Chapter 16: Revenge Protocol
The lavender scent was still there, but it was buried now under the sharp, clean smell of electronics and cold brew coffee. Elliot’s room had been transformed from a chaotic nest into a command center. Wires snaked across the carpet, connecting his powerful desktop tower to a secondary monitor, the high-quality webcam perched precariously on a stack of programming textbooks. The Lego Star Destroyer watched over them, a silent ally.
Luna sat cross-legged on the floor, her back against his bed, scrolling through a PDF Elliot had created. It was a forensic timeline, each entry冰冷 and precise.
10:04 PM: Call initiated with Marcus Hayes.
10:22 PM: Video feed terminated (phone motion). Audio feed remains active.
10:23 PM – 10:47 PM: Unauthorized audio recording captured.
11:02 PM: Local audio file saved to device linked to Hayes.
3:14 AM: File uploaded to external server.
“He saved it,” Luna said, her voice flat. “He didn’t just accidentally record it. He saved the file. Waited hours. Then uploaded it.”
Elliot didn’t look up from his screen, where lines of code cascaded. “Premeditation. Makes the lawsuit even juicier. I’ve also isolated three shell companies he’s been funneling your sponsorship bonuses through. The skim is about twenty-two percent. It’s all in the deck.”
He sounded different. The shy, hesitant Elliot was gone, replaced by a version that was all sharp edges and focused intensity. This was Finch, the developer who could dismantle a faulty system line by line. He was dismantling Marcus.
Luna hugged her knees. The plan was solid, logical, brutal. It was the emotional math that wasn’t adding up. The notification vibration on her own phone, set to silent, was a constant tremor against her thigh. She’d looked, once, an hour ago. A glimpse of her mentions was like staring into a strobe light of obscenity and condemnation. A popular gossip channel had a side-by-side photo: her curated, sparkly LunarNova thumbnail next to a crude, AI-generated image of what they imagined she looked like during the leak. The contrast was the punchline.
“Hey.” Elliot’s voice cut through the static in her head. He’d swiveled his chair around. “Don’t. Whatever you’re thinking, don’t. That’s the noise. We’re dealing with the signal.”
“The signal is that I’m a joke,” she muttered, picking at a thread in his rug.
“You’re not.” He left his chair and slid down the wall to sit beside her, their shoulders touching. “He is. He’s a petty, fraudulent little man who got mad you were firing him. This is a tantrum. We’re just publishing the receipts for his tantrum. The laugh will be on him when the lawyers get involved.”
She leaned her head against his shoulder. “What if they don’t care? The internet. What if they just… like the drama? What if they think the audio is hot and my spreadsheets are boring?”
“Then they’re idiots, and you walk away from idiots.” He said it simply, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. “You’re not doing this for them. You’re doing it for you. To end it your way. To look him in the eye, metaphorically, and say ‘I see your garbage move, and I raise you a fucking genocide.’”
A choked laugh escaped her. “You don’t play poker, do you?”
“No. But I play a lot of strategy games. This is a resource dump. We’re sacrificing the pawn—the LunarNova brand—to checkmate the king.”
The metaphor clicked. It gave the horrible, giddy plunge a sense of purpose. She was choosing to lose the game to win something else. Her integrity, maybe. Or just the simple right to close a door herself.
Her phone buzzed again, this time with a call. The screen flashed: MARCUS.
The name was a jolt of lightning down her spine. She stared at it, frozen. Elliot’s hand closed over hers, warm and steady.
“Answer it,” he said quietly. “Put it on speaker. Let him talk.”
“Why?”
“Intel. He thinks he’s won. People who think they’ve won get arrogant. They say stupid things.”
With a trembling finger, she swiped to answer. “Hello, Marcus.”
“Luna, sweetheart. Jesus, where have you been?” His voice was all false concern, a oily smoothness that made her skin crawl. “I’ve been trying to reach you. I’ve been seeing this… this terrible thing going around. You must be devastated.”
Elliot gestured for her to keep him talking.
“I’m managing,” she said, her voice miraculously steady.
“Of course you are, you’re a tough kid. Look, this is a nightmare, but it’s also an opportunity. Controversy is currency. Your numbers are through the roof. The engagement is insane. We need to strike while the iron is hot. I’ve already drafted a statement—a measured, victim-leaning angle—and I’ve got three interview requests from major outlets. We can own this narrative.”
She watched Elliot’s face. His expression was one of cold disgust. He mimed writing something down.
“What’s the statement say?” Luna asked.
“The usual. You’re a victim of a privacy violation, your trust was betrayed by someone close, you’re taking time to heal but you’re strong for your community… blah, blah. We’ll merch it. ‘Team Luna’ shirts. Maybe a charity stream for digital privacy. It’s gold.”
