— Redo it. I want it on my desk by morning,” my boss Tamara’s voice clanked like a bolt being drawn.
She tossed a folder with the report onto my desk. The corner of the pricey leather jabbed unpleasantly into my stack of papers.
“Tamara Igorevna, but we submitted this project last week. Everything was approved.”
She smirked—the way you smirk at something both disgusting and funny, like mold on bread.
“It was approved. And now it isn’t. The client found mistakes. And do you know what I think, Anya?” She leaned closer, and I caught the cloying sweetness of her perfume. “You’ve gotten careless. You’ve relaxed.”
I stayed silent. Arguing would be like pouring gasoline on a fire. I had seen that report. There were no mistakes.
But I had also seen the client’s email that Tamara had prudently kept from me.
I saw it last night at three fifteen, when our whole corporate system was asleep—and I wasn’t.
“Cat got your tongue?” she pressed. “You’ve gotten slow. A real old mouse. Gray, invisible. All you can do is rustle papers in the corner.”
Her words didn’t hurt. They were simply… information. New data for the system. I looked up at her calmly.
“I’ll take care of it, Tamara Igorevna.”
She had expected something else. Tears? Excuses? Begging? My calm threw her off balance.
“Excellent. A mouse should know its place.”
She turned on her heel and clicked away to her glass aquarium of an office.
The whole department carefully pretended to have heard nothing, burying their faces in monitors. A hypocritical, cowardly bog.
I opened the folder. Flawless work. My work.
And at the very end, on the last page with the final calculations—a crude, ridiculous correction made by someone else’s hand. A correction that turned success into failure.
I stared at those crooked figures, and there was no resentment in my head. Only a cold, crisp calculation.
At night, when the city outside turned into a scatter of lights, I was in my element.
My modest laptop at home was just a terminal, a gateway to another world. A world without titles or decorations, where there was only pure skill.
I didn’t redo the report. I worked on my personal project, code-named “Insurance.”
On a secured cloud drive, in a folder inconspicuously titled “Recipes,” lay all of Tamara’s underbelly.
It wasn’t just compromising material. It was the anatomy of her fears and lies. Deleted emails to suppliers with unmistakable hints about “kickbacks.”
Audio recordings of her chats with the CFO where they cheerfully discussed “optimizing” rank-and-file bonuses by cutting them for those who didn’t know how to stand up for themselves.
Screenshots of messages where she ordered term papers for her blockheaded son.
And the sweetest part—a detailed log of her chat with a top manager at our main competitor, to whom she was leaking information about our tenders.
She’d called me a mouse. Well then. Mice live in the walls. They hear everything. And they gnaw holes in the most unexpected places.
Today I added a new file to the “Insurance” folder: a scan of the report with her correction and the original thank-you email from the client. The contrast was deadly.
In the morning I put the “corrected” report on her desk. I simply removed her change and restored the original, accurate figures. Let her send it to the client. It would be amusing.
Tamara flipped through the document with a victor’s air.
“You can do it when you want to. Seems you just need the right incentive.”
She didn’t spot the catch.
Her certainty in her own impunity—and in my obedience—had blinded her.
“Since you finished so quickly,” she went on without looking up, “you can do something useful.”
After the merger we got the database from “Hermes.” Thousands of items. You need to manually reconcile all the SKUs with our catalog. The automated script throws too many errors.
It was an exquisite torture. Work that required an analyst’s meticulousness but was, in essence, dumb and mechanical.
A week of that and any specialist starts to question their sanity. The perfect way to “prove” my incompetence.
I decided to make one last attempt. To play by the rules.
“Tamara Igorevna, could I have a word?”
She lazily nodded toward a chair. I stepped into her office.
“I wanted to discuss workload. Reconciling the database will take at least a week and completely halt my primary analytical work. Perhaps it should go to an intern or junior specialist?”
It was my compromise. My olive branch.
Tamara leaned back and slowly, deliberately, removed her glasses.
“Anya, are you saying this work is beneath you?”
Her voice was silky, almost friendly, which only made it worse.
“No, of course not. I’m only talking about priorities and efficiency.”
“Efficiency?” She smirked. “I think you should think about your own. Others manage. No one complains.
“It’s always something with you. Maybe you just can’t cope? You know, I value people who just do their jobs instead of trying to seem smarter than everyone else. People who know their place.
“And you, Anya, seem to have forgotten yours. Go. Work.”
That was the end. Not of the conversation—of my attempts to make this end “nicely.” I left her office feeling her triumphant gaze on my back.
She didn’t just want to humiliate me. She was afraid.
Afraid of my competence, and so she tried to bury me under pointless drudgery, grind me into the dirt so she’d look more significant by comparison.
I sat down at my desk. Turned on my computer and opened that very database. Thousands of rows of meaningless letters and numbers.
All respect, all doubt evaporated.
Only a cold, ringing clarity remained. The mouse would no longer rustle in the corner. The mouse would go gnaw the load-bearing beams.
The reckoning came on Friday.
Midday, Tamara’s phone rang. She grabbed the receiver, her face spreading into a honeyed smile.
“Yes, Gennady Petrovich, I’m listening.”
