The CEO Fired His Secret Heiress

I was the secret weapon who built my CEO's company from the ground up. But the moment he hired his new intern girlfriend, my life became a living hell. She publicly humiliated me, calling me a conniving social climber.

She sabotaged our biggest deal by projecting falsified documents framing me for corporate espionage onto the screen during the signing. Then, she smashed an award over my head, leaving me bleeding on the office floor.

And the man I'd dedicated five years of my life to? He looked at my bleeding wound, then at his crying girlfriend, and believed her when she claimed I attacked her.

"You're fired," he spat.

He thought he was firing a disgraced employee. He had no idea he was firing Allie Valenzuela, the sole heiress to the very corporation that had just saved his company.

My next call wasn't to a lawyer. It was to my father.

Chapter 1

Allie Valenzuela POV:

The moment Benjamin Blanchard, the man whose company I built from nothing, fired me in front of the entire tech industry, wasn't the moment my heart broke. It had already been shattered into a million pieces, one for every time he chose her over me. But that story doesn't start with the end. It starts five years ago, with hope, and it dies here, in this office, with a lie.

The final line of code flickered on my screen, a glowing green beacon in the pre-dawn darkness of the Innovatech office. I hit 'Enter' and held my breath. The system hummed, whirred, and then… stabilized. The catastrophic data breach that had threatened to sink our biggest client, and us along with them, was contained. A wave of relief, so potent it made my head spin, washed over me.

I leaned back in my chair, the leather groaning in protest. My eyes burned from staring at the monitor for thirty-six hours straight. A dull ache throbbed at the base of my skull, a familiar companion on nights like these. This was the fifth time in five years I had single-handedly pulled Innovatech back from the brink of bankruptcy. I was Allie Valenzuela, Stanford MBA, Chief of Staff to the CEO, and the company's best-kept secret weapon.

Just as I was about to close my laptop and attempt to feel human again, the door to Benjamin's office swung open. But it wasn't Benjamin.

A young woman, barely out of her teens, stood in the doorway. She was wearing a pink baby-doll dress that looked more suited for a sorority party than a tech startup, and her eyes, wide and blue, scanned my disheveled appearance with a look of thinly veiled disgust.

This was Kasey Ballard. The new intern. Benjamin's new girlfriend.

She wrinkled her nose, her gaze lingering on the empty coffee cups and takeout containers littering my desk. "Wow. It looks like a hurricane hit in here."

I forced a tight, professional smile. "Just weathering a storm, Kasey. Everything's secure now."

"Right," she said, the