#1 TRENDING: #GraduationGirlFound
#2 TRENDING: #TKRoseExposed
#3 TRENDING: #TheLeak
My breath stalled in my lungs. The phone felt suddenly heavy, like a brick of lead. The scent of burnt sugar spiked violently in the enclosed cabin of the SUV, acrid and choking.
"No," I whispered. The word sounded wet and pathetic in the silence. "No, no, no."
I tapped the hashtag. My finger left a smudge on the screen.
The feed populated instantly. It wasn't a slow trickle of rumors. It was a deluge. It was a tsunami of information, moving so fast the timestamps were measured in seconds.
@Nexus_Zero [Verified]: You wanted the truth about the Invisible Queen? You wanted to know who writes the fantasies while hiding in a castle? We found the receipt. #TKRose is #GraduationGirl.
The tweet had an attachment. A video file.
I pressed play.
The footage was grainy, shot from a high angle. It was drone footage. The camera swooped down out of the grey sky, buzzing over the tree line, fighting the wind. It focused on a structure perched on the cliff edge.
The fortress.
The drone hovered, peeping-tom style, outside the floor-to-ceiling glass walls of the living room.
I saw the firelight flickering inside. I saw the shadows. And then, for a split second, I saw her.
Tessa.
She was walking past the window, wrapped in a blanket, looking small and fragile. It must have been taken this morning, just moments before we left. The resolution was high enough to see the messy bun of her black hair. High enough to identify her.
"They're watching," I choked out, bile rising in my throat. "They're outside the house."
But it got worse.
Beneath the video was a document. A screenshot of a hacked database. It was a medical log from the Omega Health Foundation.
ALERT ID: 4992-ALPHA
PATIENT: KANE, TESSA
STATUS: CRITICAL ENDOCRINE DISTRESS
LOCATION PING:[Coordinates Redacted]
Except they weren't redacted. The hacker, thisNexus_Zero, had highlighted the GPS coordinates in neon green.
They traced the ping.
The distress signal. The biometric alarm that had saved her life... It was the breadcrumb trail. We had used the system to find her, to save her, and in doing so, we had lit a flare in the dark for every predator with a WiFi connection.
I scrolled down. My vision blurred.
The comments were a cesspool. It was the internet at its absolute worst, a mob mentality fueled by anonymity and cruelty.
Side-by-side images were propagating like a virus.
On the left was the sleek, dark, erotic cover ofThe Alpha’s Oath, symbolizing power and control.
