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He’s already used them. Three times. Once, to cover a sexual harassment accusation at Yale, which was quietly settled.

Another, to tank a rival developer’s launch.

And a third, still active, targeting a “female influencer with market saturation potential.” The description is vague, but the profile picture they used to brief the bots?

Lyra.

Fuck.

I clench my fist so hard that my knuckles pop.

This isn’t mere high-school jealousy anymore. This is industrial sabotage. Coordinated, funded, and tracked. And Lyra is the target. Because she’s too beautiful. Too magnetic. Too real in a world built on filters and manufactured charm.

She doesn’t play the game, and that makes her dangerous.

I save the files to a secure, encrypted drive, hidden under three decoy folders. Because if Evander sees this, he’ll shut it all down. And right now, I need time to build a counter-strategy. To hunt their sources and protect Lyra without making her feel the walls closing in.

Because the thing is, she’s not paranoid.

The world really is trying to break her.

And now I know who’s holding the hammer.

Lyra’s not just at risk. She’s center stage in a goddamn performance she doesn’t even know she’s starring in.

And I’ve been too busy trying not to touch her to realize that the knives were already out.

I sit there staring at the paused screen. Lyra’s so bright in that footage, laughing and living, while the two people she calls friends move chess pieces behind her back. It’s almost poetic, in that cruel, venom-dripped way life likes to play itself out.

I want to shut it all down and pull her out of Willowridge entirely. I want to lock every door behind us, cut the strings, and eliminate the threats.

But I can’t. Because I was given one rule. One command that I’m not going to break.

Don’t touch her life. Not her circle. Not her parties. Not her town.

Evander made that clear from the moment he handed me the file with her name on it.

The office smelled like cigars and old leather. Evander’s scent, permanent and overbearing, was soaked into every corner of the Vane estate’s study. It was early fall. Rain clattered softly against the leaded glass windows, and the trees outside were still half-dead, clawing at the sky.

Evander sat behind his monolithic desk, his expression carved from stone. He slid a thick dossier across the surface toward me.

“She’s not to feel threatened,” he said.

I opened the folder and skimmed the first page. Lyra Vane. Her photo was clipped to the top corner. The kind of photo you get from a private jet manifest, not a social profile.

“Fine,” I replied, flipping to the security assessment.

“And you don’t interfere in her personal life,” he added, his tone sharper.

I looked up. “If her personal life is the source of the threat, I’ll need to.”

Evander’s eyes didn’t blink. “No. You protect her without disrupting her routine. Her friends, her parties, her… whatever the hell she does with her time. You stay invisible unless there’s an immediate threat.”

“That’s not how this works.”

“It is now,” Evander snapped. “You think this town gives a shit about what happens to her? They smile and take her pictures, but the minute she stumbles, they’ll bury her. You interfere, and they’ll know she’s under surveillance. That’ll isolate her even more.”

I paused, noting the unusual sharpness in his voice. “She’s already isolated.”

Evander looked away, his jaw tight. “Then don’t take the rest of her life away.”

A brief moment passed before he folded his hands.

“After Isola died…” His voice dropped. “She’s been clinging to routine. To people who might not deserve her, but they’re hers. It’s all she has got left.”

I didn’t say anything, but something in my chest locked tight. Evander looked at me. We never talked about Isola. If he was mentioning her, then it meant he was serious about this.

And the way he said it, like there was more—something unspoken between grief and guilt—burned a hole in my gut.

It would’ve actually made me feel sad if I didn’t know what a monster Evander is and what he did to Isola.

He came to me for Lyra’s protection for a reason.

Because he knew I’d never let anything happen to Isola’s daughter.

He probably also knows I’ve been keeping tabs on the girl since Isola’s death.

He handed me a key.

“Keep her alive, Creed. But let her believe she’s free.”

I could drag Lyra away from all this. I could shut her inside the estate and never let her out again. And maybe she’d be safe. But she’d wither.

She’s not built for cages. Lyra Vane is and always has been chaos in silk. A free spirit with iron in her bones and rebellion in her blood. She doesn’t just walk into rooms; she owns them. And Evander’s right. This town may be poisonous, but it’s hers .

And now I see how deep the rot goes.

Harper and Declan aren’t just socialites playing influence games. They’re part of something larger. Coordinated, funded, calculated. A slow-drip sabotage hidden in designer gowns and rooftop parties.

And Lyra’s the one they’re isolating and breaking down. The same way you boil a frog slowly… so she doesn’t notice until it’s too late.

And I’m supposed to watch.

To let her keep dancing through this town while wolves pull her strings from the shadows.

No fucking way.

But I can’t break the rules yet. Not until I know who’s really holding the leash. Not until I’m ready to cut it.

XXX

I don’t leave the room for two days.

I mean, I technically do… to piss, grab coffee, and snarl at anyone who dares try to talk to me. But emotionally? Mentally? I’m 100% locked in like a war general reviewing troop movements, except my battlefield is made of Wi-Fi trails, metadata, and bitchy influencer group chats.

I haven’t seen Lyra once. And that’s on purpose .

Because if I see her, if she walks past the surveillance hub door barefoot, wearing one of those oversized cashmere sweaters that swallow her whole, I’ll forget how to type, forget the risk, forget everything except how she tastes when she’s sleepy and lets her guard down.

So I keep the door locked. I keep the footage rolling, and I keep digging.

By hour four of day one, I’ve built a digital profile of every friend Lyra’s ever smiled at since the tenth grade.

I’ve mapped out party guest lists from the last six months, RSVP databases, and even a suspiciously specific Pinterest board Harper made about “reclaiming your image” that might as well be titled How to Publicly Humiliate a Vane in 5 Easy Steps .

