Chapter 1 - The Stolen Blueprint
The air in the fourteenth-floor breakroom of Sterling & Cross Media was thick with the scent of burnt French roast and industrial lemon floor wax. Outside the massive plate-glass windows, a gray Chicago morning drizzled down over Wacker Drive, turning the city into a watercolor smear of charcoal and wet asphalt.
I stood by the stainless-steel counter, waiting for the espresso machine to hiss out its final, bitter ounces of dark liquid. My left hand rested against the cool granite edge, while my right thumb tapped a nervous rhythm against the ceramic mug.
Wait.
A sharp, sickening jolt tore through the base of my skull, so violent that my knees buckled. My vision fractured, double-exposing the breakroom with a phantom memory that tasted of bile, copper, and profound humiliation.
I gasped, catching myself on the edge of the counter with both palms. The ceramic mug rattled against the stone.
The phantom sensation hit me like an ice-water plunge: the deafening silence of Executive Boardroom A; the smug, porcelain smile on Liam Vance’s face; the enthusiastic applause from the executive committee; and the hollow, dead feeling in my chest as our division vice president, Arthur Sterling, shook Liam’s hand and handed him a forty-thousand-dollar promotion for the exact digital restructuring proposal I had spent three months drafting in my unheated studio apartment.
I remembered what followed in that first life.
I had sat there in my seat, paralyzed by shock. I had stayed silent, telling myself that hard work would eventually speak for itself, that management would figure out who really built the engine. Instead, Liam rode my stolen architecture straight to the executive floor. Within six months, he systematically pushed me off every client portfolio we shared. Within a year, he marked my performance review as "deficient in collaborative leadership," engineered my termination, and took the corner office overlooking Lake Michigan. I ended up burning through my savings, blacklisted by his whisper network, working graveyard shifts as an off-the-books copy editor while Liam was featured on the cover of Crain’s Chicago Business.
My breath came in ragged, burning gasps as the memory burned itself out.
I looked down at my hands.
Smooth. Steady. No calluses from the cheap warehouse keyboard I pounded in that dark timeline. My watch—a simple steel Seiko my late father had given me when I graduated from Northwestern—ticked with quiet, rhythmic precision.
8:44 AM. Tuesday, October 14.
A vicious, diamond-hard clarity surged through my nervous system, instantly burning away the lingering vertigo.
I'm back.
The universe had dropped me straight onto the executioner's platform, sixteen minutes before the bi-weekly senior strategy meeting.
At 9:00 AM sharp, twelve division heads and the regional managing directors would file into Boardroom A. The centerpiece of the agenda was supposed to be an open brainstorming session to solve our forty-percent drop in digital ad retention. In my past life, I had spent the previous evening sitting at this very breakroom table with Liam Vance, drinking lukewarm coffee, patiently walking him through my eighty-page strategic deck: Project Vanguard.
Liam was my junior associate. The kid I had mentored from his first day, the one whose rent I had covered when his direct deposit glitched, the guy who cried on my shoulder when his fiancé walked out. I had trusted him like a younger brother. I had emailed him my raw presentation slides at 11:30 PM so he could proofread the financial appendix.
And right now, Liam was sitting at his cubicle down the hall, uploading my slides onto his personal USB drive, swapping my name on the title card for his own, and rehearsing the opening monologue that was supposed to bury my career.
"Ethan? You okay, man? You look like you just saw a ghost."
The smooth, honey-coated voice drifted through the breakroom doorway.
I didn't jump. I slowly turned my head, my face an impenetrable mask of quiet, unbothered composure.
Standing in the doorway was Liam Vance.
He looked immaculate in a tailored charcoal suit that I had personally helped him pick out at a discount outlet six months ago. His hair was styled with expensive pomade; his teeth were bleached white; and in his left hand, he held a sleek leather portfolio stamped with the company's silver crest.
Underneath his arm was a black leather laptop sleeve.
"I'm fine, Liam," I said, my voice dropping into a calm, steady cadence that carried an edge of cold steel. "Just admiring the morning."
Liam stepped inside, flashing that bright, boyish grin that had deceived three different department heads. He poured himself a cup of green tea, casually leaning against the counter beside me.
"Big meeting in ten minutes," Liam said, his eyes darting toward the floor, unable to hold my gaze for more than a second. "You ready for Arthur's grilling on the retention numbers? I heard he's looking to cut heads if we don't bring a real solution to the table."
"I'm ready," I replied, taking a slow, measured sip of my black coffee. "Are you?"
"Always," Liam laughed, though his throat bobbed on the swallow. "Teamwork makes the dream work, right?"
"Right," I whispered, watching him walk out into the hallway.
May you like
I reached into the breast pocket of my suit jacket. My fingers brushed against the cold, brushed-aluminum casing of an encrypted flash drive containing every single email, timestamp, raw vector asset, and digital breadcrumb Liam Vance never knew I saved.
Not this time, Liam.
