Chapter 4 - The Digital Autopsy
By dawn, the Major Crimes division of the Metropolitan Police Department felt less like a police precinct and more like a high-stakes tech bunker.
Detective Vance had brought in Special Agent Sarah Miller from the FBI’s Regional Cyber-Fraud Task Force. Miller was a woman in her late thirties with razor-sharp features, dark hair pulled into a severe ponytail, and eyes that looked through monitors as if they were glass windows into crime scenes.
On the massive projection board at the front of the conference room, my sister’s face was frozen mid-laugh.
They had intercepted the raw, multi-channel video feed straight from VIXN Media’s private cloud storage, bypassing the compressed social media upload. Across sixteen separate monitors, Cresa’s wedding was laid out like an anatomical dissection.
“This wasn't an organic broadcast,” Agent Miller said, tapping a key on her terminal. The screen split into a wireframe diagram of the Belvedere’s grand ballroom. “Look at the network metadata. Declan Cross didn't use standard cellular bonding units for this stream. He had a private, encrypted satellite uplink truck parked in the service alleyway behind the hotel.”
“Why would a wedding influencer spend forty thousand dollars renting an enterprise-grade satellite uplink?” I asked, holding a fresh ice pack against my swollen, sutured cheek.
“Because she wasn’t streaming to public platforms alone,” Miller replied darkly. She tapped another key.
The screen shifted, revealing a dark, utilitarian interface dominated by Cyrillic text, live streaming windows, and a cryptocurrency ticker running in the top-right corner.
My breath hitched. In the main window was the exact footage of me falling into the glass showcase. But on this site, there was no cute pastel overlay or bubbly pop music.
The title of the feed was in English: *LIVE BET: Glass Drop / Primary Target / Laceration Guaranteed.*
Below the video was a ledger of live transactions. Over forty-eight Bitcoin—equivalent to more than two million dollars—had been escrowed through an unregulated offshore betting exchange twenty minutes before the ceremony started. The conditions of the wager were spelled out with bone-chilling clarity:
*Target: Maeve Lindell.*
*Event: Facial impact with structural glass within 60-minute window.*
*Bonus Pool: Embedded fixture contact (Visible blood within 10 seconds).*
I gripped the edge of the conference table until my knuckles went snow-white. The room spun around me. My mother’s manicured hands shoving my head away from the white silk... Cresa’s cruel, melodic laughter... the cameraman leaning in with the stabilizer rig, shouting through the chaos: *“Keep zooming in, her blood is worth millions!”*
They hadn’t just humiliated me. They had turned my body into a live-streamed blood sport, monetized for an international dark-web syndicate that wagered on orchestrated violence disguised as influencer mishaps.
“Jesus,” Vance muttered under his breath, his knuckles whitening as he stared at the screen. “Declan Cross isn’t an influencer manager. He’s an operative for an organized entertainment-fraud ring.”
“It gets deeper, Maeve,” Agent Miller said, turning her chair toward me. Her voice softened with genuine empathy, though her eyes remained deadly serious. “We ran the registration on the staging company that built the gift display. *Belvedere Artisanal Woodcraft LLC.* The corporate entity was incorporated seventy-two hours ago. The signatory on the business license isn't Declan. It’s your mother, Rowena Lindell.”
I sat there in the blinding white light of the police briefing room, feeling the stitches in my cheek pull tight against my skin.
Every holiday dinner, every passive-aggressive critique about my plain clothes and my quiet life, every time Rowena had called me an ungrateful burden while draining my father’s savings accounts for Cresa’s beauty pageants—it all crystalized into one horrifying reality.
To them, I was never a daughter or a sister.
May you like
I was an asset to be liquidated.
***
