Chapter 3: The Digital Reckoning
I arrived at the Gazette office an hour later, breathless, smeared with orange frosting and sweat, looking nothing like the woman who had walked into the gala. The editor on duty, a man named Marcus who had been trying to dig up dirt on Thorne for years, looked up from his desk in shock.
"Elara?" he asked, standing up. "What happened to you?"
I didn't speak. I simply dropped the brown folder and the tiny black recorder onto his desk. "The Senator. The housing development bribes. The offshore accounts. It’s all there."
Marcus opened the folder, his eyes scanning the documents. As he read, his expression shifted from confusion to pure, unadulterated shock. He grabbed a thumb drive and plugged in the recorder. When the voice of Senator Thorne—negotiating the sale of public land for a private kickback—filled the office, Marcus looked at me with a reverence I hadn't felt in my life.
"You realize what this is?" he whispered.
May you like
"It's the end of them," I replied.
By morning, the story was live. It broke the internet. The video of the humiliation at the gala—which Thorne and Vanessa had intended to use to destroy me—had been repurposed. The public watched the video of the "cake incident," and then they watched the follow-up news report exposing the corruption. The mockery turned to rage. The city turned on Thorne. Protests began forming outside his office before the sun reached its peak.
