"I need someone's permission to put a homewrecker in her place? I'm doing God's work. You, your daughter, your whole family could walk through that door right now, and I'd make every last one of you kneel and beg. And you'd take it."
The parents around her chimed in immediately.
"You wreck someone's family, and getting hit is the least of what you deserve."
"Maria is the real CEO's wife. You think climbing into someone's bed means you've made it?"
Unbelievable. Every kind of fool crawled out of the woodwork today.
Walter had once tried to take over the parent company's operations. One look from my father sent him scurrying back with his tail between his legs.
It was me who saw a sliver of ambition in him and handed him a thousand-person subsidiary to cut his teeth on.
And somehow that had turned him into a publicly traded company's CEO in these people's eyes?
Maria's expression grew more triumphant by the second. Then her gaze dropped to my neck and her eyes turned vicious.
"You shameless wretch. You spent my husband's money on gemstones? A one-of-a-kind piece from an auction house? You think you deserve to wear that? Give it back!"
She lunged forward and grabbed the stone at my throat with her bare hands. The chain bit into my skin and tore free, leaving a line of searing pain across my neck.
She clutched the blood-smeared gem like it was a holy relic, then looked at me as though she wanted to rip me apart with her teeth.
"Something this exquisite, wasted on trash like you. And that suit, Maria, look at the cut. Must be couture. I wonder which designer she conned it out of?"
I pressed my hand against the jacket instinctively, and my voice came out cold as frost. "You'd better stop. Right now."
### Chapter 3
Olympia Whitney, the biggest bootlicker in the group, looked at me with undisguised contempt. She pulled her kid's set of markers from her bag, raised her hand, and dragged one straight down my chest.
A thick black line tore across my couture white suit in an instant, running from my collarbone all the way down to my thigh.
The other parents saw what she'd done and snatched markers from pencil cases, rushing at me all at once.
Within seconds, my pristine white suit had become a mess of garish colors layered over black.
Olympia was the first to whip out her phone, snapping photo after photo of me. She let out a cold laugh.