The knock at the wing door was like an explosion in the quiet room, fast and urgent, the kind of sound that cuts through rehearsed calm and leaves everyone raw. Ivy spun. Damian was already halfway to the door, Ezean's jaw went tight, and Alondra felt something inside her drop like a stone. The woman at the threshold was small and frantic, her hair plastered from the rain, her eyes wide like someone who had been looking at a television with her life on it and found no mercy.
"They're showing my daughter," she screamed, voice breaking ragged as she pushed past Damian. "They're showing my daughter on the stream. she's there; she's on the screen right now. please, someone do something."
Alondra's breath stopped. The woman's hand shook; she held up a phone with a live feed paused and an image of a school photo on it, and behind it a corridor that looked too much like the one the stream had come from. The woman's voice doubled over into sobs. "I didn't know, I swear, I didn't know it would go like this."
Ivy's face went white. "Who are you?" she said, calm on the surface but the words clipped like knives.
"My name is Rosa," the woman managed, collapsing into a chair like her legs had failed her.
"My daughter is in Madrid; she's in school. Someone sent me a link, and then it was there, a thumbnail, and then another clip, and people were saying things, saying she looked like the woman in the photo, and then they posted her school picture, and now there's a face that is hers. they called it a match, they used my address, they used her class, people are calling our house."
Alondra felt her chest cave. Her mother, her quiet home in Madrid, the certainty that Marisol would be safe because she lived far away and prayed loud and cooked louder—all of it leapt into a raw new shape. The message on Ezean's phone burned in the corner of her head. WE HAVE YOUR FAMILY'S PHOTOS. PHASE II: EXPOSURE. She had tried to keep the worst of it at arm's length, and now the worst was stepping through the door of a sterile wing and bringing other people's panic with it.
"Explain," Damian said, voice low. He had the look of a man who had been trained to solve violence with method, not mercy. He already had a tablet in his hands, fingers steady, the kind of person whose work smoothed fear into plans.
Rosa gulped air like a drowning woman. "They matched a school photo to my daughter. They overlaid it, called it a match on some forum, and then someone spliced a clip that shows a corridor with a timestamp, and they labeled it with my address. People are calling, strangers were at my door, I've had messages, my mother called me crying, and neighbors came, and they saw the post; they were pointing. I turned the stream on, and there she was, like a—" she could not finish it, hands braced over her mouth.
Ivy's eyes were calculating now, fingers flying. "What's your daughter's name, Rosa? Where is she now?"
The woman told them. Alondra's mouth went dry. The name was far from her mother's, but the panic in the woman's voice could have been Marisol's if the world had been crueler.
"We need to get her off social," Ivy said. "Takedowns, now. We need the original URL, who posted it, everything. Damian, sweep local—this is local; it's domestic. Trace every mirror."
Damian's face was stone. "I've got people on it," he said. "We can push for rapid takedowns, but these people bounce. We can also send a DMCA through our fastest channels. It buys time but not much."
Ezean stood by the window, hands in his pockets. He'd been making decisions all night like a man playing chess against someone who refused to show a face. Now his jaw kept clenching as if to hold in the pieces that threatened to spill. "We also need to think about safety," he said. "If addresses are being posted, we have to make sure those families are protected. Whoever's doing this will escalate. They're trying to cause panic, to weaponize fear. They want behavior. They want people to react."
"That means physical security," Damian said. "We can't watch every house, but we can start with verified threats. Rosa, can you get us a direct number for the school, your address, and the neighbors who reported? We need to know whether anyone came to the door, whether you filed a police report."
Rosa shook her head. "I'm calling now." She fumbled for her phone, hands trembling, the squeak of a screen under rain-slick fingers like an animal's cry. "They said the clip was real and then they said it was doctored and then they said it was a match and then they said stay quiet. I don't know what to do."
