Chapter 3

The blood rushed straight to my head in an instant. I had been working on this major project for three months!

Over those three months, I never left the office before 10:00 pm. I had revised the proposal more than ten times, pulled countless all-nighters, and lost clumps of hair.

Now the proposal was finalized, the client was satisfied, and we were about to sign the acceptance documents so I could receive my commission and year-end bonus. Making me hand over the project at this point was obviously an attempt to take credit for my work.

Sure enough, the moment Bryan heard the news, he dropped the pitiful look he had been putting on, and the corners of his mouth curled up despite his efforts to hide it.

He shot me a smug glance. "Ms. Robertson, don't worry. I definitely won't let you down! I'll do a far better job than certain people who only know how to work blindly without thinking!"

I trembled with anger. When I spoke again, my voice cracked with emotion. "On what grounds? Aren't you worried that doing this will discourage those of us who actually do the real work? This is unfair. I'm going to appeal to higher management!"

Angela simply let out a cold laugh. "Who are you going to take this up with? Ms. Powell? She's so busy every day, and even I rarely get to see her. How are you going to reach her?

"Also, don't even think about quitting. The company spent a fortune training you and had you sign a five-year contract. If you leave before it expires, you'll have to pay millions of dollars in penalties for breaching your contract."

As soon as she finished speaking, my heart sank.

I walked back to my desk, completely disheartened. The moment I sat down, Bryan dropped a stack of documents nearly as tall as my waist onto my desk with a loud bang.

Even though he was clearly thrilled, he put on a helpless expression. "Look at you. You just had to make a scene. Now I have to clean up the mess you left behind.

"Forget it. I'll just treat this as repayment for you switching shifts with me. Since you're free now, you can take care of all the invoices and reports I've piled up over the past two weeks."

I was furious. I couldn't believe that Bryan actually made stealing my credit sound like he was doing me a favor. Some people really had no sense of shame.

What made it worse was that quite a few coworkers who didn't know the truth actually fell for his act and praised him for being generous.

I took several deep breaths and reminded myself not to get angry. If I let my anger affect my health, nobody would pay the price except me.

But as soon as I opened the company group chat and saw the announcements Angela had posted, I nearly crushed my phone from anger.

Angela tagged everyone in the group and wrote, "Formal reprimand. Employee Jeremy Crawford has shown a negative work attitude, a lack of team spirit, and insubordination toward a superior.

"By management's decision, he has been removed from his position as project leader. Let this serve as a warning to all.

"In addition, Jeremy is required to submit a 30,000-word self-reflection before the end of the New Year's holiday and will no longer be eligible for this year's year-end bonus review."

The group chat was silent at first. Bryan was the first one to reply, saying, "I support the company's decision!"

Right after that, the sycophants followed suit.

By then, I was so worn down that I didn't even have the energy to be angry anymore. Instead, I felt a slight urge to laugh. I really shouldn't have been so lenient with these people.

I opened the company's system and submitted an annual leave request right away. I had saved up 30 days of annual leave because I had been so busy that I hadn't taken a single day off in the past two years.

Then I booked a flight to Northstar Mountain. According to company policy, an annual leave request would be approved automatically as long as it was submitted in the system in advance and didn't conflict with any major projects.

I took a screenshot of the approved request, saved the recording I had made in Angela's office, and backed up both files to cloud storage. After that, I compiled all the files related to the Starhaven Technologies project and sent them to Bryan.

I really wanted to see how this group of useless people, who cared more about appearances than real work, was going to finish this major project without someone like me, someone they could push around and rely on to handle all the hard work.