I smiled as his mother held up my thrift-store dress and laughed, “Did you really think our son would marry someone like you?” His father sneered, his sister recorded me, and my boyfriend stood frozen beside them. I placed my glass down and whispered, “You should’ve checked who signed your family’s biggest investment deal.” The room went silent—because revenge hadn’t even started yet.

The video went live at six o'clock that evening.

By six-thirty, it was the number one trending topic in the entire country.

The contrast was too brutal, too poetic, too delicious for the internet to resist: a haughty, arrogant old-money matriarch holding up an eight-dollar dress to mock a young woman, only for the young woman to calmly reveal she owned the ninety-million-dollar mortgage on the very roof over the matriarch's head.

The public reaction wasn't just negative for the Carlisles—it was apocalyptic.

By eight o'clock, the comment sections under Victoria's pathetic self-pity video were flooded with millions of quotes: "You should've checked who signed your family's biggest investment deal."

The charity boards were the first to move.

By nine o'clock, the Metropolitan Opera Guild issued a public statement revoking Victoria Carlisle's position as board chair. The Children's Hospital Foundation scrubbed her name from their annual gala list.

Then came the financial contagion.

At ten o'clock, three major subcontractors working on Carlisle Development's flagship hotel project pulled their crews off the site, citing unpaid invoices and moral hazard.

At eleven o'clock, the county prosecutor's office issued a formal notice of inquiry regarding the five-million-dollar construction fund diversion Sarah had leaked alongside the video.

I sat in my apartment living room, dressed in silk pajamas, holding a glass of cabernet while watching the local news ticker crawl across my television screen:

CARLISLE DEVELOPMENT FACES FORECLOSURE AS HALCYON ACCELERATES DEBT. PROSECUTORS LAUNCH FINANCIAL FRAUD PROBE.

My doorbell rang.

I didn't answer it. I pulled up my front door camera feed on my phone.

Victoria Carlisle was standing in the hallway outside my penthouse apartment.

She wasn't wearing her pearl necklace. She wasn't wearing her pastel cardigans. She looked like a woman who had been dragged through a hurricane. Her hair was matted with rain, her mascara was smeared down her cheeks, and she was pounding on my heavy oak door with her bare fists.

"Maya!" Victoria shrieked through the speaker, her voice cracked and hysterical. "Maya, open this door! You've ruined us! They're freezing our personal accounts! The bank sent a repossession notice for the estate!"

I leaned forward, pressing the intercom button on my phone screen.

"You're making a scene in the hallway, Victoria," I said quietly into the phone.

"You monster!" she sobbed, pressing her face against the camera lens. "You evil, vindictive little girl! We were a respected family before you walked into our lives! You destroyed my son! You destroyed my husband's health!"

"Your husband destroyed his own company when he stole five million dollars from his workers' pension fund to buy your daughter horses, Victoria," I replied coldly. "And you destroyed your family the moment you decided that a person's worth is measured by the price tag on their dress."

"Please..." Victoria suddenly gasped, dropping to her knees right in front of my door camera, her hands clasped together in a pathetic gesture of begging. "Please, Maya... take the house! Take the cars! Just call off the prosecutors! Don't let them take Charles to prison! Don't ruin my children's lives!"

I looked at the woman kneeling on the carpet outside my door—the same woman who had tossed my childhood dress onto a chair like garbage forty-eight hours ago.