Chapter 7
I stood outside the hotel room door with my hand still on the handle and let myself breathe once before I stepped inside.
The camera caught me first.
The comment section detonated.
“She showed up.”
“No way.”
“Internet doormat is here.”
I looked straight at the phone propped crookedly against an ice bucket, then at the woman who had spent the last two weeks setting my life on fire for clicks.
For the first time since this started, she actually looked scared.
It wasn’t the fear of getting caught doing something wrong.
It was the fear of losing control of the room.
I closed the door behind me.
“You should end the stream,” I said.
She laughed, thin and high. “Why? So you can cry in private?”
I took another step in. My heels sank into thick hotel carpet. The room smelled like vanilla body spray, cheap champagne, and something artificial underneath it, like a stage set pretending to be luxury.
Her cameraman—or boyfriend, or manager, whatever he was—looked at me with narrowed eyes.
“You brought people?” he asked.
“Not yet,” I said.
That wasn’t entirely true.
I pulled out my phone and held it up. Behind me, the door opened again.
The girl who had sent me Aaron’s location the night before walked in first. Her face was bare, nervous, determined. Behind her came another woman I didn’t know, older than both of us, carrying a leather folder against her chest like it was a shield.
The relationship tester’s face changed.
Not fear this time.
Recognition.
The older woman smiled without warmth. “Still using hotel rooms, Mia?”
So that was her real name.
Not the sweet crusader username. Not the pastel profile photo and fake concern.
Mia.
The chat was flying too fast to read now.
I saw bits and pieces.
“She knows her.”
“Who’s Mia?”
“Expose her.”
Mia recovered fast. I had to give her that. She always did.
She folded her arms and looked at me like I was beneath her. “This is cute. Bringing backup because your man embarrassed you.”
“No,” I said quietly. “I brought witnesses.”
The younger girl beside me swallowed hard. “You did this to me last year.”
Mia rolled her eyes. “I don’t even know who you are.”
“Yes, you do,” the girl said. Her voice shook, but she kept going. “You posted my boyfriend’s messages. What you didn’t post was that you kept DMing him after he stopped responding. You used a second account. Then you edited the timestamps and told everyone he had begged to meet you.”
The cameraman muttered a curse under his breath.
Mia snapped, “Don’t be stupid. Why would I need to fake anything?”
The older woman opened the leather folder and slid printed pages onto the desk.
“Because half your income comes from outrage payments, tip gifts, paid unlocks, and private ‘testing services,’” she said. “And because the moment a real target stops being useful, you manufacture the rest.”
The comments were moving so fast the screen looked like static.
I watched Mia glance at the phone, calculate, then soften her whole face into pity.
She looked at the camera and put on that voice again. The one that had made strangers call me pathetic while thanking her for her service.
“Everybody, calm down. This poor girl is spiraling. She couldn’t handle the truth, so now she’s trying to smear me.”
I almost laughed.