"Yes, yes, right there," Veronica breathed, eyes glazed as she stared at the night sky through the window. Her lips bit down hard. "Don’t move—yesss." She smiled, then let out a long sigh of relief.
She straightened and began smoothing her skirt, turning to the man behind her with a practiced smile.
His smirk deepened. "I like a woman who knows what she wants," he murmured, closing the distance. She took a small step back but kept the smile in place.
"Of course." She ran a hand through her hair. The man opened his mouth, about to say sothing, when there was a knock at the door.
Veronica frowned and moved toward it. "Are you expecting soone?" the man asked.
She paused, then pulled the door open. Standing on the doorstep was soone she never expected to see.
"Well, well, well..."
---
"I will be fine," Veronica told Martin, who watched her nervously as Knight and a few of his n filled her living room.
"Are you sure?" he asked again. Veronica exhaled, irritation flickering across her face even though she knew he ant well.
"Yes. He looks like a demon, but don’t let that fool you," she chuckled, glancing at Knight—though inside she knew the line was a lie.
Martin nodded and left. The click of the door made Veronica’s heart slam against her ribs. She turned—and nearly jumped when Knight stood right in front of her.
"Geez, don’t you know what personal space is?" she muttered, sliding away.
"If you don’t want to put a bullet in your skull, tell who has the original copy of that video," he said, voice eerily calm. Veronica would have laughed if she thought he was bluffing. She knew him too well.
She folded herself onto the couch, crossing her legs. "You forced out of the country because of your little wifey, and now I’m back and you want to play the blaming ga?" Her tone was sharp. "If you’re not going to sit and talk like a normal person, you can walk out. I don’t have ti for this."
Knight said nothing for a long, tight mont. Then he crossed the room and sat. Veronica exhaled.
"Now tell what’s going on. What video?" she challenged.
"The video you made of my wife." His voice tightened. At the words, Veronica felt a flicker of sothing—guilt, maybe, or the mory of what she’d done to Genesis. Jealousy had clouded her judgnt then; she regretted it now, not because she’d grown kinder, but because it had taken her best friend away.
She rubbed her fingers along the couch arm. "What about it? I thought you destroyed every last video."
"I thought I did," Knight said, fixing her with a stare. Veronica offered a humorless laugh.
"You think I took a copy? You don’t even rember what happened clearly. You told your brute"—she jerked her chin at Damon—"to tie to a chair. When exactly did I have ti to snatch one of the drives?"
Knight’s jaw tightened. "All of them were destroyed. Every single one. I made sure of it." He leaned in, eyes narrowing. "But now... one video of Genesis is on the dark web."
Veronica froze. The words hit like a blow. For a heartbeat she thought she’d misheard, then saw the storm in his eyes and the lie collapsed. Her smirk faltered.
"That’s not possible," she whispered, shaking her head. Her breath ca shallow. "No... you—" She cut off, then forced out, "Show ."
Without a word, Knight flicked two fingers toward Damon. The man stepped forward, pulling out a separate phone from inside his jacket. It was older, scuffed, the kind of device ant for things no normal phone should ever touch. He tapped quickly, his face impassive, and then turned the screen so Veronica could see.
The page that loaded looked like a ruined mirror of a normal streaming site — black background, jagged grids of thumbnails, crude neon text, and counters with obscene view numbers. No friendly UI, no advertisers, just tags and chatter in broken, hateful comnts. It slled of sothing rotten: exploitation, anonymity, and money changing hands in corners where law didn’t reach.
Damon’s jaw was tight. He scrolled slowly, pulling a clip into a contained, read-only viewer. Knight didn’t look away.
The thumbnail made Veronica’s stomach turn before the player started: a blurred, half-covered genesis in a chair, crying and shaking, water and light catching on her skin. The sound was muted at first; their was overlaid subtitles for privacy, but there was no question what it was — it was the sa scene like that day , the sa chair, the sa set of cruel hands at work. The clip was short, hit the dark web’s algorithm, and already had thousands — tens of thousands — of views and a stream of disgusting, predatory comnts.
Knight’s hands went white on the armrest. "Goddamn it."
Damon zood in on the uploader tadata the tech could pull — not a real na, just an account handle. The handle was scrambled, the site using throwaway IDs and proxy tags: Missio_93___AM. The tech tried to trace the origin but the post had been routed through multiple nodes and scrubbed.
"We tried chasing this uploader," Damon said. "They used bounce relays, throwaway wallets. Whoever posted it made it purposefully hard to trace."
Veronica, who had been watching with a face that had finally lost its practiced bravado, leaned forward, eyes narrowing at the screen. She read the handle out loud, fingers worrying the hem of her skirt. "Missio... missio — that rings a bell." She swallowed. "Wait. The suffix — AM."
Damon scrolled, bringing up a tiny corner of the uploader’s comnt history: a handful of short, crude ssages, a posting ti, a paynt hash. Nothing useful. "Nothing matches. The uploader’s scrubbed the trail."
Veronica’s face went still — the motion of thought quick, precise. "No," she said slowly. "Listen." She turned to Knight. "The caraman — the one who had the personal cara that day. He’d written a tag on the side of the device. I rember because I laughed at it: he’d scrawled his na with a sticker. Miss- sothing."
Knight snapped his head toward her. "You were going to take a copy from him?"
"I was," Veronica admitted, the confession small and brittle. "The hired rig on the stand had glitched. He used his own personal cara as a backup to capture one angle. I planned to get it from him later — before you ca." She swallowed hard. "The half-tag on the uploader — ’Missio’ — that matches how he labeled his gear."
Damon’s voice dropped. "So the uploader could be the caraman, or soone using his tag. Or both."
Damon shook his head. "So if he’s missio, and he’s not working alone, who is this "AM",
Veronica’s eyes darkened. "Amanda."
The na landed like a stone.
Knight’s mouth went hard. "Amanda?"
Veronica nodded, slow as a confession. "Amanda was there. Amanda helped coordinate everything. She’s... my friend. Or was my friend, she knows people. If soone wanted a scapegoat or a partner with access, Amanda fits." Her fingers moved in a tiny, practised gesture — the old habit of orchestrating details — but her expression was raw now, edged with fear.
Leonardo rubbed his face. "If the caraman stashed a clip and handed it to Amanda, or she grabbed it, that explains how a single video survived the purge. It also explains how it leaked to the kind of buyers who traffic in this garbage."
Knight’s eyes were ice. He let the silence sit between them like a thing that could be sharpened. "Find them," he said, voice small and lethal. "Quietly. Amanda first. Then the caraman."
Damon was already moving, fingers on an earpiece. "On it."
Veronica folded her hands, suddenly small and animalistic with guilt. "I would have gotten the footage. I ant to get it. I didn’t foresee.." She stopped, and the rest was a hollow apology.
Knight’s head turned. "They won’t live to market another thing."
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