Raina's POV
The phone buzzed like a wasp trapped in glass.
It was a small, impatient sound that somehow felt enormous in the hush of the farmhouse. I'd been standing in the doorway, half-drunk on the sight of him,Ethan, blood dark at his lip, his hand pressed to his side like the rest of him might fall out if he loosened his grip. I wanted to scream and then wrap him in blankets and forget the world.
Instead the phone buzzed again.
My hand moved without permission. I picked it up from the table where I hadn't even realised I'd dropped it when I'd come down the hallway. Mike's phone was next to it, buzzing in his suit pocket like a trapped bird; the farmhouse had the same quiet as before the storm, as if even the walls were holding their breath.
A notification brightened the screen. A thumbnail. A play icon. A single line of text beneath it, short, flat, enough to make the marrow in my bones loosen:
Raina Mehta, today the truth comes out.
I didn't want to look. I did anyway.
The thumbnail was a blur at first: a low-res, grainy frame of a room that might have been mine three years ago. A dark hand. A piece of glass glinting. A flash that could have been light or could have been something else.
The caption under it was almost ceremonial, like the clicking of a seal—truth. Not a truth; the truth.
My mouth went dry. A memory rose so fast and jagged that my head spun: December, the echo of a gunshot not like a sound but like a memory that had been pressed into my bones, a man I'd once loved, or thought I had, and a face I'd only seen in flashes. Every professional skill I had as a doctor fled the room. There was a child in me that crouched and waited for someone to tell it it was safe.
I pressed play because I was a coward and because I was a person who had to know.
The image was blurred and small. The audio was worse, like a memory recorded in a room too wet with panic. My own voice, torn and high: "No—stop—don't—please—" The syllables were mine and not mine, a ghost recording of a night I'd tried to mummify.
Then a sound that made my heart hit my throat, a gunshot, sharp and final in the tiny speaker. Metal on metal. A fragment of a callused voice in the background saying a name..RAINA..Like an accusation.
I felt the room tilt. The world narrowed down to that clip and the small, terrible knowledge that whoever had posted this had taken the thing I had tried to bury and put it under glass where everyone could stare.
"Mam" Mike's voice was too close. He was already moving, always moving. He had the efficient, merciless look of someone who had trained himself to handle crises so others didn't have to. He reached instinctively for the phone. "Don't touch—" He stopped himself, not out of courtesy but because he knew that pulling the device away would steal me of that awful truth.
Ethan's breath hitched. He looked at the screen, then at me, and for one second his injured face was childlike. It broke something in me.
"Turn it off," I whispered. It felt ridiculous to ask, like asking a fire not to burn. "Turn it off, Mike. Please."
He didn't touch it. He didn't have to. He met Ethan's eyes, and the way the two of them looked at each other, a man who had been shown his own fragility and another man who'd given that fragility to the world, made a hardness settle in my chest.
"Volume down," Ethan said. His voice was low, and the sound went through me. He shuffled on his feet, too many things going on behind those hazel eyes.
"Don't—" He stopped, because what could he say that would fix metal sound and old blood?
But the video was already being shared. Comments bled in under the clip like ants crawling toward sugar: who is she? is this the psychiatrist? what happened that night? Someone had already predicted the narrative and set baits for the rest of the world to bite on. The internet was fast and ugly and hungry.
A new notification arrived: the URL had been pushed to several micro-blogs. The timestamp was current. Whoever had posted it had wanted it to burn now.
My hands went cold. The pen on the table,a pointless stick of ink I had used to sign something that felt like a noose, slid slightly. I pressed my palms to the table, feeling the marble bite at my skin, trying to anchor myself to fact. The pen was still there. The black rose, still in its vase, leaned with one drooping petal like a heart that had been wounded and refused to die.
"Papa—" I started, because the simplest, most animal reaction when the world collapses is to look for the parent's hand. I wanted the calm of him ordering things into place, the remoteness and the terrible competence of his voice. He had been the one who told me to sign. He had been the one who thought this could be contained.
