My Mother's Killer's Daughter Works For Me

The day my mother hemorrhaged during the difficult labor of her second child.

And my father, a man worth hundreds of millions, pulled every doctor off her to go treat his mistress's migraine, because the woman had whined that all the crying was giving her a headache.

That night, my mother and my unborn brother both died in agony, and the mistress arranged to have me thrown out of the house.

Twenty years passed.

On the charity of my mother's best friend and a drive that nearly killed me, I became the woman who now ran a multi-billion-dollar conglomerate. They called me Ms. Butler.

It was the company's annual conversion review, and my assistant handed me five files.

He pointed at the girl on the first page, full of praise.

"Ms. Butler, this one, Lisa Butler, has done excellent work. Almost every supervisor gave her near-perfect marks."

I opened Lisa Butler's profile, and my eyes stopped on the line listing family members.

Those two names I wouldn't forget if you burned me to ash.

After a long moment, I told my assistant to bring all five interns in.

One by one, the conversion contracts went down the table.

When I reached the last person, I lifted my head, met her sure-of-herself eyes, and calmly slid the termination letter across to her.

"Lisa Butler. You didn't make the cut."

…

The air in the conference room seemed to freeze on the spot.

The other four interns stood there holding their conversion contracts, at a loss, every one of them glancing at Lisa.

My assistant froze too. Standing at my side, he shot me an anxious look.

"Ms. Butler…"

I acted as if I hadn't seen it, my gaze level on the girl in front of me.

She looked very much like her mother.

The same beauty, the same cleverness, the same superiority she'd been born wearing.

Of everyone in that room, Lisa was the only one who didn't panic.

She simply blinked once, startled, then settled back into composure almost at once.

She opened the folder she'd brought without hurry and laid its contents flat across the table.

"Ms. Butler, I've interned at your company for three months and handled four projects, two of them entirely on my own. Client renewal rate, one hundred percent."

Her tone was even, neither meek nor pushy, and perfectly organized.

"Top marks on two straight quarterly reviews, and the highest numbers of any intern in my cohort."

When she'd finished, she paused and raised her eyes to me.

"That's the best record of anyone in this cohort. If you're rejecting me, you owe me a reason."

She said it with her chin tipped slightly up, and there was no hurt in her eyes, only the controlled calm of someone who'd just been insulted.

It was bone-deep nerve.

The confidence and the arrogance you only got from being pampered since childhood, raised in a happy, perfect home.

I leaned back in my chair and watched her for a while before I answered.

"There is no reason."

Lisa's face went stiff.

"This is my company. I want to let you go, and it's that simple."

A crack finally showed in her expression.

Her color shifted, but she recovered fast and gave a cold little laugh.

"Ms. Butler, this is workplace bullying."

She closed the folder, her tone turning cold in an instant.

"If word of this got out, I'd imagine it would do some damage to your company's reputation."

I smiled.

"I'm not bullying you."

I held her gaze without blinking, my face giving nothing away.

"If this feels like bullying to you, then maybe that's your problem. Excellent people never think they're being targeted. Only the guilty ones do."

At that, Lisa's expression changed completely.

I'd finally gotten under her skin.

That was when my assistant leaned in close and dropped his voice in my ear.

"Ms. Butler, perhaps you'd reconsider? This Ms. Butler really has performed exceptionally during her internship, and the board did look into it. Her father is Ernest of Butler Group, the same Butler——"