Part 21
The hospital corridors grew quieter with every passing day.
Adrian had been unconscious for two weeks — his doctors said his body was healing, but his mind had chosen silence.
The world outside hadn't been so kind.
Every morning, headlines screamed new scandals, new leaks, new "sources" about Ethan Vale.
Each one worse than the last.
At first, he thought he could handle it — that it was just noise.
But the noise grew teeth.
His email inbox overflowed with messages that came from nowhere — no sender, no traceable address.
They always started the same way:
You hurt what was loved.
Then followed screenshots, photos, sound bites — fragments that made him look guiltier than ever.
It wasn't just his career being dismantled now. It was his mind.
One file contained a recording of his own voice.
"Accidents are easy when people stop paying attention."
Soon, his face filled the feeds again.
Not as a star, but as a villain.
Comment threads swarmed with fury.
Sponsors pulled out.
His label suspended him.
Every time he tried to go online to defend himself, another message appeared before he could type:
Stop pretending, Ethan.
You and I both know what you did.
He changed numbers.
He changed devices.
The messages always found him again.
He started leaving lights on in every room.
He stopped sleeping.
And still — the silence between each message was worse than the messages themselves.
Then came the letter.
Delivered by hand, no postage, left outside his door in a plain envelope.
Inside was a photo of Adrian lying in his hospital bed — peaceful, unmoving.
Next to him, a vase of sunflowers.
And on the back of the photo, written in that same elegant handwriting:
For every scar, there's a truth.
You've given him both.
At the bottom, a signature — not a name, but a single word:
AURA.
Ethan froze.
He whispered the name aloud, tasting it like a curse.
It didn't belong to anyone he knew.
Aura.
A name that sounded less like a person, more like an atmosphere — something that could slip through walls, through code, through fear itself.
The next morning, his social media accounts were wiped.
His emails disappeared.
Every hard drive he owned crashed within seconds of logging in.
And when he checked his phone, it restarted by itself — only to show a white screen with a single message:
"We remember everything."
His hands trembled.
He dropped the phone.
For the first time, Ethan — once adored by millions — looked around his empty apartment and realized there was no one left to call, no one left to defend him.
Only the sound of rain against the glass.
And somewhere, beneath that sound, a soft hum.
The hum of a monitor in a hospital room across the city,
where Adrian lay still and silent,
while a small card rested beside his sunflowers.
Rest now.
I'll handle the rest.
— A