Chapter 1

The students had made a new group chat, apparently forgetting that one of the accounts in it was one we shared. The second I logged in, messages started pouring in.

"What's so special about him being a senior? We only treated him like some big shot because we were being nice. Guy doesn't know anything."

"Exactly. What did he even do? Talk at us for a while and tweak a few numbers? We're the ones who stayed up all night writing everything, putting the slides together, and running around getting stuff done. Why should he get a cut?"

"Right. We stick to the story that this was just a final project. And nobody says a word in the old chat. Leave it dead for a few days, then delete the group."

A final project? That was the excuse they'd used to rope me into this in the first place. And now they were planning to ride that lie all the way to the end.

Annoyed, I opened the old group chat, switched to my own account, and sent a message.

"I've been advising you on this project for a while now, so I need to make something clear. The core financial models and market projections in these reports rely, in part, on sources and levels of detail that are much closer to what you would find in an actual business plan.

"That means they're fine for a standard class assignment, but they absolutely should not be used in a business competition. If you submit them for one, the judges are going to start asking where those numbers came from."

I'd been in the group for two months, and I rarely spoke to them in such a formal, professional tone.

If they took the warning seriously and rebuilt their work using publicly available data, I was willing to pretend I knew nothing. I wouldn't make things difficult for them at tomorrow's final, either.

But within seconds, the new group chat exploded.

The most nervous one on the team, Tristan Vale, immediately sent a horrified reaction meme. "Wait, if he's saying all that… does that mean he knows we're entering the competition?"

Their team leader, Maris Elley, brushed it off. "What are you freaking out about? And spare me the whole 'friendly warning' act. Who does he think he is, talking down to us like that?

"He knows he's not getting a dime out of this, so now he's panicking. He's just trying to scare us into backing out."

Another girl on the team, Elowen Pryce, was quick to agree. "Maris is right. He just can't stand the thought of us succeeding with something he worked on. God forbid we do well without everyone knowing how brilliant he is."

Sitting in my office, I couldn't help but laugh. So they did know it was my work.

When I first joined the group, the entire project had been a train wreck. Nothing fit together, and half of it barely made sense.

I walked them through everything, from the underlying theory to how it was actually applied. But every draft they sent me came back riddled with mistakes, until eventually it became easier to fix the work myself than explain the same problems for the fifth time.

By the end of it, I'd sacrificed night after night of sleep building practically the entire thing from the ground up.

And all that "staying up late writing everything, putting the slides together, and running around getting stuff done" they were so proud of?

They'd downloaded whatever they could find online, dumped it into a premade PowerPoint template, then tossed it into the group chat and passed it off as research they'd supposedly gone out and conducted themselves.

Now they'd ridden my work all the way to the finals and decided the last thing they needed was me.

Ten minutes later, Maris finally replied in the old group chat. "Fine. Since you want to put everything out in the open, I will too. All that 'guidance' you gave us? It was basic theory anyone could look up online. We already knew all of it. We never needed you to explain it in the first place."