Chapter 2

The next morning, the moment I walked into the office, the air smelled like smoke before an explosion.

Julian was standing by the breakroom, face red with rage, gripping a printed report so hard the veins bulged on his knuckles.

The new hires huddled around him with their heads down, barely daring to breathe.

I walked past as if nothing was wrong, grabbing an empty mug for coffee.

"Evelyn, get over here."

Julian barked, barely masking the fury in his voice.

Holding my mug, I slowly turned around.

"Something wrong, Julian?"

He slammed the papers onto the marble counter with a deafening thud.

"This is Maya’s user testing analysis. Look at this garbage. Does this look acceptable to you?"

I glanced down. The formatting was a mess, data points were missing, and the summary made no sense.

Yeah, it was rough.

But I knew damn well it wasn't Maya's fault.

She was a fresh intern. Handing her zero guidance and twenty-four hours to deliver an enterprise-grade report—she was lucky she turned in anything at all.

"What kind of report were you looking for, Julian?"

I didn't defend her. I just asked him a straight question.

He blinked, caught off guard, before shouting even louder to compensate.

"A professional, comprehensive, high-level data analysis, obviously! Do I really need to spell that out?!"

"What is your standard for 'professional'? How do you define 'comprehensive'?"

I pressed on calmly. "And where should the depth come from? Are we benchmarking historical cohorts, or projecting future user retention curves?"

Julian choked on his own tongue.

His face turned a deep, furious purple. He clearly hadn't expected me to pull his pants down in front of everyone.

"I kept you on as a consultant, not a grammar cop!"

He snapped, his voice dropping into a harsh hiss.

"I’m just clarifying your specs so I can provide accurate 'consulting' input."

I smiled politely, keeping my tone completely neutral.

The silence in the breakroom became suffocating.

Finally, a senior dev from another squad stepped in to break the tension.

"Julian, let's take a breath. Evelyn is just trying to align expectations. Maya, pull up the report template Evelyn built last month and use that structure."

Julian snatched the exit ramp, scoffed loudly, and stormed off.

Maya shot me a look of pure gratitude before sprinting back to her desk.

I poured my dark roast and walked back to my computer.

I opened my Julian Vance - Incident Log and added a new entry:

April 16th. Day 2.

Due to ambiguous goals and lack of technical direction, junior devs failed to produce actionable work. Julian lashed out publicly without offering solutions.

He remains completely oblivious that the root issue is his own unrealistic timeline set yesterday.

I clicked save.

This was only the prelude.

That afternoon, Liam ran into a wall trying to render a slick animation Julian demanded. The client’s legacy codebase simply couldn't handle that kind of graphics pipeline.

Liam gathered his courage and went to Julian’s office.

Through the glass partition, Julian's impatient barking leaked into the open floor:

"Can't do it? That's a skill issue! I don't care how you do it, just make it work by tonight!"

Liam stammered, trying to explain the system architecture limits, but Julian cut him off brutally.

"Save the excuses! Are you the software engineer, or am I?"

Liam walked back looking like a kicked puppy. He sank into his ergonomic chair and stared blankly at his monitors for hours.

By the time the afternoon circus ended, a heavy gloom hung over the entire office.

Julian stayed hidden in his glass fishbowl. The juniors stared at their screens with lifeless eyes.

I sat quietly, cleaning out personal files and drafting my handover docs, occasionally glancing up to log the disaster.

Around 9:30 PM, most of the floor had cleared out.

Liam was still hunched over his desk, letting out ragged sighs at endless lines of red errors.

I packed my tote bag. As I passed his chair, I paused.

"Stop banging your head against the wall. If you switch the rendering pipeline to a fallback canvas mode, it takes a few extra lines, but it won't crash their old framework."

I murmured the tip quietly.

Liam's head whipped around, his eyes instantly catching fire.

"Evelyn!"

I didn't stop walking. I just gave a slight wave.

"Don't thank me. I'm just a consultant."

Stepping into the elevator, I sighed softly to myself.

I wasn't saving the project. I just couldn't stand watching a talented young engineer get crushed by an incompetent clown.

Back in my apartment, I didn't go straight to bed. I booted up my personal laptop.

I took every absurd demand, toxic message, and reckless order Julian had dropped in our WhatsApp work group over the last forty-eight hours, screenshotted them all, and filed them with exact timestamps.

Cold, hard receipts.

Proof of how a "genius" project manager steered a multimillion-dollar product directly into an iceberg.

I wasn't doing this for petty revenge.

I did it because once I walked out that door, I wanted those kids I trained to have a shield.

I wanted everyone to know they didn't fail. The golden boy did.

I shut my laptop and stared out at the city lights.

This was just the opening act. Julian wasn't going to stop, and the time bomb was ticking down fast.

The night is always dead silent before the thunder cracks.

All I had to do was wait for the explosion.