The city always felt hungover at dawn—streets rinsed, promises sour. Blackwell Capital's glass ribs caught the first weak light as if the building, too, needed proof the night was over. I was at my desk outside Adrian's office before seven, fingers wrapped around a coffee I couldn't taste, the words from the video's caption still burned behind my eyes: PROOF OF COERCION.
Ethan arrived with two laptops, a stack of folders, and energy that vibrated. "We have a play," he said by way of hello.
"Tell me it's more than 'wish on a star,'" I muttered.
He grinned like a man who loved a puzzle. "It's math and physics, actually."
Adrian walked in behind him, cutting the hallway's hum the way a keel cuts water. He didn't slow. "Conference room. Ten minutes." To me, softer: "You okay?"
"No." I stood anyway. "Ready, though."
His gaze held mine for a beat that felt like a promise. "Good."
Inside the war room, Ethan dropped a blackout shade so the screens blazed cleanly. On the main display, he froze the doctored video at a frame where "Adrian" was allegedly kissing "me." He split the screen into quadrants: doctored footage; original office cam still; a 3D model of the room; a live feed from the same camera angle.
"Lesson one," Ethan said. "Light."
He circled the shadow on Adrian's jaw in the fake—the shadow fell left. In the original still from that exact minute, the shadow fell right.
"Morning sun," Ethan said, tapping the window side. "On Tuesday, at that time, the light comes from here. Our fake forgot the rotation of the earth. Cute."
"Lesson two," he continued, "reflections." He zoomed to the glass cabinet behind the desk. "The rain. In the doctored clip, droplets streak down in the cabinet reflection as if the window were there. It isn't. That cabinet reflects the interior, not the city."
My heart climbed one rung out of the pit. "Keep going."
"Lesson three: objects." He pulled up a still of a black fountain pen lying horizontal on Adrian's blotter. "In the original, pen points east. In the doctored, mid-'kiss,' the pen has teleported forty degrees without a hand in sight. Continuity error."
Adrian's mouth tilted. "Someone was overeager."
"Or underpaid," Ethan said. "But the crown jewel is metadata." He pasted a snippet of the video file's header. "Edited twice. Encoder string matches a workstation we know—because we seeded that workstation last week with a distinctive codec profile: BQC-Shadow-21."
"HR's vendor admin session," I said, blood humming. "The piggyback."
"Bingo." Ethan clicked again. A second pane showed a DM log. "And the outreach that accompanied the drop—time-stamped from T.B. to the gossip account: 'New angle. Proof of coercion. Post at midnight.'"
Heat licked my cheeks. "Tara."
Adrian's attention cut to me. "We don't go public with a name without airtight proof," he said. "Not yet."
"I know," I said. I still want to.
"We'll use what we can prove now," he said. "And squeeze the rest until it squeals."
Ethan exhaled, satisfied. "We partner with a third-party forensics lab. They publish the discrepancy analysis and metadata. We amplify. We get respected tech reporters to cover deepfakes in finance PR wars. We look like adults in a room full of children with matches."
"And the human piece?" Adrian asked without looking away from the screen.
Ethan nodded toward me. "Ella delivers a clean statement, no drama, no tears. Calm beats outrage. Then we drop the honey token follow-up: that the same vendor session accessed orientation photos. We don't point at anyone—yet—but we show that there was an internal breach."
"Then we file," Adrian said. "Vendor. Blogger. Anyone who touched that footage. Publicly."
I stared at the frames, the fake mouth nearly touching the fake me. The tight coil in my chest loosened a fraction. "Let's do it."
Adrian's eyes warmed by half a degree. "We already are."
—
The press room smelled like wet umbrellas and ambition. Reporters arranged their faces into skepticism as if it were a dress code. On the screen behind the podium glowed a title in clean sans serif: SYNTHETIC MEDIA IN CORPORATE WARFARE: A CASE STUDY.
Ethan opened with the lab. A neutral forensic analyst in a blazer and a practiced voice explained, line by line, the light, the reflection, the pen. The earth spun. The rain misbehaved. The pen teleported. Science lay down between the video and the truth like a wall.
Adrian stepped up next. He didn't snarl. He didn't spit. He stood at the mic as if the room belonged to him and spoke as if it were obvious.
"Blackwell Capital will not be extorted by fabrications," he said. "We are filing actions against the distribution network responsible for the doctored video. More importantly, we will continue to operate with the same standard we always have: we acquire value, not surnames."
The line landed heavier today; it wasn't a sound bite now. It was a blade.
