhead lights were low, pooling her workspace in the corner of the room with angled shadows while leaving the rest of the room lost in darkness. Piles of printouts from her simulations littered her desk, pages of her script of handwritten notes (meticulous, to a degree only Shylie could read), sprawling logic trees (scribbled in the margins), decision branches, thoughtfully annotated. Conditions for every potential failure had been mapped and re-mapped, re-evaluated again and again, revised to the point of obsessive perfection. No mistakes. No blindspots. No allowances for weakness. She had rewritten her version of the core of the platform by hand, already envisioning what would happen when she opened it up to the rest of the school. She'd gone through every line, every decision point, every potential outcome and evaluated, measured, and double-checked it. Triple-checked. It was more than secure now. It was perfe
Restart My Life: The CEO's Second Chance Chapter 28: The Reckoning Room
The boardroom meeting was in a modern wood-paneled conference room; freshly upholstered but intentionally stiff. The massive oval table gleamed like black marble, reflecting the tense faces around it in sickly amber from the fluorescent lights above. A tense silence. Thick. Humid. Oppressive. Each breath everyone took seemed labored in the room’s acoustics. Principal Min presided over the table. Stiff-backed and pursed-lipped, her eyes darted back and forth at the disparate groups around her. Administrators on one flank, as tight-lipped and formal as they were white-collar. Parents on the other, one fidgeting in her seat with an oversized purse, the other scribbling notes in a cheap notebook (concerned or looking for a scoop, either would do). Principal Min looked expectantly at Elias Tan. Tan was unmoved. Erect and statuesque, he exuded a cool authority in the room. Tall, built, and inhumanly calm. He was wearing a perfectly-tailored charcoal suit, presse
Restart My Life: The CEO's Second Chance Chapter 27: Calculated Exposure
Shylie sat alone in the incubator's private strategy room. The fluorescent lights overhead hummed faintly in the background. On her desk was a solitary lamp, casting harsh shadows across the reams of printouts, handwritten memos, and a manila folder, stampedCONFIDENTIAL: Simulation 26. She'd been here before. The same practice rooms, the same data to pore over, the same decision trees to analyze and evaluate and perfect. The variables were different this time. She could feel it in her bones. Shylie read the packet once, twice. Three. It wasn't a game.Scenario: You are co-founder of a breakthrough biotech startup with a sibling. Your sibling leaks part of your research to a rival firm in a moment of desperation. Your company's investors are on edge. Trust is broken. The future of your work is on the line.
Restart My Life: The CEO's Second Chance Chapter 26: Intervention Protocol
It was late. Actually, it was very late. Past midnight. Shylie arrived back to her dorm-style student unit just outside the incubator hub. The small, sterile room with its bare walls and utilitarian furnishings felt like a refuge from the Reed household insanity. But there was nothing restful about the cramped space where Shylie had come to live “closer to campus under a work-study program.” She had wanted to be near the hubs, closer to the action. But the truth was she just couldn’t take it there anymore. It had become too oppressive, her family’s collective madness too suffocating. She set her bag by the door with a harsh exhale and kicked off her shoes before stepping into the silence, inhaling the stillness like a narcotic. The pale lamplight cast an eerie pallor across the entire room; even the high buzz from the city outside the thin windows felt muted and far away. She wasn’t alone. Elias was sitting at her desk, an unmistakable presence framed by t
Restart My Life: The CEO's Second Chance Chapter 25: The Forgotten Sibling
Dinner at the Reed house had not always been so cold. Thomas remembered times of laughter, silverware clanking against plates, his mother's quiet voice chastising him whenever the noise level became too high. But now, it was so quiet. Too quiet. The five of them sat in their traditional places, each of them trying so hard to act like everything was okay. It was like they were in a play with no audience.His mother set down the plates with a gentle clink and did her best to avoid eye contact. His father shielded himself behind the Sunday paper, flipping idly through its pages without actually reading them. Leah talked the easiest, her voice filling the awkward silence with her usual ease. Nonsensical things. A class project. A teacher's praise. A bright, unceasing smile. If any of them had a band-aid for their family, it was Leah.But the air had frozen because of Shylie.Shylie didn't eat much. She sat
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