Chapter3

When I woke up, my head was still pounding with a thick, heavy fog. It was still raining outside. A fever cooling patch lay abandoned on the desk, its edges curling inward. I had left the thermometer face down on the corner. I didn’t even bother to check it; I knew my temperature had to be hovering around 102 degrees. The fever just wouldn't break.

As I sat up straight, the deep ache in my shoulders made my entire spine pop. Then I looked down.

A trail of muddy footprints sat next to my chair, stretching from the doorway to my desk, then doubling back. The prints were pronounced, leaving behind a pattern of horizontal ridges—sneakers. I remembered Ethan’s training shoes had that exact tread.

I froze for three seconds. Then I snapped my head toward my laptop.

The screen was glowing. I knew for a fact I had put it to sleep before I passed out.

The protective cover of the side USB port was pushed ajar, sitting crookedly, never snapped back into place.

Pressing my hands flat against the cold desk to steady myself, I pulled up the system logs.

03:15 AM. External drive inserted.

03:17 AM. Drive ejected.

Accessed target: [Sterling_Core_Model_Final]

I carried my laptop bag out of the library. The rain showed no signs of letting up. I pulled up the hood of my jacket, though my shoulders were already soaked through.

I found him sitting by the window in the campus café. The compression bandage was still wrapped tightly around his knee, an untouched coffee resting at his elbow.

"Aria, you didn't go home last night? I tried calling your phone—"

I spun my laptop around to face him. The system log window was still open.

"Three-fifteen in the morning. You pulled the flash drive and shredded the entire deep directory containing the original files." I slid a few freshly printed sheets of paper straight across the table, right to his fingertips.

Ethan's hand froze just as he reached for his cup. But instead of dropping his gaze in guilt, he snatched up the pages, crushed them into a tight ball, and hurled them violently right at my face.

"Are you out of your mind?!" his voice spiked, completely ignoring the strange looks from the students around us. "My laptop died, so I just borrowed yours to check an email from my coach!" He stood up abruptly, his face contorted in disgust and disbelief. "Aria, did this fever completely fry your brain? You’re always paranoid, building walls like an absolute freak. And now you’re taking a few lines of nameless logs, running out into public, and accusing me of stealing from you?"

I stared blankly at the stranger standing in front of me. Two whole years. I had scraped together my scholarship money to buy him top-tier sports protein. Just last night, I had pushed myself into feverish shock pulling an all-nighter at the library, all to help him while he dealt with his leg injury. And this was my reward.

"I know it was you copying the files behind my back," I said, staring dead into his eyes.

"Enough! When will this endless jealousy of yours ever stop?" Ethan’s voice dripped with naked contempt. "No wonder Chloe beats you in every single class. She was born with a silver spoon into a billionaire family like the Sterlings, yet she is a hundred times more generous and confident than you. And you? You're just a lunatic hiding in the corner, suspicious of everyone."

I stared at his face, slightly distorted by his hypocritical self-righteousness, and a wave of nausea washed over me. I finally saw it clearly. The person standing before me had never been a victim; he was nothing but a greedy, despicable thief.

"I get it," I swallowed the dry ache in my throat. Without another word of argument, I efficiently packed my laptop back into my bag.

Ethan froze.

"Aria..." He furrowed his brows. "If you apologize for your paranoia right now, I can still forgive—"

"No need," I cut him off, grabbing my bag and standing up.

"Ethan, why are you still here?"

The pungent scent of Tom Ford perfume drifted over from behind me. Wearing a seasonal haute couture trench coat, Chloe squeezed herself smoothly between Ethan and me, slipping her arm intimately through his.

She glanced down at the crumpled system logs on the floor.

"Your fever still hasn't broken, Aria?" Chloe looked squarely at my pale face, a fake smile tugging at the corner of her mouth. "For tonight's supreme academic honors gala, you won't even make it past security in that secondhand hoodie. Do you want me to have the bodyguards from my dad's company give you a ride? You know, let you see what a real high-society event looks like."

Ethan casually wrapped his arm around Chloe's waist. He didn't even cast a glance my way. "Leave her alone. She can't even tell the difference between her hallucinations and reality right now."

"Is that so?" Chloe turned her head. In the moment she walked toward the café doors, tucked neatly under Ethan’s arm, she tilted her head back, cocked one eyebrow, and mouthed a silent word to me:

"Loser."

I watched expressionlessly as Ethan tilted his shoulder outside the door just to keep the umbrella over her head.

I turned and walked back to my dorm.

Plugging my laptop back into the power, I opened the seemingly empty deep-level IT directory interface. My fingers hammered out a twelve-digit sequence—the Sterling family’s base-level biometric cipher.

A black clearance authentication box popped up.

He had indeed shredded the surface-level browsing history. But an idiot like him, who couldn't even touch the threshold of an Ivy League school, could never comprehend just how incredibly deep the security baseline went for trade secrets worth hundreds of billions.

I curled the corner of my mouth and hit the Enter key.

[File Extraction Successful. Target Path Locked.]

Tonight was the grand university-wide annual academic gala. Chloe and Ethan would be dressed in the most expensive evening wear, comfortably stealing what belonged to me while bathing in the applause of thousands.

I picked up a mug of cold black coffee from my desk and downed it in one gulp.

Let them step up. Let them stand on the highest podium. Because it was only from that kind of height that the sound of a snapping neck would sound truly beautiful.