Then it was my turn. The room tilted, and I tilted with it. I adjusted the mic a fraction, the way Adrian had taught me, squared my shoulders, and made myself a person who could breathe on a stage.
"My name is Ella Carter," I said. "I'm nineteen. I started my internship last week. The video you saw is not real." I let the sentence sit a heartbeat. "I was not kissed. I was not coerced. I was not locked anywhere. The only lock is the one people want to put on my mouth."
A twitch of surprise rippled through the front row.
"I will not pretend my last name isn't messy," I continued. "It is. But I came here to work. I'm standing here because lies shouldn't get a bigger microphone than truth. That's all."
I stepped back. I didn't wobble.
Hands shot up. Ethan shook his head slightly. The moderator closed the session. No questions. The room complained, but the narrative had already shifted: deepfake, forensics, lab confirms. Hashtags began to bend, and in the corner of my vision, #NotAVictim climbed again.
Backstage, my breath finally found me. Adrian was there first, palm warm at the small of my back, pressure barely there and somehow everything. "You were—"
"Okay?" I supplied, because I didn't trust myself with bigger words.
"Better than okay," he said. The praise slid through my ribs, dangerous and sweet.
Ethan swept in, triumphant. "Mainstream outlets are picking up the lab story. Tech Twitter is shredding the editing mistakes. Finance Feral just posted 'Daniel Carter discovers gravity: film at eleven.'"
I almost laughed. Almost.
We didn't make it to the elevators before HR Lemon Blazer materialized with a stack of policy printouts and an apology face. "Mr. Blackwell, Ms. Carter—Legal has some concerns about the forensics references to our vendor. The vendor is saying—"
Adrian lifted a hand. "They'll say what they like to their lawyer."
"Also," she pressed, "given the… perception issues, perhaps Ms. Carter should work on thirty-seven for a while. Optics—"
"No," Adrian said without turning. "She stays."
Lemon Blazer brightened with brittle courage. "On what grounds?"
"On mine." His gaze slid to me for a fraction of a second, and the world remembered its axis.
HR retreated, scattering apologies like confetti.
In the elevator, the mirrored walls gave me three versions of my own face. In all three I looked older.
"Breathe," Adrian said quietly.
I did.
The doors opened to a corridor buzzing like a hive. Some faces softened as I passed; others sharpened, eager for the next wound. Tara appeared near the coffee machine as if summoned by the scent of victory. Her smile was saccharine; her eyes were knives.
"Great performance," she said. "So empowering."
"Thanks for the coffee yesterday," I replied, keeping my voice even. "It looked expensive. Shame it went in the trash."
Something mean curled at her mouth. "Shame you didn't drink it."
Ethan's phone chimed. He glanced down, then up at her with professional blandness. "Tara, Legal is looking for you. Vendor relations meeting. Bring your laptop."
A flicker—fast, gone. She lifted her chin. "Of course." She swanned away, perfume trailing the implication of innocence.
I let out a breath I hadn't realized I held.
"Patience," Adrian murmured, as if he'd felt the heat in my hands. "Squeezing gently has more yield."
"You really like your metaphors," I said.
"I like results."
We barely sat before a notification flashed on the dashboard screen. Breaking: Carter Media to Host Live 'Truth Session' at 3PM. A teaser clip auto-played: my father behind a desk, calm, composed, unbothered by physics.
"Here we go," Ethan said.
"Volume," Adrian said.
Daniel Carter leaned into the camera like an old friend dropping wisdom. "Today," he said, "I will share the truth about my daughter's time at Blackwell Capital. Documents. Statements. Audio messages. I'll give Mr. Blackwell one last chance to do the right thing before we involve authorities."
My spine went cold. "Audio messages?"
Ethan was already scanning. "Could be spliced voicemails. Could be an actor. Could be… Ella, did you ever—"
"No," I said, word too hard. "Never."
Adrian's expression didn't change. It sharpened. "We assume he'll fabricate again. But people have short memories. We need a preemptive frame."
"Deepfakes 2.0," Ethan said. "We educate the audience before he talks. Thread, video explainer, friendly journalists on standby. If he drops audio, we drop the lab's voice-forensics primer."
Adrian nodded once. "Do it."
Ethan left like an arrow.
I stood at the window, city bright and clinical, the afternoon building itself like a verdict. "He won't stop," I said. "He won't stop until he burns us both."
"Then we don't burn," Adrian said simply. "We bend heat."
I looked at him, at the edges he kept for the world and the edges he didn't use on me. "Why are you doing this?" I asked before I could stop myself. "I'm not useful enough for this much trouble."