By hour eight, I’ve started talking to myself. “No one organically hashtags ‘raw healing’ that many times in one week, Harper.”

At hour twelve, I switch to black coffee and pistachios. It’s not healthy, but if I’m going to unravel a conspiracy, I need to be both jittery and slightly malnourished for maximum paranoia.

Day two, I hit gold. Declan’s crypto wallet pings a purchase order linked to an ad targeting firm, small, dirty, and buried under layers of shell sites.

It’s the same firm that placed ads in proximity to Lyra’s events over the past month, all with clickbait headlines like “The Truth About Influencer Privilege” and “How the 1% Co-Opts Trauma Culture.”

It’s subtle, designed to provoke discourse without naming her directly. But I see it. The timing and the placement.

They’re not just trying to sabotage her career. They’re trying to erode her reputation… slowly, casually, publicly. Like bleeding her out with a thousand paper cuts.

And the worst part is that it’s fucking working.

Comments have changed. Subtweets. Even some of her so-called followers are turning, though not with full force… just with hesitation, with doubt. And in her world, that’s lethal.

She doesn’t even know she’s bleeding. And I’m the only one watching her drown.

At hour thirty-six, I finally take a shower. Sort of. It’s more of a combat rinse. But it gets the job done. I don’t shave. I do, however, stare at my own bloodshot eyes in the mirror and mutter, “You look like someone who’s about to storm a congressional hearing.”

Charming.

Meanwhile, I imagine Lyra in the garden.

Or sprawled on the sunroom couch. Maybe she’s reading.

Maybe she’s sketching. Maybe she’s texting Harper because she still doesn’t know that the shark is circling her ankles with lipstick on its teeth.

I don’t check the camera feed because that’ll only make it harder for me to stay away from her, especially considering she’s in the same house as me.

I could go to her. I want to go to her. But I know myself.

The second I touch her, all this will stop being about strategy and start being about desperation. The second she whispers my name like a secret, I’ll stop thinking like a soldier and start acting like a man in love.

And love? Love is reckless.

So I keep the door closed, keep the lights low, and keep feeding the monster I’ve unearthed, frame by frame, byte by byte.

I’ll see her again when I’m ready. When I have answers. When I know exactly how deep this rabbit hole goes.

Because until then? I’m not Silas, the man with the fucked-up past and a hard-on for the sinful girl.

I’m the puppeteer. And it’s time to start cutting strings.

It’s now the morning of day three. Technically, it’s still dark. The control room is lit by the glow from the screens and caffeine fumes. I haven’t slept more than a few hours total, but my eyes snap open the second the system pings an alert.

It’s a local media flag with the keywords: Lyra Vane.

My heart drops before I even open the file.

I pull up the article, and the headline screams louder than any siren: “Heiress in Decline: Lyra Vane’s Erratic Behavior Raises Eyebrows”

The subheader throws in buzzwords like instability and legacy liability for flair. The tone’s vague enough to avoid lawsuits but pointed enough to stab.

The byline is fake. I know that because I’m the source.

Well… technically, my ghost—a backdoor persona I built weeks ago to track disinformation trends. It wasn’t supposed to publish anything. It was supposed to bait and trap.

But someone used it, which means someone got in .

I trace the upload path and follow the digital fingerprints—sloppy rerouting through a dead press agency in Boston, masked by three dummy ISPs and a bot farm in South Africa. It merely takes me seventeen minutes to reverse-engineer.

The order came from Mirage. Of course it did.

I slam the desk so hard that my coffee tips and spills across a pile of annotated profiles. It doesn’t matter. I already memorized them.

Declan. Harper. Their handlers. The wires that are tying it all together.

But this is public. This is open war . The worst thing is, I missed something.

I scramble through the morning’s security logs and pull up the mailbox cam near the front gate. The timestamp is 6:12 a.m.

A letter, unmarked with no post office tag. Slipped in by hand. And by the time the estate staff went out to check, it was already gone.

Which means she saw it. Which means I was too slow.

I’d intercepted twenty-six letters since I took this job. Twenty-six messages scrawled in too-precise handwriting, each one designed to destabilize her.

Fuck! How did I miss this one? That can’t happen again.

I shift feeds, pull up Lyra’s social graph, and then switch to Zara’s. Her phone’s already lighting up with dozens of texts. All anonymous, all venomous.

“Why are you covering for a manipulator?”

“Heard you were paid off to keep her secrets.”

“How long until you crack too, little sidekick?”

She hasn’t answered any of them. But I see her pause. Her thumb hovers, then drops. She sets the phone face down on the bar counter and stares into the distance like the storm’s inside her skull.

I zoom out. Harper’s account goes private. Ten minutes later, she quietly blocks Lyra.

No message. No warning.

Just gone.

Silas Creed, digital voyeur and human firewall, watches every reaction in real time.

Every dropped call, every paused group chat, every story reposted without tagging Lyra, every friend who “accidentally” forgets to invite her to next week’s launch party.

It’s not chaos. It’s a symphony. And someone else is conducting. I growl, wanting to tear the whole town down.

I want to drag Declan by the collar and Harper by the extensions and make them explain themselves to Lyra’s face.

But I can’t. Not yet.

Because I don’t just need proof, I need to control the fallout .

Lyra’s been betrayed before. She’s been lied to and isolated. I’ve read her medical files, her therapy logs, the unsent emails to her mother, written in the middle of the night like a prayer and confession in one.

And if I drop this on her now, I won’t just break the illusion.

I might break her . So I keep watching. I keep cataloging and preparing.

Because the moment I make a move, there won’t be a second chance. And when I do strike, no one in this town will ever fuck with Lyra Vane again.