“I have billions,” Vance roared, standing up, his face purple with rage. He looked deranged now, the facade completely gone. “I can buy the judge. I can buy the jury. I will bury you in litigation so deep you won’t see the sun until you’re eighty. Who are you to challenge me? I am Sebastian Vance.” “You are a criminal,” Annie said. “And you are out of time.” She turned the phone screen toward him. “The timer,” she said. It was not counting down to send an email. Vance squinted at the screen. It was not an email client. It was a video interface. The little red dot in the corner was blinking.
“I’m live-streaming, Sebastian,” Annie said softly. The realization hit Sebastian Vance slowly, like a poison spreading through his veins. He looked at the phone. He looked at the red dot. He looked at the numbers in the corner of the screen. Viewers: 412,058. “What?” Vance choked out. “What is that?” “It’s a platform called Twitch,” Annie explained, her voice devoid of sympathy. “My boyfriend sets up gaming streams. He helped me rig a hidden camera in my uniform button, and this phone is acting as the relay. For the last ten minutes, since I put the phone on the table, the camera has been facing you.” Vance froze. He looked at the phone lens, the black eye of the internet. “You’re live,” Annie said. “Four hundred thousand people just watched you confess to vehicular manslaughter. They watched you admit to paying off my father. They watched you admit that you thought you had Isabella Molineux handled. And they saw you rip up the affidavit,” Annie added. “Which, by the way, the internet loves. Destroying evidence on camera? The prosecutors are going to frame that screenshot.”
Vance lunged across the table. It was a desperate, animalistic move. He swiped at the phone, knocking it to the floor. The screen cracked further, but the audio kept running. “Turn it off,” Vance screamed, scrambling on his hands and knees to grab the device. “Turn it off.” “It’s too late,” Annie said, stepping back. “The stream is being recorded by thousands of people. It’s already on Twitter. It’s on Reddit. It’s everywhere. You can smash the phone, Sebastian. You can burn this building down. You can’t delete what the world just saw.”
Vance knelt on the floor, clutching the broken phone. He looked up at Annie, tears streaming down his face. The arrogance was gone. The power was gone. He was just a man who had run out of road. “Why?” he sobbed. “I offered you money. I would have given you millions. Why do this? Why ruin everything?” “Because you stole my father,” Annie said, her voice shaking for the first time. “You didn’t just take him away for twelve years. You took his dignity. You let him die in a cage thinking he was a criminal while you drank champagne in rooms like this. Money doesn’t fix that, Sebastian. The truth fixes that.”