Allison sat in the back of a yellow cab as it sped uptown.

The cab jerked to a stop outside the iron gates of Columbia University's Morningside Heights campus.

Allison paid the fare, shoved her wallet into her bag, and pushed the heavy car door open.

The moment her boots hit the pavement, she saw him.

Trevor, her ex-boyfriend, was leaning against the brick wall near the dormitory entrance. He was smoking a cigarette.

Trevor spotted her. He immediately dropped the cigarette onto the concrete and crushed it under his expensive sneaker.

He plastered a sickeningly deep, affectionate look onto his face and walked quickly toward her.

"Allie, baby," Trevor said, reaching his hand out.

He tried to grab her fingers.

Allison felt a wave of pure physical nausea hit her stomach. She twisted her torso sharply to the side, completely dodging his touch.

"Don't touch me," she snapped.

Trevor let his hand fall, looking hurt. "Allie, please. What happened with Kenzie was a mistake. It was just a frat party. I was drunk. It meant nothing."

Allison let out a harsh, humorless laugh.

"A mistake?" Allison asked, her voice rising. "You paid for the room at The Plaza Hotel using my secondary credit card, Trevor. That's a very expensive mistake."

Trevor's face stiffened. The fake affection vanished, replaced by a defensive scowl.

"Well, maybe if you weren't so obsessed with your family's company, I wouldn't have looked elsewhere!" Trevor shot back, stepping closer to intimidate her. "You completely ignored my emotional needs!"

The sheer audacity of his victim-blaming made the blood roar in Allison's ears.

Her eyes turned as cold as the December wind.

She pulled her left hand out of her heavy wool coat pocket.

She held it up right in front of his face, extending her ring finger.

The plain platinum wedding band caught the dull afternoon sunlight.

Trevor stared at the ring. His brow furrowed.

"What is that?" Trevor scoffed. "Did you buy a prop ring to save face? You're pathetic."

Allison looked at him with absolute deadpan calm.

"I got legally married this morning," Allison announced. Her voice didn't shake. It was a statement of absolute fact.

Trevor threw his head back and laughed loudly.

"That is the most ridiculous lie I have ever heard in my life," Trevor mocked, wiping a fake tear from his eye.

The heavy wooden doors of the dormitory suddenly banged open.

Zoe stormed out.

She was holding a massive plastic cup of iced coffee with a double shot of espresso. The ice cubes rattled loudly as she marched down the steps.

Without breaking stride, Zoe swung her arm forward.

She aggressively hurled the entire cup of freezing coffee directly onto Trevor's limited-edition sneakers.

The dark brown liquid splashed violently over the white leather and soaked into his expensive socks.

Trevor let out a high-pitched scream. He jumped backward, frantically shaking his wet feet.

"Are you crazy?!" Trevor screamed at Zoe, his face turning purple with rage.

Zoe didn't back down. She turned to the growing crowd of students walking past the gates.

"Hey everyone!" Zoe yelled at the top of her lungs. "This guy is a cheating loser who uses his girlfriend's money to pay for his hotel rooms!"

Several business school students stopped in their tracks. They pointed at Trevor's ruined shoes and immediately pulled out their phones to record the scene.

Trevor's face burned with extreme humiliation. He looked around wildly at the cameras pointed at him.

He glared at Allison, his eyes full of venom.

"You are going to regret dumping me, Allison," Trevor threatened, his voice shaking with anger.

Allison didn't say a word. She calmly pulled out her phone and started dialing the campus security emergency number.

Trevor saw the numbers on her screen. He cursed loudly, turned around, and sprinted away down the sidewalk. His wet shoes made pathetic squeaking sounds with every step.

Zoe grabbed Allison's left arm.

She pulled Allison's hand up to her face, her eyes wide with shock as she inspected the very real, very heavy platinum band.

"Holy crap," Zoe whispered.

Allison pulled her hand back and swiped her student ID card at the door scanner. The light flashed green.

They walked into the lobby and stepped into the cramped, slow-moving elevator.

The doors slid shut, sealing them inside.

"Who is the poor bastard that agreed to this?" Zoe demanded, her eyes practically sparkling with gossip.

"He's just some guy in the finance sector," Allison said vaguely, staring at the floor numbers ticking upward. "My lawyer introduced us. It's strictly to solve my property inheritance issue."

The elevator dinged and stopped at their floor.

They stepped out and walked down the long hallway lined with ugly blue carpet.

Zoe suddenly changed the subject, her energy shifting rapidly.

"Oh my god, did you hear the news that blew up the department today?" Zoe asked, waving her hands excitedly.

"No," Allison said, her mind already drifting back to the corporate audit she needed to run tomorrow morning.

"We got a new Advanced Finance professor," Zoe gushed. "Everyone says he looks like a Hollywood actor, but he is completely ruthless. A total ice king."

Allison nodded absentmindedly. She didn't care about academic gossip.

