Chapter 2

The scandal kept trending, refusing to die down. Worried about donor backlash, the board placed Arthur on mandatory leave to ride out the storm.

Three days later, the moment I walked out of my lab, my phone lit up with over ninety-nine missed calls and texts.

I calmly dialed Arthur back. He picked up on the first ring, his voice trembling with rage. "Elena Vance! What the hell are you trying to pull?!"

"Do you have any idea what you've done?! The university suspended my lectures because of your ridiculous lies!"

Thinking my silence meant I was intimidated, his arrogance flared right back up.

"Listen to me: I still have the original raw datasets and every single preliminary draft from back then! Do you really think your smear campaign scares me?"

"Once the board finishes their investigation, the narrative will flip entirely. You'll end up right back where you started—a disgraced rat that everyone despises!"

I let out a quiet chuckle, remaining silent.

A smear campaign? Coming from him, that word was pure comedy.

He ranted on, grasping at straws, but when I refused to take the bait, he slammed down the phone in frustration. "Just you wait, Elena! If those sponsored trending tags don't disappear by tonight, I will sue you for every penny you have for defamation!"

He actually thought I paid for those trending topics. It was almost laughable.

The internet already despised academic vultures who stole credit from junior researchers. Once a scandal like this broke, social media carried it for free. Who needed to pay for PR?

I saved the three-minute call recording and immediately backed it up to my encrypted cloud drive.

This was the second lesson he had taught me: everything requires hard evidence.

Five years ago, after the plagiarism rumors ruined me, I tracked Arthur down in the hallway to demand answers.

He merely frowned, looking down on me with pity. "Elena, you stole my research. I personally convinced the dean not to expel you—I did you a massive favor."

"Why do you keep digging your own grave by claiming I stole from you? I'm a tenured, world-renowned professor. Why would I steal from an undergrad who barely passed Advanced Calculus?"

"You need evidence to make claims like that, Elena."

Desperate, I grabbed his sleeve to keep him from walking away, but the fabric gave way, and I accidentally ripped his blazer right off his shoulder.

The very next morning, photos of that moment were plastered all over the campus anonymous forum.

The posts claimed that after my plagiarism was exposed, I threw myself at my professor, begging to trade my body just to get co-author credit.

Arthur even posted a comment under the thread: [Let's keep discussions civil to protect the university's reputation. Please hold yourselves to higher moral standards and do not compromise academic integrity.]

His hypocritical comment acted like gasoline on an open flame. The thread exploded, spilling out into public social media.

[Just curious, how many nights does it take to get a second-author credit? Must be quite the performer.]

[She always walks around in fancy clothes. Guess we all know how she pays for them now. Thank god Professor Miller has morals, or our whole department would be trash.]

[Can someone kick her out of the dorms already? Every time she walks past our floor, it smells cheap and disgusting. Why isn't the administration doing anything?!]

The dean suspended my classes. I desperately tried to stay on campus to gather proof of my work.

Instead, vile rumors swallowed me whole. No matter how many times I tried to explain myself, I was met with nothing but disgusted scowls.

Until one afternoon in the campus dining hall. Someone bumped into me in line, and I stumbled, almost falling into a guy standing behind me.

He shoved me away violently, stumbling backward in genuine panic. "Don't touch me! I don't buy escorts!"

A girl at the next counter scowled, marched straight up to me, and dumped her entire bowl of greasy pasta right over my head.

"Can't survive without throwing yourself at men, huh?! Your professor turned you down, so now you're preying on random students? What's next? You gonna rub yourself against the campus janitor?!"

Scalding hot broth dripped from my hair, searing red streaks across my face as my clothes clung heavily to my skin.

All I could do was desperately plead, "I didn't do it! The research was really mine!"

Someone eyed my collar and clicked their tongue. "No wonder she had the nerve to seduce the professor. She’s definitely got the assets for it."

"Please, it's what she does behind closed doors that gets the job done. How else could she wrap him around her finger looking like pure trash?"

"Try pulling that cheap crap again, and I'll make sure you wash your hair in boiling grease every single day."

With that, the girl shoved her boot right into my stomach, grabbed her boyfriend's hand, and strutted off.

I collapsed onto the linoleum, kicked and shoved by the moving crowd until violent nausea forced me to vomit bile.

Only then, repulsed by the sight, did the onlookers finally turn away.

When I dragged myself back to my dorm, a sign was taped across the door: [No Whres Allowed. Elena Vance Keep Out.]

Locked outside all night without a chance to clean myself up, I went to the dean the next morning, begging for a hearing.

He pinched his nose and slammed the door in my face. "Countless reports say you slept your way through every single lab credit, and you still dare to come make excuses?!"

"As of today, you are permanently expelled. Don't you ever set foot on this campus again—you've disgraced this entire institution!"

From that moment on, my life was plunged into absolute darkness.

Snapping back to the present, I released the next wave of evidence, posting high-resolution scans of my original research logs and notes online.

[These are supposedly Professor Arthur Miller’s original project drafts. Can anyone explain why he went out of his way to copy my exact handwriting?]

The internet erupted once again. I looked at the comments with a cold smile.

This was the first lesson I taught myself: an eye for an eye.