Three Years Forgotten, Why Go Crazy When I Say Goodbye? novel Chapter 40

Willow didn't waste time on pleasantries. "What gives you the right to withhold our project bonuses?"

"Our?" Julian looked at her with a mocking smirk. "Who exactly are you referring to, aside from yourself?"

"My team. The people who actually did the work."

"So, barging into my office wasn't just your brilliant idea, it was theirs too?"

"Does it matter?"

"It matters immensely," Julian replied, his voice laced with ice. "I was actually considering leaving them a way out, but it seems that won't be necessary. Since you're all so united, I'll go ahead and adjust their bonuses to match yours perfectly."

Willow was seething. Matching hers meant zero. Her team had killed themselves working all year, relying on this exact payout. Now, not only was he violating corporate policy, but he was intentionally bankrupting her team just to torture her.

"Coming here was my decision. They had absolutely nothing to do with it. Besides, you can't just casually manipulate their compensation. Every single one of us signed a contract."

"A contract?" Julian looked at her like she was the dumbest person on earth. "Do you really think the Sinclair legal team is so incompetent that they'd be held hostage by a few sheets of paper? If they want to blame someone, they can blame themselves for following the wrong leader."

He was right. Willow had seen the Sinclair legal team in action—they were a battalion of the most vicious, elite lawyers in the country. They had never lost a case.

Julian clearly knew his absolute power, which was exactly why he operated with such terrifying arrogance.

And the worst part was, she couldn't do a damn thing to stop him.

Willow had heard the rumors before—whispers that Vivienne was the true mastermind behind the Seattle project, that Vivienne had driven its success, and that without her, the division would be nothing.

At the time, Willow had brushed it off as toxic office gossip. But looking at the reality now, it all made perfect sense. Where there's smoke, there's fire.

Julian's blatant favoritism was the ultimate green light for everyone else to follow suit.

He wanted her to be nothing more than a stepping stone for Vivienne. He wanted her entire team to pave the way for his precious ward, just so he could crush Willow under his heel.

Willow fought desperately to maintain her sanity, but the sheer cruelty broke her. "Julian, you cannot do this! Do you have any idea what I sacrificed for that patent? I worked from dawn until midnight! I literally lived in the office for an entire month just to secure a single baseline metric! And even then, the data kept failing. I had to redo the trials over, and over, and over again. The stress was so suffocating I was living on anti-anxiety pills. I was so sleep-deprived and sick that I almost collapsed and died in that lab!"