"The crazy part is," Zoe emphasized, leaning in close, "his last name is Dillard. And someone saw a wedding ring on his finger today."

Allison's hand froze on the brass doorknob of their room.

The surname hit a very specific, very sensitive nerve in her brain.

Dillard.

Her husband's name was Elliot Dillard.

But she quickly pushed the thought away. Dillard was a common name in New York. She had personally reviewed Elliot's background files before signing the prenuptial agreement. His resume was a relentless timeline of investment banking, hedge funds, and private equity. There was absolutely zero mention of any academic experience. It was an unsettling coincidence, but she simply didn't have the time or the mental bandwidth right now to stress over a million-to-one statistical anomaly.

She turned the knob and pushed the door open, completely unaware of the trap she was walking into.

Allison pushed the dorm room door open.

Her other roommate, Claire, was sitting cross-legged on the cheap rug, typing furiously on her laptop.

Allison's desk was covered in glossy brochures and thick application packets for the London School of Economics.

Allison walked straight to her desk.

She didn't hesitate. She scooped up the entire pile of expensive, carefully prepared application materials and shoved them forcefully into the plastic trash can.

The heavy paper hit the bottom of the bin with a loud thud.

Claire's head snapped up. She pushed her thick black-rimmed glasses up her nose.

"Are you insane?" Claire asked, her eyes wide with shock. "You've been working on those for six months."

Allison pulled out her desk chair and sat down. Her posture was rigid.

"I'm not going to Europe for grad school," Allison announced. Her voice was terrifyingly calm.

Zoe closed the door behind them and leaned against it.

Allison looked at her two best friends. She gave them a highly sanitized, surface-level summary of her brutal confrontation with Judd at the company today. She left out the marriage, but she made it clear she was going to war.

Zoe walked over to the mini-fridge. She pulled out a freezing can of Diet Coke, popped the tab, and handed it to Allison.

"We are behind you one hundred percent for this Manhattan revenge tour," Zoe said fiercely.

Allison took a sip of the cold soda. The carbonation burned her throat.

She opened her laptop and logged into SSOL, Columbia's notoriously terrible course registration system.

The screen loaded slowly.

"I need to move all my classes to the early morning and late evening," Allison muttered, her fingers flying across the trackpad.

"Why?" Claire asked.

"Because I need my core daytime hours completely free to intern at the Lee Group's Wall Street headquarters," Allison explained. "I have to be inside the building to find the financial rot."

Claire slid across the rug and looked over Allison's shoulder at the glowing screen.

"Look," Claire pointed at a row of text. "The Advanced Finance Seminar has exactly one spot left."

Allison stared at the screen.

"That class is worth a massive amount of credits," Claire warned. "And it's basically the golden ticket into top-tier investment banks."

Allison's eyes moved to the instructor column.

It read, in cold, black pixels: E. Dillard.

Allison remembered the conversation in the hallway just three minutes ago.

"Hey, Zoe," Allison called out without looking away from the screen. "What is Professor Dillard's full first name?"

Zoe shrugged, tossing her jacket onto her bed.

"Nobody knows," Zoe said. "The university website only lists his first initial. They haven't even uploaded a faculty photo yet."

Allison chewed on her lower lip.

The coincidence was strange, but New York was full of elite men with the last name Dillard. It meant nothing.

She moved the cursor and aggressively clicked the 'Register' button. She claimed the final, highly coveted seat in the class.

Instantly, a bright red warning box popped up on the center of her screen.

WARNING: This course maintains a zero-tolerance attendance policy. One unexcused absence will result in an automatic failing grade.

Allison scoffed. She confidently clicked 'Accept'.

She firmly believed she had the perfect time management skills to balance a hostile corporate takeover and a demanding Ivy League schedule.

She closed the laptop with a sharp snap.

She walked over to her narrow closet and pulled the folding doors open. She needed armor for her first official day infiltrating the company.

She pulled out a sharp, impeccably tailored black Tom Ford suit. She hung it carefully on the back of her door.

Suddenly, her phone chimed.

She picked it up. It was an encrypted text message from an unknown number.

Remember the confidentiality clause in section four of our agreement.

The message was brutal in its brevity.

Allison knew immediately who it was. It was Elliot, her cold-blooded contract husband.

She typed back a single 'OK' emoji.

She saved his number in her contacts under the name Cold-blooded Partner.

Hours later, the dorm was pitch black.

Allison lay in her narrow twin bed. She stared at the ceiling. Her brain was hyperactive, refusing to shut down.

Images flashed behind her eyelids. The dense text of her father's will. The cold, sharp line of Elliot's jaw as he sat across from her at City Hall.

She tossed and turned, tangling her legs in the thin sheets.

At exactly 6:00 AM, her alarm went off. The shrill electronic beeping cut through the quiet room like a knife.

Allison sat up violently.

Her heart was pounding. Her eyes were wide open, burning with raw ambition and a desperate hunger to conquer the Wall Street battlefield.

