Chapter 81: SAVE HER
The story breaks at six in the morning, while I am still three streets away from the warehouse, watching the surveillance feed Liam patched through to my secondary device.
It is worse than I expected. I expected speculation. I expected the lazy cruelty of strangers who have nothing invested in the truth and everything invested in a headline that performs well. What I find instead is something more deliberate, more calculated, a story shaped by someone who knows exactly which details will do the most damage and has arranged them with surgical precision. Aria's name sits beside words like *unstable* and *opportunist* and *desperate*, the language engineered to dismantle everything she has spent five years quietly building.
I read three articles before I stop reading and start moving.
