The Billionaire's Undercover Heiress

Chapter 3: Checkmate with a Smiley Face

My heart didn't just sing; it roared. This wasn't a punishment; it was a gift. A direct line into Sterling Prescott’s strategic mind. He was already looking past the Schmitt merger, planning his next kill. And he had just handed the roadmap to me, his enemy’s daughter.

I sat at my desk, fingers poised over the keyboard. To any observer, I was a scared intern facing a mountain. Internally, I was a shark that had just been dropped into a tank of seals.

For four hours, I was a machine. I dove deep into financial databases, patent filings, and the insider forums my father had taught me to navigate. The names and numbers before my eyes weren't a confusing jumble; they were a battlefield. I saw their supply lines, their weak points, and their over-extended fronts. The overleveraged assets of one, the brilliant but untested tech of another, the fatal flaw in a third's supply chain. This was my native tongue, the world I was born to conquer.

The hidden Stanford MBA was humming. My mind, honed by years of watching my father wage war in boardrooms, was a lethal machine. I cross-referenced R&D burn rates with executive turnover, analyzed patent longevity against market saturation curves, and built financial models in my head with a speed that would have made my professors weep. The final document wasn't a report; it was a battle plan, elegant in its deadliness.

The report I was building wasn't just a competitive analysis. It was a weapon, showing not only who Prescott should acquire, but how to cripple those he couldn't. It was brilliant. Thorough. Damningly professional.

Which made it completely unusable.

Blair Davenport could write this report; Blair Davis could not. A new assistant producing this level of analysis in four hours wasn't a prodigy; it was a confession.

So, with a sigh of both frustration and artistic pride, I began the second, more difficult phase: dumbing it down.

I took my elegant, surgical report and butchered it. I rewrote sharp analytical points in simple, almost childish language. I replaced complex charts with brightly colored bar graphs straight out of a high school presentation. I littered the executive summary with phrases like “It seems to me…” and “I might be wrong, but…”

Then came the trump card. I identified the single most promising, and most vulnerable, acquisition target on the list—a small solar tech startup called 'Helios Innovations.' Their technology was revolutionary, but they were bleeding cash and riddled with internal strife. They were the perfect target for a predator like Prescott.

In my original analysis, I dedicated a full section to a step-by-step acquisition strategy. In the 'Blair Davis' version, I buried it. I mentioned Helios almost as an afterthought, in a single, highlighted bullet point at the very end of the report. It was flagged in neon yellow, with a handwritten-style font comment next to it that read: “This one looks neat! :)”

It was an insult to my intelligence. It was perfect. It was a Trojan Horse within a Trojan Horse.

At precisely 4:55 p.m., five minutes before the deadline, I printed the report. I stapled the corner slightly askew. Then I took a deep breath, picked up my deliberately flawed masterpiece, and knocked on the oak doors.

“Enter.”

Sterling Prescott was standing by the floor-to-ceiling windows, staring out at his kingdom of glass and steel. He didn’t turn as I entered.

“The report, Mr Prescott,” I said, my voice laced with a hint of nervous pride.

He finally turned and gestured towards the massive mahogany desk that sat in the center of the room like a sacrificial altar. “Leave it.”

I hesitated, playing my part to the hilt. "I can walk you through the key findings if you like. "I used highlighters for the important parts!" I said, my tone sickeningly eager.

He gave me a look that could freeze helium. It was a look that said he would rather personally scrub every toilet in the building with his tongue than be ‘walked through’ anything by me.

“That won’t be necessary, Miss Davis, you should go.”

I nodded, gave him one last bright-eyed smile, and walked out, leaving the report on his desk. The moment the latch clicked, I let out a breath I didn’t realize I’d been holding, my back pressed against the cool wood.

Inside his office, Sterling stared at the report as if it were a venomous snake. He had given the new girl an impossible task specifically to watch her fail. He steeled himself for an exercise in mediocrity.

He flipped open the executive summary. His eyes narrowed. The language was simplistic, almost patronizing. “It seems to me…” he scoffed. But the points themselves… they were concise. Alarmingly so. He ripped through the pages, his initial annoyance morphing into a grudging respect, which then curdled into deep suspicion. He stared at the report. It was a paradox. The presentation was a joke, but the analysis... the analysis was lethal. It was like a child's drawing that depicted a murder scene with perfect anatomical accuracy.

She’d profiled the leadership of each company with information that hinted at insider knowledge—a CEO’s gambling problem, a CTO’s simmering resentment. This wasn't public information. How in the hell did an assistant with a resume that screamed ‘mediocre’ pull this off in four hours?

Then he reached the final page. And he saw it.

The single, neon-yellow highlighted bullet point. The almost-hidden recommendation.

Helios Innovations.

It was a perfect, predatory checkmate, disguised as a smiley face.

“This one looks neat! :)”

Sterling stared at the two words and the cheerful emoticon. A chill, entirely unrelated to the office’s air conditioning, traced its way down his spine. This wasn't an accident. This was a message.

He stood up, his mind racing. Who was Blair Davis? No one was that accidentally brilliant. This was the work of a professional. A ghost. His eyes fell on her empty desk. It was clean, sterile, exactly as it should be.

Except for the mug.

The bright pink, glitter-horned, ridiculously cheerful unicorn sat there, mocking him. It was a declaration. A piece of chaos was deliberately injected into his world of order. A puzzle piece that didn't fit. Just like the report. Just like the woman herself.

For the first time in a very long time, Sterling Prescott was confronted with something he couldn't categorize or control. He was intrigued. He was suspicious. And, though he would never admit it, even to himself, he was deeply, dangerously fascinated.

He picked up his intercom. “Maria, cancel my five-thirty. And get me every single piece of information you can find on Blair Davis. I don't care what it takes. I want to know where she went to kindergarten.”