Gennady Petrovich was that very client. I tore my eyes from the meaningless table and watched.
The smile began to melt off her face. She looked like a wax mask softening over a flame.
“How… brilliant?” she echoed, hysteria creeping into her voice. “Yes, of course, I’ll pass along your thanks… to Anna. Yes, she’s a very valuable employee.”
She dropped the receiver as if it were red-hot. Her gaze darted across the office and speared me.
It held nothing but pure, undiluted hatred. She understood. She understood that I hadn’t obeyed, that I’d sent the correct report and made her look like a complete idiot.
She stormed out of her office. The whole department froze. The show was starting.
“My office. Now,” she growled, pointing toward her lair.
I calmly closed the reconciliation program, stood, and followed her.
The moment I shut the door, she pounced.
“Who do you think you are, you little bitch? You tried to set me up?!”
“I corrected a mistake,” I answered evenly.
“That wasn’t a mistake! It was a test! Which you failed! You disobeyed a direct order!”
She paced like a caged beast. She realized she’d lost control. It was driving her mad.
“You’re fired!” she shouted. “Fired for cause! For sabotage! I’ll make sure no decent company ever hires you again!”
I stayed silent. It was expected. But she wasn’t finished.
“I know about your little student brother,” she hissed, stepping close. “Studying at a prestigious university, is he?
“Expensive, I bet? What will he do when his little mouse of a sister gets tossed out on the street without a penny? Sweep courtyards?”
And that was the moment. A low blow. A blow aimed at the one thing that mattered.
My job wasn’t just a job. It was the price of Lyoshka’s future.
Something clicked inside me. Loudly, finally. The dam burst.
I looked her straight in the eye. And for the first time she saw in mine neither submission nor fear. She saw what she feared most. Superiority.
“You won’t be able to fire me, Tamara Igorevna,” I said quietly.
“And why not?” she faltered.
“Because in exactly ten minutes the CEO and the head of Security will receive an email.
“From one of my anonymous accounts. The email will contain a link to a cloud folder. Let’s call it ‘Tamara Igorevna’s Works.’”
Her face went slack. The color drained out.
“You… you wouldn’t dare.”
“It has everything: your kickback arrangements, the scheme for stripping employees of their bonuses, the purchased papers for your son.
“And, of course, the full history of your collaboration with our competitors at ‘Atlant.’ I imagine Security will be especially interested in that section.”
I turned and headed for the door.
“Sit down!” she squealed.
I stopped without turning.
“You’re in no position to give orders. You have exactly nine minutes to write a resignation letter of your own free will. Otherwise I hit ‘send.’ The clock starts now.”
I left her office, leaving her alone in her glass aquarium that suddenly looked like a prison cell.
The entire department stared at me. But now their eyes held not fear of the boss, but shock and… the first stirrings of respect.
I sat at my desk. Opened my laptop. And waited.
Nine minutes. The air in the office grew so thick and viscous it felt like you could cut it with a knife. No one typed.
No one spoke. Every gaze, one way or another, was fixed on two things: the closed door to Tamara’s office and me.
I didn’t look at the time. I watched the cursor blinking in the empty body of an email.
My finger rested on the touchpad. I was perfectly calm. This wasn’t revenge. It was a surgical operation to remove a tumor.
Exactly eight minutes later, the door opened.
Tamara stepped out. She looked ten years older. Her expensive suit hung on her like on a hanger. Her perfect hair was mussed.
But worst was her face—gray, gaunt, empty-eyed. She looked at no one.
She walked the length of the department, came to my desk, and laid a folded sheet of paper on it. A resignation.
Then, just as silently, she headed for the exit, snatched her coat from the rack, and disappeared through the door. No one said a word to her.
I took the letter and went to the CEO.
Sergey Vladimirovich, a heavyset man with tired but very shrewd eyes, was already waiting for me. He silently took the paper and read it.
“I was expecting something like this,” he said. “Tamara was… effective. But toxic. What exactly happened, Anna?”
He looked directly at me. He wasn’t asking whether it was true. He was asking what the last straw had been.
And there it was—the moment of truth. I could have laid out everything. Become a hero. But real power doesn’t shout about itself on every corner.
“Tamara Igorevna encountered irreconcilable differences with corporate ethics,” I replied evenly. “She decided her resignation would be the best solution for the good of the company.”
He looked at me for a long moment, and understanding flickered in his eyes. He saw not just an offended employee but someone holding all the cards and in no hurry to show them. He saw strength.
“I see,” he nodded. “All right. Go back to your desk. You’ll act as interim head of the department for now. Prepare optimization proposals by morning…
“No. Just get back to work. We’ll sort it out on Monday.”
I left his office. Acting head.
Back at my desk, I deleted the drafted email. I didn’t touch the “Insurance” folder.
It stayed where it was, like a nuclear briefcase. A guarantee that the old order would never return.
I didn’t feel euphoria or joy. I felt a weight settle on my shoulders. I had won.
But victory didn’t make me free. It made me responsible.
I was no longer a gray mouse rustling in a corner. But I wasn’t a jubilant conqueror either. I had become something else.
Someone who knows everyone has secrets. And the one who controls those secrets controls everything. And that knowledge is the heaviest burden of all.