He was monetizing it. Right now. While pretending to be her savior.
Elliot was typing silently on his laptop, pulling up the contract Marcus had sent her two years ago. He pointed to a clause, highlighted in yellow.
Luna found her voice, colder now. “And who betrayed my trust, Marcus? In this statement. Do we name anyone?”
A brief, calculating pause. “I don’t think that’s prudent yet, sweetheart. Legal says we should keep it vague for now. ‘A trusted individual.’ Lets us keep our options open. Maybe even spin it later, if the guy comes forward with an apology, we could do a reconciliation stream, the ratings would be—”
“Is the uploader’s IP address part of your legal team’s ‘options’?” Elliot said, leaning toward the phone.
Dead silence.
Marcus’s tone shifted, the oil evaporating. “Who is that? Luna, who’s with you?”
“This is Elliot Finch. I’m the person in the audio. And I’ve been analyzing the metadata of the leaked file. Fascinating stuff. The upload traceroute is a real journey. Ends up at a server registered to a holding company. Which is funny, because that same company shows up on the financials for Luna’s ‘NovaTech’ sponsorship deal from last quarter. The one where twenty-two percent vanished.”
The silence on the other end was different now. It wasn’t shocked or angry. It was the dead, hollow silence of a trap snapping shut.
Marcus’s voice came back, low and venomous. “You have no idea what you’re dealing with, you little shit.”
“Actually, I have a very good idea,” Elliot said, his voice eerily calm. “I deal with corrupted code all the time. You’re just a bug, Marcus. And we’re about to patch you out.”
He nodded at Luna. She took a breath. “You’re fired. Again. And my lawyers will be in touch. Don’t call this number again.”
She ended the call. Her hands were shaking. She dropped the phone into her lap as if it were toxic.
Elliot exhaled, a long, slow breath. “Okay. So he’s scared. And dumb. Good combination.”
“He sounded like he wanted to kill you,” she whispered.
“He’d have to leave his mom’s basement first.” Elliot stood up, cracking his knuckles. “We’re moving the stream up. Tonight. Nine PM. Peak traffic. Before he can get any other narrative spun up.”
The timeline collapsed in on her, a new kind of vertigo. “Tonight?”
“The poison is already in the water. We administer the antidote now.” He held out a hand. “You ready to build your bomb?”
She looked at his hand, then at his face—the determined set of his jaw, the unshakable focus in his eyes. This quiet, messy room was the frontline. He was her armor and her weapon and her only ally.
She took his hand. He pulled her up.
“Let’s go code a funeral,” she said.
For the next six hours, they worked. Luna narrated, drafted talking points, rehearsed her delivery in the mirror—cold, clear, unwavering. Elliot built the digital theater. A stark, black backdrop. Clean, bold typography for each piece of evidence. A discreet “DONATE” button that linked not to her, but to a digital privacy rights nonprofit. He wrote a script that would, the moment she said “Thank you and goodbye,” permanently delete the LunarNova channel and all affiliated accounts.
It was a digital suicide vest. She would wear it willingly.
At 8:55 PM, she sat in his desk chair, the webcam a single, unblinking eye. She wore a simple black sweater, no makeup, her pink hair pushed back. She looked tired. Real. Nothing like the shimmering avatar of LunarNova.
Elliot knelt just out of frame, his hand on her ankle. “Look at the lens. Talk to one person. The person who needs to hear this. Not the mob.”
“What if I throw up?”
“Then we cut for a second. It’ll be human.” He gave her ankle a squeeze. “You are the most real person I know. Show them what that looks like.”
The countdown on his secondary monitor ticked from ten. Her streaming dashboard, usually a comforting panel of alerts and friendliness, was a seething, scrolling beast of hate, curiosity, and grotesque emojis. Viewer count spiked faster than she’d ever seen it: 50,000, 100,000, 250,000…
The “LIVE” light glowed red.
She took one last breath, tasted the lavender and the coffee and the metallic tang of fear.
She looked into the lens.
“Hello,” she said, her voice clear in the quiet room. “My name is Luna Skye. And yes, that was me you heard.”
The red LIVE light burned like a cauterizing brand. A quarter of a million usernames swarmed in the sidebar, a churning, faceless audience holding its breath. The chat scroll was a blur of crying-laughing emojis, demands, and vitriol she refused to read.
“It was a private moment,” she continued, her eyes fixed on the lens as Elliot had instructed. “It was intimate. It was stolen from me, and from the person I was with, by someone I trusted to manage my career.” She could hear her own heartbeat in her ears, a frantic drum against the quiet of the room. “That person is Marcus Hayes.”
She clicked a key on the keyboard Elliot had positioned. The screen behind her changed to the first slide: a copy of her management contract with a specific clause highlighted in violent yellow. The chat hiccupped, the scrolling slowing for a second as people processed the shift from salacious gossip to a legal document.
