Chapter 3
1782words
On her first day, Olivia had summoned all department heads for a meeting. Though it lasted just thirty minutes, everyone left feeling like they'd survived an execution squad.
"Effective immediately, all thirty-seven current Flourish products will cease production." Olivia's voice wasn't particularly loud, but each word landed like a hammer blow, stunning everyone—including Director Lee, who had rushed in when he heard the news.
"Madness! This is absolute madness!" Director Lee slammed his fist on the table, his entire body shaking with rage. "Woods! Do you have any idea how many years of expertise went into these products? You can't just axe everything overnight! You're ripping out Flourish's very heart!"
Olivia regarded him with an expressionless stare, her calm bordering on ruthless. "Director Lee, I respect craftsmanship, but the market doesn't pay for sentiment. Your entire product line's three-year sales don't match what a single bestseller from a major competitor makes in one quarter. Keep clinging to these 'roots' and we'll all be buried with them."
"So… what exactly are we supposed to sell?" a young marketing manager ventured nervously.
Olivia projected an image onto the screen: a sleek, minimalist glass bottle containing a pale green essence. "This," she declared. "Flourish's single flagship product—simply called 'Flourish.' Pure centella asiatica extract focusing on barrier repair and sensitivity relief. Price point: $380."
The room fell into stunned silence. Everyone was floored by the price. Flourish's most expensive product had never broken the $50 barrier. At $380, this seemed like pure insanity.
"You've completely lost your mind!" Director Lee jabbed a trembling finger at her. "Flourish is a people's brand—we've always been affordable! You're destroying everything we stand for!"
"'Affordable' shouldn't be code for 'cheap,'" Olivia rose to her feet, her presence suddenly filling the room. "The product launches in one week alongside my marketing strategy. If anyone thinks I'm being reckless, the board is one floor up—go petition for my removal now. Otherwise, we execute."
With that, she turned and walked out, leaving behind a roomful of shell-shocked executives who could only exchange bewildered glances, stunned by the hurricane that had just blown through their meeting.
In the days that followed, Olivia virtually moved into the office. She embedded herself with the R&D team, obsessing over every microscopic detail of the formula. Meanwhile, she brought in an entirely new marketing team that launched a pre-release campaign that left everyone scratching their heads—no celebrity faces, no flashy ads, just a series of anonymous, high-quality educational videos about "compromised skin barriers" across social media. The production value rivaled National Geographic documentaries.
News of these unconventional tactics inevitably reached Alexander Shaw's ears.
"She's killing their entire product line for a single item priced over $300?" Nathan Quinn couldn't keep the disbelief from his voice as he reported. "Alexander, your ex-wife isn't running a business—she's setting cash on fire out of spite."
Alexander didn't even glance up from the quarterly report he was reviewing. "Let her play," he said dismissively. "That three percent stake should fund her little tantrum for a while. Eventually, she'll realize just how valuable my compensation package really was."
In his mind, Olivia's behavior was nothing more than the desperate flailing of a business-illiterate woman drunk on her newfound wealth. He could already picture Flourish's inevitable bankruptcy, followed by her inevitable return—humbled and broken, finally appreciating what she'd thrown away.
Reality, however, had other plans.
A week later, Flourish launched without fanfare. Purchase links appeared at dawn through those educational accounts, with an initial inventory of just five thousand units.
Everyone braced for catastrophic failure. Instead, all five thousand bottles sold out in ten minutes flat.
"How is this even possible?!" Director Lee clutched the sales report, his hands shaking worse than before—but this time from sheer excitement.
A young marketer from Olivia's team explained breathlessly: "Ms. Woods' strategy was genius! Those educational videos tapped directly into Gen Z's obsession with ingredients and science-backed skincare. We built a massive audience without ever mentioning we had a product to sell—just showing them what their skin needed. When the links dropped today, all those primed customers pounced!"
Olivia remained unruffled as she watched purchase requests flood in and #Flourish shoot to the top of trending topics. She issued a single directive: "Open pre-orders, but announce limited production capacity with a one-month wait for the second batch. Release footage of our manufacturing process and ingredient sourcing to reinforce our commitment to quality and exclusivity."
This masterful combination of tactics transformed Flourish overnight from forgotten relic to coveted luxury. Beauty influencers scrambled to purchase and review the product, generating organic buzz that money couldn't buy. Pre-orders surpassed 100,000 units within a week.
In the exclusive chat group of Harbor City's elite socialites, the conversation had taken a dramatic turn.
[Um, guys? This Olivia Woods might actually know her stuff. Anyone score that Flourish serum? I tried some from my daughter—hate to admit it, but my skin looks amazing.]
[For real. Word is Flourish is the hottest ticket in town—venture capital firms are literally lining up to throw money at it.]
[Oh please. Beginner's luck, obviously. She must have some sugar daddy pulling strings behind the scenes. No way she did this herself.]