His gaze searched mine, and for a moment I saw the man the headlines never printed. "You are not a calculation, Ella." A beat. "Not to me."
The floor swayed; it was only my heart. Don't be an idiot. Rule Three. I swallowed hard. "We have two hours."
"We use them."
—
The next two hours were war by a thousand keystrokes. Ethan orchestrated a symphony: the lab's explainer thread; a tech reporter's prewritten piece about voice forgery; a short video of our light-shadow demo with an overlay of the room model. We didn't say Daniel's name. We didn't accuse. We taught.
My phone lit with messages I tried not to read. Some kind. Some feral. One from a number that kept reinventing itself:
Unknown:You can still walk away. Choose blood over a stranger's rules.
I put the phone face down and wrote a line for our explainer video. Synthetic stories star real people. It felt true enough to keep.
At 2:58, the Carter Media "Truth Session" countdown rolled on a dozen screens.
Adrian stood beside me, arms folded, expression patient and predatory. "Whatever he drops, we respond on our terms," he said. "No flinching."
"Got it."
The stream began. My father smiled the smile he used on donors and judges. "Thank you for joining me. Today, we will present uncomfortable facts."
He started with a timeline. He peppered it with insinuations. He gestured to folders as if paper were truth. Then he cued the "audio."
A tinny file played: my voice, anxious, saying I can't breathe when he's close; a man's voice, low, answering Then let me teach you how. The crowd chat went feral.
My stomach dropped. "That's not real," I said, but the room didn't care what my stomach knew.
Ethan's shoulder brushed mine. "We're ready," he said, and launched the voice-forensics primer across our channels. Formant analysis. Spectral fingerprints. A side-by-side of my speaking voice against the clip, frequency bands highlighted where the forgery stitched itself together. The lab's expert, neutral and boring, explained why the sample was a composite.
Adrian didn't look away from the screen. "Make them bored," he'd told Ethan earlier. "Bored is powerful."
Comments began to shift under my father's stream. Deepfake again?Formants don't lie.Why does the pen keep moving? (Someone had dragged a joke forward from this morning. I wanted to kiss their anonymous face.)
Daniel kept going. He always did. He unfolded one more envelope on screen, milking the moment. "And now," he said, eyes soft with a father's performative grief, "a legal development."
A knock sounded at our door. Not a polite one. The kind that turned offices into courthouses.
Ethan opened it to a woman in a dark blazer carrying a canvas messenger bag and a seriousness that rolled off her like weather. "Adrian Blackwell?" she asked.
"Yes," Adrian said, already bored.
"Service of process," she replied, producing a packet. "Temporary restraining order pending hearing tomorrow at nine. Allegations of workplace harassment and undue influence over a protected party." Her eyes flicked to me.
Protected party.
I felt the words like a slap. "I'm nineteen," I said, too loud. "I'm not—"
"It's a tactical label," Adrian murmured, not looking at the papers. "It'll play well on camera."
The process server set the packet on the desk, recorded the moment on a small body cam, and left without drama.
Adrian didn't touch the documents. He looked at me.
"If the judge signs the temporary order as written," Ethan said quietly, reading fast, "you two can't be within a hundred feet of each other until the hearing. No contact. No proximity at work."
The room shrank, then expanded until I could barely feel my feet. The stream on the screen kept my father's voice going, smug and righteous.
Adrian's jaw ticked once. Only once.
"Ella," he said, voice low enough I felt it instead of hearing it. "Rule Four."
Trust no one but me.
"Okay," I whispered.
He nodded, once. "Good. Then listen."
He stepped back from me so precisely it hurt. The space he left was a map of everything we hadn't done.
"Pack your things," he said. "Ethan will take you to a safe workspace off-site. We fight this tonight. We walk into court together tomorrow—"
"You can't," Ethan said, eyes still on the order. "If the TRO enters overnight, you won't be allowed in the same room."
The building's hum seemed to recede like tide.
My father smiled from the screen with all the gentleness money could buy. Choose blood over a stranger's rules, the unknown messages had said.
Adrian's eyes met mine, and for the first time since the elevator, something like real danger moved between us—not from the market, not from the cameras, but from a piece of paper and the distance it demanded.
"Ella," he said, soft and absolute. "Don't open that door for anyone but Ethan."
A shadow moved on the frosted glass outside. A familiar silhouette. A delicate chain, a flash of blonde.
And then Tara's voice, syrup-sweet through the crack: "Ms. Carter? Legal needs you—alone."