“Clause 4-B,” she said, her voice gaining a flat, forensic steadiness. “Fiduciary duty. He had a legal obligation to act in my best financial interest.” Another click. A spreadsheet appeared, rows and columns of numbers. “These are the payments from NovaTech, my biggest sponsorship last year. Column A is what they sent. Column B is what reached my account. The difference is twenty-two percent. It went to a holding company called Meridian Shell, LLC.”
She kept talking, methodically, coldly. She explained the metadata Elliot had traced, the audio file’s journey from Marcus’s device to a public forum. She displayed the damning timeline, each timestamp a nail in a coffin. The chat was splitting now, fragments of “OH SHIT” and “GET HIM” breaking through the noise. The viewer count climbed: 300,000.
“He called me today,” Luna said, and for the first time, a slight tremor entered her voice. She played the audio clip from their earlier call, Marcus’s voice, oily and then venomous, filling the stream. “You have no idea what you’re dealing with, you little shit.”
The reaction was instant, a torrent of outrage. She was no longer just a victim of a leak; she was a witness presenting evidence. The power dynamic was subtly, irrevocably shifting. But the pressure of the performance, the weight of every word, was a physical compression on her chest.
She moved to the final slides, detailing the planned charity link, the legal actions. “So this isn’t an apology. This is an accusation. This is a termination. And this…” she said, her breath catching slightly, “is a resignation.”
The word hung in the air. LunarNova was quitting. The persona she’d built for years, the glittering cage, was being announced dead on live television. The finality of it hit her like a wave, colder and more terrifying than the hate.
“I’m walking away from this channel, from this brand, because I don’t want to live inside something he poisoned.” Her chin began to quiver. She fought it, gripping the edge of the desk, her knuckles white. “He took something real and he tried to make it dirty for clicks and cash. And I just… I need you all to know that what he leaked… it wasn’t a performance. It was…”
Her voice shattered. A single, hot tear broke free, carving a path through her carefully composed expression. It was a drop of pure, undiluted exhaustion and grief. She faltered, her gaze dropping from the camera to her trembling hands.
Without thinking, Elliot moved.
He rose from his crouch out of frame and simply sat in the empty chair beside her, the one meant for guest streams. He didn’t look at the camera, only at her. He pulled her into his side, his arm wrapping firmly around her shoulders, tucking her into the familiar shelter of his body and his worn grey hoodie. The camera captured it all: his messy hair, his tense jaw, the protective curl of his posture around her.
A fresh tsunami of comments exploded. The chat was now pure chaos.
Luna buried her face in his shoulder for one second, two, drawing in the scent of lavender and code. Then she straightened, wiping the tear away with a sharp, angry motion. She didn’t shrug him off. She leaned into his hold, finding her voice again, rougher now but clear.
“This is Elliot,” she said, as if introducing a co-pilot in a storm. “The other voice in the recording. My boyfriend. The one who helped me trace all of this. He’s why I had the courage to do this tonight.”
Elliot gave a small, awkward nod to the camera, his expression grim. “She’s doing all the hard work,” he murmured, his voice just picked up by her mic.
“We’re done letting other people tell the story,” Luna said, locking eyes with the lens again, Elliot’s solid presence a wall against her back. “So that’s it. The evidence is there. The links are below. Donate to the cause if you want. I’m Luna Skye. And I’m logging off.”
She reached forward, her hand steady now, and hit the key sequence Elliot had programmed. The screen went black. The red light died.
The silence that followed was absolute and ringing. The numbers, the noise, the eyes—all gone, replaced by the faint hum of the computer fan and the sound of her own ragged breathing in the quiet, dark room.
She was still curled into Elliot’s side. He hadn’t let go.
“You did it,” he whispered into her hair, his voice full of a wonder that had nothing to do with the stream.
The hum of the computer fan was the only sound, a low drone beneath the roar of silence left in the wake of a quarter-million vanished voices. Luna didn’t move from the circle of his arm. The adrenaline that had held her spine rigid for the past hour was evaporating, leaving behind a hollow, trembling chill. The evidence was out. The channel was gone. It was over.
Yet she felt unfinished.
She turned her head, her cheek still against the rough cotton of his hoodie. She looked at his profile in the dim glow of the idle monitors—the sharp line of his nose, the dark fringe of his lashes. This boy who built weapons from code for her. Who sat in front of a hateful world and held her without being asked.
“You did it,” he’d said. But he was wrong.
With a sudden, liquid movement, she shifted in the chair, pivoting her body to face him. Before he could speak, she climbed into his lap, her knees bracketing his hips on the office chair. The chair groaned softly, rolling back a few inches under their combined weight.
