POV Floris
My fingers were flying across the keyboard like I was conducting a digital orchestra of revenge.
The first hack was easy—almost insultingly so. Eric’s IT department had focused so much on keeping people out that they’d forgotten to monitor who was already inside. Classic corporate oversight.
“Jesus, this security is weaker than gas station sushi.”
I pulled up the access logs from the night Helena’s tapes went viral. Hundreds of login attempts, automated scripts, the usual digital white noise.
But buried in the chaos was something interesting—a single, clean access point that had navigated straight to Eric’s personal archives without any trial and error.
Someone who knew exactly where to look.
“Found you, you sneaky little shit.”
The username made me pause: AgathaInezSharma47.
“Agatha Inez Sharma?” I said out loud, because apparently I’d developed a habit of narrating my own detective work. “Who the fuck is Agatha Inez Sharma?”
I ran the name through every database I could access. Social media, employment records, academic databases, even fucking LinkedIn. Nothing.
The name was a ghost—too perfect, too complete, too obviously fake. But something about it nagged at me. Three names. Formal structure. Almost like…
“Like someone trying too hard to sound legitimate,” I realized.
I started breaking it down. Agatha—old-fashioned name, probably chosen to sound authoritative. Inez—Spanish origin, maybe trying to throw off geographic tracking. Sharma—Indian surname, common enough to blend in.
Then it hit me like a digital brick to the face.
“A.I.S.,” I whispered. “Agatha. Inez. Sharma.”
My blood turned to actual ice water.
I flipped the letters backward in my head. A-I-S also becomes backward… ‘S-I-A.’
“No fucking way.”
But even as I said it, I knew it was true. The kind of truth that makes your stomach drop through the floor and your worldview shatter into a million razor-sharp pieces.
Sia. The woman who’d warned me about Eric’s patterns. Who’d tried to save me from making her mistakes. Who’d looked genuinely hurt when I accused her of jealousy.
The woman who’d had access to Eric’s systems for fifteen fucking years.
“You calculating bitch,” I breathed.
My hands were shaking as I dug deeper, following the digital breadcrumbs Sia had been too arrogant to properly hide.
She’d covered her tracks well—bouncing through proxy servers, using encrypted connections, timing her access to coincide with system maintenance windows.
But she’d made one crucial mistake. She’d underestimated me.
The access pattern was surgical. She’d gone straight to Eric’s personal files, extracted the videos of his parents, then uploaded them to a dozen viral platforms simultaneously.
Professional-grade character assassination, executed with the precision of someone who’d been planning it for years.
“This wasn’t spontaneous revenge,” I realized. “This was a fucking long con.”
I pulled up more data, cross-referencing timestamps with security logs, building a timeline that made my skin crawl. Sia hadn’t just leaked the videos after I’d gotten close to Eric.
She’d been systematically documenting everything—my conversations with Eric, our growing relationship, even our goddamn date. She’d been waiting for the perfect moment to detonate her psychological bomb.
And I’d given her the perfect scapegoat.
“Smart move, Sia. Really fucking smart.”
The beauty of her plan was diabolical. Frame the new girl for the leak, destroy Eric’s trust in me, get me fired and disappeared. Eliminate the competition while maintaining her position as his loyal right hand.
Except she’d forgotten one tiny detail.
I wasn’t some desperate corporate climber who’d roll over and die when things got complicated. I was a Middleton. And Middletons don’t fucking give up.
I kept digging, following the money trail now. Sia’s personal accounts, offshore transfers, payments that coincided with sensitive information appearing in competitor’s hands.
She hadn’t just leaked Eric’s family secrets. She’d been selling Brighton Systems intelligence for years. The perfect inside job, hidden behind fifteen years of apparent loyalty and victim status.
“You’ve been playing everyone,” I said to my screen. “Eric, me, probably half the corporate world.”
The final piece of evidence made me actually laugh out loud. A wire transfer to a private security firm in Boston, dated exactly six hours before Jake’s video.
“Well, congratulations, Sia,” I said, screenshotting everything and backing it up to three different encrypted servers. “You just declared war on the wrong fucking girl.”
I stared at the evidence on my screen—months of digital breadcrumbs that painted a picture of betrayal so complete it was almost artistic. Sia had played the long game better than anyone. The wounded mentor, the protective colleague, the woman who’d tried to save me from Eric’s psychological warfare.
All of it bullshit. All of it performance.
She’d been the puppet master from day one.