Alondra moved without thinking, the anchor in her chest a bright metal. She crossed the room and put both hands on Rosa's shoulders, the contact small and human. "It's not your fault," she said, voice raw. "This is not your fault; they're using you. We'll help."
Rosa's eyes found hers, desperation in them. "You are her," she whispered, a question and an accusation braided together. "On the screen, it looks like you. People say it's you."
Alondra felt something hot and hollow open in her stomach. "It's me, but not like they show," she said, and she thought of the photograph Ezean had kept, the private image of her asleep, never meant for eyes beyond a locked suite. "I'm real. It was a private moment." The words tasted of metal and fear and not-protection. "We will fix this."
They got to work. Ivy organized phone trees like a conductor; legal lines were called, and takedown requests were composed with excoriating care. Someone on the team pulled the live feed and tried to freeze frames to find the edges of metadata to see which server had seeded the mirror. Alondra watched numbers roll on a streaming counter like a tide—500, 5,000, 12,000—and each click felt like a blow.
"I need to go to Madrid," Rosa said suddenly, voice raw. "My mother will not be safe." She had been half convinced she would stay, that TV would be just a loud nightmare, but now her whole life had become a set of locations, and she felt powerless.
"Don't travel alone," Damian said immediately. "We can arrange security if needed. We can also get you an emergency contact at the school. We can call the police together."
Rosa's face crumpled. "They already called me hysterical and told me not to go into the school, but the kids, they will see; someone will spread it there and then—" Her breath cut off.
Alondra's phone vibrated. A new notification scrolled, a string of messages from her mother that had come through at dawn—"Miss you, cariño, call me when you can, be careful, your aunt called and is asking if Marisol has more sisters to come with her." She opened them with thumbs that shook and then saw something else, an image forwarded by a friend in her contacts—a screenshot from a small fringe channel that had a thumbnail of a woman in a kitchen from what looked like a security camera, a blurred figure by a doorway, and, beneath it, a caption: Flight attendant's family home. Verify location. Contact if you have info.
Her stomach dropped like a heavy thing. Her hands went cold. "No," she breathed.
Ezean read over her shoulder, his face the color of hard slate. He called Damian over, and they froze the frame. The resolution was poor, but it was enough—a door, a curtain she recognized from childhood photos, a vase in a window exactly like her mother's, and the tilt of a lamp that had a name in her head. Her breath came shallow, like someone trying to keep water out of their mouth.
"Is that—" Damian's voice was careful, "is that her house?"
Alondra's mouth tasted of iron. "Yes," she said, small. "That's my mother's kitchen. That lamp, that pattern on the curtain, that plant. It's hers."
They acted without ceremony. Ivy called contacts in Spain, a lawyer typed frantic emails to local law enforcement, and Damian's people reached out to a trusted security consultant who had worked in Madrid before. Ezean's assistant began arranging flights, but Alondra did not want to leave yet. She felt the absurdity of being at the center of a storm she had not summoned and not being able to touch the people being dragged into it. She wanted to be there for her mother, not because her mother needed protection but because she could not stand the idea of strangers peeking into Marisol's kitchen with predatory curiosity.
"You have to go," Ezean said, voice soft but insistent. "We can't keep this in the dark, and your leaving will not help. I can send security with you. I can have people meet your family at the airport and escort them. Please, let us help."
She looked at him, and for a moment, the man who bought silence with money and power looked like a child asking to be forgiven for something he hadn't yet done. "I don't want you to spend everything trying to fix me," she said, because she was stubborn and furious and did not like being a thing to be rescued.
"We're already spending everything," he answered, the dry humor gone, "and we'll do more if we have to." He reached for her hand, and his fingers were steady, not possessive but fierce.
"We don't let them turn people's homes into a spectacle. Not on my watch."
Rosa sobbed low in the corner like someone who had been waiting for rescue for a long time and then realized rescue took paperwork and phone calls and people who could do more than shout. "Please get them off," she begged. "Please get them off."
