Chapter 3

Scarlett's POV

The afternoon after Lucas walked out, an uninvited guest showed up.

A cloud of heavy, suffocating perfume entered the room before the person did.

A moment later, an obnoxious bouquet of white lilies was slammed onto my nightstand.

I wasn't severely allergic to pollen, but as a designer whose craft relied on sharp senses, I despised overpowering, synthetic scents.

Frowning, I looked up from my tablet.

Standing before me was a woman dressed in a pristine white designer dress, sporting flawless "no-makeup" makeup, her silky hair falling neatly over her shoulders.

It was the innocent face of the entertainment industry's newest darling—Lucas's rising protégé, dubbed by millions as the "purest star of her generation": Chloe.

"Scarlett, I heard about your accident. I cleared my whole schedule just to visit you."

Chloe's voice sounded sweet enough to rot teeth, but the gleam in her eyes radiated pure, gloating triumph.

In my last life, that wide-eyed, naive facade completely fooled me into thinking she was just a harmless rookie.

It wasn't until her bodyguards crushed my fingers one by one that I saw the monster underneath.

I didn't answer. I didn't even shift my posture, watching her like a pathetic clown in a circus.

Chloe dragged a chair over, sat down, and fixed her eyes on my thick plaster cast. She let out an exaggerated gasp.

"Oh my gosh, Scarlett... how did it get this bad?"

Chloe covered her mouth, her eyes welling with instant, theatrical tears, as if she were the one suffering.

"Lucas told me you might never be able to hold a pencil again. What are you going to do? You're a brilliant designer! If you can't sketch, aren't you basically... useless?"

Her words sounded full of sympathy, but every syllable was aimed directly at ripping open my deepest wound.

If this were my previous life, fresh off the news of my permanent injury, I would have broken down completely.

Instead, I felt nothing. In fact, I almost laughed.

"Are you finished?" I asked flatly, barely bothering to lift an eyebrow.

Chloe froze for a second.

She gritted her teeth, dropping her voice to an intimate whisper: "Scarlett, you don't have to put on a brave face. I know you're dying inside. Lucas is a loyal guy. Even though he views you as a burden now, he's still willing to support you. But still..."

"Still, since your hand is ruined and you won't be designing anything ever again, wouldn't it be better to close your independent studio? Those people working for you don't have a future tied to a cripple. Just stay home, be a good little trophy wife, and stop giving Lucas a hard time with your baggage, okay?"

There it was. Her real motive.

Crush my spirit, dismantle my career, and grind me into the dirt so I could never stand up again.

Staring at her fake, smiling face, I suddenly chuckled.

"Chloe, do you really think having Lucas back you up gives you the right to run your mouth in front of me?"

My voice wasn't loud, but the sheer chill in it made the air grow heavy. "Calling him 'Lucas' this and 'Lucas' that, sounding so intimate. What, does his talent training program teach you how to act pure and how to be a homewrecker at the same time?"

"You!" Chloe's face flushed crimson. "Watch your mouth, Scarlett! I came here out of kindness. Don't be ungrateful!"

"Kindness? You don't know the meaning of the word," I scoffed, twirling my stylus lazily with my left hand.

"Go back and tell Lucas to keep his disgusting PR games out of my sight. Whether my studio stays open or whether I can still draw isn't up to a third-rate starlet who traded her dignity for fame to decide."

"You... you crazy bitch! You deserved to lose that hand!" Shaking with rage, Chloe's delicate facade cracked entirely.

She leaped to her feet, glared at me with pure venom, and slammed the door behind her as she stormed out.

Silence returned to the room.

I stared at the obnoxious lilies on the nightstand and hit the nurse call button.

"Please throw these flowers in the trash. The smell is making me sick."

Once the room was cleared, I leaned back and closed my eyes to rest. Doing the math in my head, since Chloe couldn't wait to come here and gloat, her behind-the-scenes move would happen any minute now.

Sure enough, less than three hours after Chloe left.

Night had fallen, draping the room in shadows. The phone resting beside my pillow buzzed violently.

My eyes snapped open. That was the custom high-priority encrypted alarm I had set up.

Sitting up swiftly, I grabbed my tablet with my left hand and tapped in the passcode. A glaring red warning box lit up the dark screen—

[ALERT: Unauthorized intrusion detected on your offshore private cloud! Firewall bypassed!]

Right on schedule.

My gaze turned razor-sharp, like an eagle locking onto its prey in the dead of night.

Instead of severing the connection, I steadily initialized the counter-tracking program running silently in the background.

Lines of green code scrolled rapidly down the screen, laying out their digital footprint in real time.

They were being cautious, routing through several proxy hops, but their methods still looked amateurish to me.

During the years Lucas kept me trapped in that house, I had forced myself to become a top-tier digital security expert just to secretly audit his company's financial records.

"You want to steal my collection? Go ahead. Take it."

With a cold smirk, my left hand tapped the glass, deliberately opening a "vulnerability" to guide the intruder straight into the bait folder.

The monitor confirmed it: the intruder was frantically downloading the archive titled *Awakening_Final_Master.rar*.

The progress bar crawled forward: 10%... 50%... 90%... 100%.

Download complete.

At the exact same moment, the lightweight Trojan packed inside the archive quietly executed on their machine.

A split window snapped open on the right side of my tablet, streaming a live screen recording of their desktop.

And the sweetest, most ironic part? The Trojan didn't just capture their MAC address—it resolved their physical, static IP.

An IP address belonging squarely to the internal corporate network of Lucas's entertainment agency.

Watching them uncompress the stolen files in real time, a sea of freezing hatred churned behind my eyes.

Oh, Lucas. To build your little mistress into a star, you didn't just stand by while my hand was crushed; you actively let her rob my life's work, ready to brand me as a plagiarist for the rest of my days.

You pulled it off in my past life. You ruined my name and drove me into an early grave.

But this time around...

I watched the screen recording finish saving, then packaged, encrypted, and backed it up across three different cloud accounts.

Chloe, since you love stealing so much, choke on it. Let's see if you can handle the fallout when you proudly parade that poisoned bait in front of the world.

Let's see who ends up copying who.