“Luna?” His hands came up to steady her by her waist, his touch cautious.
She placed her palms on either side of his face, forcing him to look at her. His eyes were wide, confused. “You,” she said, her voice raw from the stream. “You did it. You built the whole thing. You gave me the sword and the shield and the fucking map. You held my hand on the way to the gallows.”
“I just wrote some code,” he breathed, his fingers flexing nervously at her sides. “You were the one who walked up there. You said the words. That was all you.”
“It was us.” She leaned forward, her forehead touching his. “And I need to feel that. I need to not be in my head anymore. I need to be right here.”
She kissed him. It wasn’t like the hungry, desperate kisses from before. This was deliberate, a slow sealing of a pact. A thank you written in pressure and breath. He responded instantly, his arms wrapping fully around her, pulling her tight against him as if he could absorb the shudders still wracking her frame.
When she pulled back, his eyes were hazy but concerned. “Hey, wait. I don’t… I don’t want to be what you crash into. You’re coming down from something huge. I don’t want to take advantage of the fallout.”
A real, startled laugh burst from her. “Take advantage? Elliot. Look at me.” She took one of his hands from her waist and guided it up, pressing his palm flat over the rapid, hammering beat of her heart beneath her sweater. “This is all because of you. Not the fallout. You. Your quiet. Your stupid, beautiful brain. Your hands that build things instead of break them. I am choosing this. I am choosing you. Right now.”
She saw the last of his resistance dissolve, replaced by a naked want that mirrored her own. “Okay,” he whispered, the word a vibration against her lips.
She kissed him again, harder, and her hands went to the hem of her black sweater. In one fluid motion, she pulled it up and over her head, tossing it aside onto the keyboard. The cool air of the room touched her skin, raising goosebumps. She watched his gaze drop, his breath catching, the blue light from the monitor washing over her.
His reverence was a physical thing in the air.
“Your turn,” she murmured, her fingers going to the button of his jeans. His hands fumbled to help, a clumsy collaboration. The denim loosened. She slipped her hand inside, past the waistband of his boxers, and wrapped her fingers around him. He was already hard, hot against her palm. A sharp, fractured gasp escaped him, his head falling back against the chair with a soft thud.
“Luna…”
“Shhh.” She stroked him slowly, learning the feel of him without the desperate frenzy of their first time. This was different. A claiming. “I need you on the floor. Now.”
They slid together from the chair, a tangle of limbs that landed with a cushioned thump on the rug beside the bed. The familiar carpet, the one she’d knelt on that first night, was now their territory. He shrugged out of his hoodie and shirt while she pushed his jeans and boxers down his hips. For a moment, she just looked at him laid bare in the half-light, all lean lines and hesitant strength.
Then she straddled him, lowering herself slowly, taking him inside her with a breathless sigh that was part relief, part conquest. She braced her hands on his chest, her pink hair falling around her face like a curtain. She began to move, a deep, rolling rhythm that had nothing to do with performance.
It was an exorcism. Every rocking motion was a pulse pushing out the poison—Marcus’s sneer, the scrolling hate, the violated sound of her own voice. She poured it all out, translating the chaotic storm in her chest into this single, driving physical truth. Her breaths became ragged sobs, but her eyes stayed open, locked on his.
Tears tracked clean lines through her skin, falling onto his chest. She wasn’t crying from pain.
Elliot’s hands gripped her hips, his thumbs digging into the bones, not to steer her but to anchor them both. He watched her unravel above him, his own expression stricken with awe. “It’s okay,” he choked out, his voice thick. “Let it go. I’ve got you. I’m here.”
She rode him harder, faster, chasing the feeling of being utterly, consumingly real. The world had tried to pixelate her, to reduce her to a soundbite. This was the rebuttal. The sweat-slicked slide of skin on skin, the raw sound of their breathing, the solid plane of his stomach against her. This was undeniable.
A deep, tightening coil in her core snapped. The release wasn’t a silent, pretty thing. It was a sob torn from her throat, a convulsive shudder that bowed her spine. She clenched around him, and his own control shattered. His cry was muffled against her shoulder, his body arching up into hers as he followed.
The silence afterwards was different. Not hollow, but full. Sated.
She collapsed onto him, her ear pressed over the frantic, slowing drum of his heart. Their sweat cooled. The LED strips on his wall hummed, casting their cheap, celestial glow over the discarded clothes and the silent computer. The internet was still out there, already dissecting her broadcast, but in this room, on this patch of floor, it held no power.
Elliot’s hand came up, stroking her damp hair with a tenderness that made her want to cry all over again.
“Welcome back, Luna Skye,” he whispered.
She didn’t answer. She just listened to his heart, and for the first time in days, found a rhythm that matched her own.