Allison stepped out of the elevator and onto the forty-eighth floor of the Lee Group headquarters.

She was wearing her sharp black Tom Ford suit. Her heels clicked against the polished hardwood floors.

The atmosphere here was suffocating.

The air was thick with tension. The relentless ringing of multi-line phones and the aggressive, rapid-fire clacking of mechanical keyboards created a wall of chaotic noise.

Naomi Kent, a senior HR manager with tired eyes, met her at the reception desk.

Naomi handed Allison a cheap plastic intern badge on a blue lanyard. It had the lowest possible security clearance.

"Follow me," Naomi said, not smiling.

Naomi led her through a massive maze of gray cubicles. Junior analysts were screaming into headsets, ignoring them completely.

They walked toward a row of massive glass-walled executive offices in the far corner.

"Listen to me carefully," Naomi whispered, leaning close to Allison. "The Executive Vice President of Investments is Godwin Wheeler. He is a notorious workaholic. Do not waste his time."

Naomi pushed open the heavy glass door and stepped back.

Allison walked in.

Godwin Wheeler stood behind a massive mahogany desk. He was staring intensely at six different Bloomberg terminal screens, his eyes tracking the scrolling red and green numbers.

He slowly turned around.

His sharp, calculating eyes scanned Allison from head to toe. He was evaluating the so-called princess of the Lee empire.

He didn't offer his hand. He didn't say hello.

"If a private equity firm executes a leveraged buyout using a sixty-forty debt-to-equity ratio, how does a sudden two percent interest rate hike impact their year-one cash flow projections?" Wheeler fired the question at her like a bullet.

Allison didn't flinch. She took a deep breath.

She tapped into the brutal financial modeling drills she had memorized at Columbia.

She delivered a flawless, mathematically perfect breakdown of the cash flow destruction within thirty seconds.

Wheeler's eyes narrowed. A tiny, almost invisible flicker of genuine respect crossed his face.

He nodded once.

He pointed a thick finger at a massive stack of thick binders on the corner of his desk.

"Those are due diligence reports for the tech merger," Wheeler said. "I want the risk summaries cross-referenced and on my desk by five o'clock."

Allison walked over, picked up the heavy stack of binders, and carried them to a small, cramped desk outside his office.

She sat down and started working at a frantic pace.

Hours blurred together.

During the lunch hour, the other interns gathered in the breakroom eating expensive salads. Allison stayed at her desk, her eyes burning as she stared at spreadsheets, desperately hunting for Cheryl's hidden financial traps.

At 12:30 PM, Wheeler walked out of his office holding an empty coffee mug.

He stopped by her desk.

"How are your classes at Columbia?" Wheeler asked casually, taking a sip of the air.

"Intense," Allison replied without looking up from her screen. "I just registered for the Advanced Finance Seminar. I need the practical combat experience."

Wheeler let out a low chuckle.

"Good luck with that," Wheeler said. "My nephew just started teaching there. He has a terrible temper. He eats unprepared students alive."

Allison offered a polite, distracted smile. She completely failed to connect the dots between Wheeler's nephew and her own schedule.

At 1:00 PM, Naomi rushed over.

"The risk assessment meeting got moved up," Naomi said. "Get in there and take the minutes."

Allison grabbed her notepad and hurried into the massive glass boardroom.

The room was packed with senior executives. Judd's top loyalist, a sweaty man named Peterson, was presenting a quarterly asset report.

Peterson pointedly looked at Allison and asked her to verify a highly complex depreciation metric on page forty. He was trying to humiliate her.

Allison didn't even open the packet.

Relying purely on her photographic memory, she loudly pointed out a massive, hidden calculation error in Peterson's formula that artificially inflated the asset value.

The room went dead silent.

Wheeler, sitting at the head of the table, hid a smirk behind his hand. He was extremely satisfied with her aggressive counterattack.

But the victory was short-lived.

The meeting dragged on. Executives argued in circles over meaningless budget cuts.

Allison felt a cold sweat break out on the back of her neck. She glanced frantically at the large silver clock on the wall.

It was 1:45 PM.

Her Advanced Finance Seminar-the class that failed you for one absence-started at exactly 2:00 PM.

Her hand cramped as she scribbled the final line of the meeting summary on her legal pad.

The second Wheeler called the meeting to a close, Allison shot out of her chair.

She abandoned all professional decorum and stepped quickly out of the boardroom.

She power-walked down the long carpeted hallway, nearly jogging as she skillfully navigated around groups of investment bankers. Despite her efforts to avoid collisions, her hurried pace still drew several annoyed, questioning stares from the senior staff.

She slammed her hand against the elevator call button.

The doors opened instantly. She threw herself inside and punched the lobby button repeatedly.

The elevator plummeted to the ground floor.

The doors slid open. Allison sprinted out into the massive marble lobby.

Suddenly, she slammed on the brakes. Her boots skidded against the polished floor. She froze in absolute horror.