My Stepbrother's Dirty Little Secret novel Chapter 151

Chapter 15)

+15 Banes

Chapter 151

Ms. Toricelli, I need to speak with you urgently regarding your Orion Vector internship. HR has reported that you have not shown up for your scheduled hours this week. This is concerning. Please respond immediately.

I swallowed, the back of my throat feeling like it was coated in sand. I opened the full thread. There was another message underneath it, a wall of text that looked like a swarm of angry hornets. My brain couldn’t catch the letters; they vibrated and flipped, mocking me. I hit the play button, desperate for the voice to make sense of the

mess.

Professor Adler:

As you know, this internship is not optional. It is tied to your final semester credit hours. You are required to complete a minimum of 240 verified internship hours to graduate.

The robotic voice droned on, indifferent to the way my heart was trying to kick its way out of my ribs.

“Additionally, your disability support scholarship requires proof of continued placement and attendance. If Orion Vector reports non-compliance or termination, it could affect both your credit completion and scholarship status.”

Scholarship.

Without that money, I wasn’t just losing credits. I was losing the half-tuition coverage my disability status provided, the only reason I wasn’t drowning in a debt of my own.

“If there is a personal or professional conflict, you must report it through proper channels immediately. Failure to complete internship hours may delay your graduation or require semester repetition.”

Semester repetition. Starting over. Being the “slow girl” for another year.

Professor Adler:

Please respond within the hour. If I do not hear from you, I will be forced to contact Orion Vector HR directly for clarification.

This was it. My future. My career. All those nights staying up until 3:00 AM debugging broken models that refused to train. The hours spent staring at lines of Python until the characters blurred into a gray soup. The late nights running TensorFlow scripts while my earpiece whispered variable errors into my ear because my brain kept flipping characters when I read too fast.

All of it, the sweat, the tears, the way I had clawed my way through a world that wasn’t built for a brain like mine. All of it was on the line because I’d quit like a coward after kissing my boss. After kissing my stepbrother.

I let out a shaky, jagged breath. What was I supposed to say? “Sorry, Professor, I blew my career because I let the CEO pin me to his desk and eat my face.”

I scrolled down to see another text.

Orion Vector HR Portal

Subject: Internship Attendance Alert

Dear Gianna Toricelli, Our records indicate absence… Continued absence without notice may result in internship termination and academic reporting…

I stood alone in bathroom, listening to those emails over and over until the robotic voice sounded like a judge

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Chapter 151

C

+15 Banus

sentencing me to death.

I was done. I was a defect.

I felt like nothing. I was supposed to save my family. I studied until my eyes bled so Mom and Jules would be safe. But Salvatore took that away. He used his blood money to buy them, making my years of hard work look like a joke. He made me useless.

Now, Morgan was gone too. I wasn’t smart enough. I wasn’t fast enough. I was a failure as a student, a sister, and a friend.

I wasn’t enough for the degree. I wasn’t enough to protect anyone. I was just a mess. I was a mistake in the story that everyone was tired of trying to fix.

I pulled up a new message and sent a voice note to my mother, “I’m staying with a friend for the week. Don’t look for me. I’m fine.”

I hit send, and then I looked at the phone. It was a tracker. I didn’t think. I dropped the phone into the toilet and flushed. I watched it swirl away, taking my career, my scholarship, and my identity with it.

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