Damian set his jaw. "We will. I'll have patrols around both addresses. We'll call the local precinct. We'll file an urgent complaint for doxxing and harassment. This is criminal."
Alondra nodded, throat tight. She could feel her mother a continent away, making coffee in the morning light, humming a song, unaware that strangers had her curtain pattern memorized. The idea of her mother's safe, small rituals being stripped and amplified online made something in Alondra break open.
They did what they could. An emergency security team was arranged, flights were booked, and legal teams in Madrid and England began coordinating. Ivy crafted a public statement that walked a tightrope between indignation and legal prudence, one that would not inflame but would signal force. Damian's techs executed a deeper sweep into the building's server logs, methodically finding the gaps and stitching timecodes together with cold patience. Slowly, like a machine moving under oil, they pulled together a map of the attack.
On the screen, a frame loaded—a clearer shot from the corridor cam, a shadow stepping into a doorway with a maintenance vest. It was enough to make a man with a hammer go to work. "Print the face," Ezean barked, "enhance whatever you can. Not just the badge, everything. I want names."
The counter for the feed crawled higher even as takedowns worked. Mirrors multiplied. Threads in foreign languages parroted the clips, saw how easy it was to stitch private life to public hate. Alondra read comments that made her skin crawl and then felt something close to anger, sharp and hot, that pushed past her fear. She was not a headline. She was a person. Her mother was a person. Rosa was a mother.
In the late afternoon, as the sun angled like a blade across the city, Alondra's phone buzzed with another notification. A small channel had uploaded a new clip titled "Phase Two—Home Footage." The thumbnail was a still of Marisol's kitchen, a shadow at the door. The description promised more content for a price. The feed was monetized, a vulgar market where privacy had a barcode.
Alondra could not breathe. She clicked the link, and the video began before she could stop it. For a moment, it looked like static, and then a doorway filled the screen, and then a figure moved in the blur—not clear enough to see a face but clear enough for her mother to stand frozen in the frame, watering a plant, the ordinary ritual of a woman who had no idea she had been turned into content.
She hit the phone off, and it went black in her hand like a pagoda shuttered in a storm. Her throat felt raw. Someone's voice in the room said something about takedowns and legal options and a press plan, but the words were thin, all function and no shelter.
Outside the window, the city went on, indifferent, with people shopping, driving, and living, their lives not captured in tiny squares that would be sold for clicks. She thought of Rosa's daughter and of her mother and of private kitchens rendered public, and wondered what would be left to protect when the leak was done.
Her phone buzzed again. New message, unknown number. 02:17 it read, and beneath it a small mocking icon. The digits were the same countdown from before, and Alondra realized with a cold certainty that they were choosing a moment, they were orchestrating a fallout, and they were working to make everyone watch.
Ezean's hand found hers and squeezed. "They want us to react," he said. "They want us to make mistakes."
Alondra nodded, throat raw, and for a second, she thought she could not move. Then she thought of her mother humming over a kettle and of Rosa calling her daughter's name into the phone, and she reached for the plan that would not let them be prey.
Damian's voice cut through the room, precise and hard. "We trace the uploader, we arrest the handler if we can, we secure families, and then we hit them with a legal and media counterstrike. We make them vanish the content, and then we make it costly to repost. We take the markets by force if we must. But first, we save people."
They were doing the first things — the small, deliberate motions of people trying to stop a fire with hands and buckets. But as night fell and the feed count ticked on like a metronome counting heartbeats, Alondra realized that there would be no single rescue that could return life to before. The leak had been a fracture that would reconfigure everything.
The phone vibrated again, and this time the alert was different. It showed a live thumbnail from Marisol's street and then, for a heartbeat, a figure moved toward the door and raised a camera. The image froze on a gloved hand, the barrel of a lens pointed like a gun.
Alondra's breath left her in a sharp, fragile sound. She looked up, eyes wide, and the room seemed to shrink into the space between her and the screen.