"He's on it," Ethan said before Mike could answer. It was the claim of a man who had already assumed the role of protector. "He knows. Vikram knows. He'll move."
That was supposed to be a relief. It wasn't. Because this was not just a leak. This was a deliberate puncture. The blackmailer had chosen to thread the needle today when the fragile paper of what I'd tried to build was still wet.
I couldn't breathe around the sound of my own voice in the video, that high, young, terrified sound. Memory has fingers that reach into you; mine brushed my ribs like cold tips.
"Raina," Ethan said, and there was something like pleading in it, which made the space between my terror and my anger collapse. "Don't read the comments. Don't—"
"Why would I not?" I snapped. The sound surprised me: sharp, raw. "Why would I not watch the thing that everyone will see? Ethan, I signed those papers! I did the thing you wanted!"
He flinched slightly as if my words hit him physically. Blood pooled a little at his lip. "You signed because it's the lesser of two evils," he said quietly. "Because I wanted to give you a shield."
"And now they have a hammer." My voice lowered. My hands began to shake. The woman inside me who critiqued tone and phrasing temporarily vanished; what remained wanted to scream until the noise matched the panic in my chest.
"Who did this?" Mike asked, controlled but urgent. He moved toward the farmhouse desk, starting to flood the lines, damage control scripts, lawyers on speed dial, people who could inject statements into the bloodstream of the press. "We need to—"
"Hold," Ethan snapped. "No statements yet. Too early. Let me..." The breath he didn't take trembled across his lips. He wanted to be the one who chose the words. He wanted to choreograph the damage. It felt absurd and noble and terrifying.
A new message blinked on the screen, this time not a clip, but a text. My name on display with a cold punctuation:
We will be at your door at dawn. Watch her break live.
The sentence sank like a stone.
My hands went numb. Every muscle in my face learned suddenly what the word exposed felt like.
They were not satisfied with the leak. The leak was a blade to open a wound. They wanted to watch the infection set in. They wanted spectacle and blood and the music of a ruined life.
I found my knees and needed them. I sat down hard, like a woman who had been pushed. Ethan's boots were close enough that I could see the scuff marks and the dried mud; he was near enough that his breath fogged in the cold kitchen air. He crouched, not gentle but intentional, as if proximity could be a bandage.
"We have three hours," he said. His voice measured the room like a metronome. "I'll get ahead of them. Mike will parse the net and find the node. Your father will apply pressure where it will hurt the most."
"And if they come now?" I asked, small and stupid and suddenly terribly afraid of the answer.
"They'll find someone at the door who is ready," Mike said. "Not you, not today."
A laugh escaped me, more hysteric than anything. "Someone at the door," I repeated. "Someone who will be ready. Who will be ready to watch me fall apart."
Ethan's jaw tightened. For a second that felt like the furnace of the house was turned up by hundreds of degrees. "No. They won't get to that. Not while I'm standing between them and you."
Someone, somewhere, had already set a calendar for my disintegration. They had blurred footage, threaded a caption, planted a promise. And now we were supposed to run the race on their track.
My phone buzzed again. My hands, of their own accord, snatched it. Another message. A single image this time: a screenshot of the farmhouse's front gate, timestamped, the camera angle low, the gate wide enough for a car to pass, and in the corner, two dark figures loitering, their faces blurred.
Below it: See you at dawn.
The floor dropped a little under me. I had signed because I wanted to be safe. I had signed because my father had told me and because Ethan had insisted and because the papers felt like a hope dressed in ink. Now the ink blurred into blood.
Ethan moved so quickly I barely registered it, toward the door, toward the monitors, toward a future none of us wanted to inhabit. Mike followed, already in motion.
I sat there with the phone burning my palm, the black rose petal falling slowly and finally onto the marble like a single, private punctuation.
Outside, the first low rumble of thunder rolled across the hills.