Sophia scrolled through the messages in silence, a knot of unease tightening in her stomach. She'd had Olivia investigated, but the results were frustratingly sparse—beyond an MBA from England, the woman's background was suspiciously blank.
"No, something doesn't add up," Sophia set down her phone and turned to her assistant. "Dig deeper. Check all her connections in England, especially in finance. There's more to her story."
She couldn't shake the feeling that the woman who'd held her gaze so steadily in that elevator was hiding something significant.
Sophia's instincts proved correct. Just as Flourish hit cash flow problems trying to scale production for their backlog of orders, a Wall Street investment firm called Obsidian Capital announced a hostile takeover bid.
The news sent tremors through the industry. Everyone assumed Flourish—a fledgling just learning to fly—was about to be swallowed by a predator. Inside the company, panic spread like wildfire.
Only Olivia remained unfazed. She locked herself in her office for three straight days.
Three days later, international financial markets were rocked by a stunning upset. An obscure offshore fund had surgically targeted a leverage weakness in Obsidian's portfolio, executing a textbook-perfect counterattack. Within twelve hours, Obsidian's stock had crashed, their funding chain had collapsed, and they were forced to abandon their Flourish takeover in humiliating retreat.
All of Wall Street was asking the same question: who was the shadowy mastermind behind this precision strike?
Soon, a codename emerged—Echo.
A legendary figure whispered about in investment circles for years—known for surgical precision and devastating execution—whose true identity remained one of finance's greatest mysteries.
When Lawyer Quinn burst into Alexander's office clutching the report, his face was ashen.
"Alexander… Obsidian Capital… it's our North American holding subsidiary."
Alexander's head snapped up, his gaze suddenly razor-sharp. "What did you just say?"
"We've been targeted and the damage is catastrophic. Our opponent… goes by Echo." Nathan swallowed hard. "But here's the kicker… we found that during her time in England, Olivia's financial papers and professor evaluations noted that her analytical approach and investment strategies were… remarkably similar to what market insiders attribute to Echo."
Alexander's breath caught in his throat. He suddenly remembered how for three years, that woman had spent countless evenings quietly reading on the sofa… always buried in foreign financial journals and investment reports. He'd never given it a second thought.
He'd always assumed it was just her way of killing time as a trophy wife with nothing better to do.
A meek, forgettable wife. A ruthless corporate strategist. A financial savant capable of bringing Wall Street to its knees.
These three wildly different personas collided in Alexander's mind like tectonic plates, leaving him reeling with a vertigo he'd never experienced before.
"Investigate," he ground out through clenched teeth, his voice barely recognizable. "I want every goddamn second of her past uncovered!"
Meanwhile, at the eye of the storm, Olivia was calmly touring the Harbor City Art Museum.
To elevate Flourish's brand positioning, she'd planned a collaboration with an emerging artist. Her target: Ethan Chen, a mixed artist whose star was rapidly rising in international circles—and who was infamous for his reclusive nature and impossible temperament.
Major luxury brands had thrown obscene amounts of money at him for collaborations, only to be coldly rejected. Everyone thought Olivia was tilting at windmills.
Olivia walked alone into Ethan's solo exhibition.
Ethan was surrounded by journalists and critics, visibly irritated by their presence. When he spotted Olivia approaching, he froze for a split second, then abruptly pushed past everyone to stride toward her.
To everyone's astonishment, this notoriously arrogant artistic genius bowed deeply to Olivia with profound respect—even displaying the reverent affection a student shows a beloved mentor.
"Professor Woods," his voice quavered with barely contained emotion, "you've finally come back to us."
This scene was captured in perfect detail through a telephoto lens by the private investigator Sophia had planted in the crowd.
That evening, the photos and report were spread before Alexander and Sophia.
[Subject Olivia Woods' secondary identity in art world confirmed—she is the shadow mentor who discovered and shaped Ethan Chen's career, and serves as anonymous advisor to multiple prestigious European art foundations.]
Alexander stared at the composed woman in the photograph and the genius bowing before her. His mind went completely blank, leaving only the sensation of his heart being crushed in an invisible vise.
Who exactly had he been married to for three years?
For the first time, he realized he knew absolutely nothing about the woman who had shared his bed.
What he had mistaken for docility, the silence he had dismissed as weakness—now revealed themselves as the greatest ironies. He'd believed himself the puppet master, never suspecting he might be the marionette.
"Ding."
His phone pinged with a message from Nathan.
[Alexander, breakthrough. Three years ago, Olivia agreed to the marriage arrangement because she was investigating something… something connected to an overseas entity hostile to Shaw Industries. The marriage may have been… merely a way to access Shaw family information and connections.]
Alexander's fingers went numb. The phone slipped from his grasp, landing with a soft thud on the carpet.
He lifted his gaze to the glittering cityscape beyond the window, experiencing for the first time a bone-deep chill and… something that felt disturbingly like regret.
Regret? When had such a word ever entered Alexander Shaw's vocabulary?
Yet now it coiled around his heart like strangling vines, squeezing until he could barely draw breath.
