The glow of Connor’s phone screen was the only light in the flat that morning, faint blue against his face as he scrolled through the latest industry newsletters and news feeds. A bitter taste rose in his mouth as the headline caught his eye:“Connor Kuranda: Pretender or Pawn?”His thumb froze over the glass. He opened it.The article unfurled in neat, polished paragraphs, the kind that cut with polite precision:For years, Connor was nothing more than a caretaker at the Billabong Care Orphanage, handling its modest accounts and daily management. Respectable, but ordinary. Then, suddenly, he married into the Kuranda family—heiress Kirra Kuranda, no less—and his fortune changed overnight. And yet, strangely, he continued to hold onto his old post, drawing income far beneath his new means. Why would a man with such newfound influence refuse to let go of such humble work?Connor’s jaw tightened. The next section chilled him more.Rumors now suggest he has been invoking the Waratah name

Kirra froze, her eyes following the trembling finger. And when she saw who stood at the end of it, her stomach dropped.“Aunt Kakadu?” Her voice cracked with disbelief. She took a step forward, her expression hardening. “You? Of all people, you are the one framing me for theft? And that too—for things like cheese? Have you completely lost your mind?”Kakadu didn’t flinch. Her head lifted, chin pointed like a blade. “So what if I did?” she snapped, her tone imperious. “I saw you here and I immediately knew you had no business being in this store. Should I have stood by and let the place suffer because of you?”Kirra’s voice shot upward, a scream tearing through the hum of shocked murmurs. “How is the store suffering because of a paying customer?”Her aunt let out a harsh scoff, her rings glinting as she waved a dismissive hand. “Paying customer—or stealing customer? We all know which one you are, Kirra. Ever since you chose the side of that orphan, you’ve been nothing but a disgrace.”

Connor found the trail where most people thought it would end, in the neat, respectable offices of men who believed their sins were safe behind mahogany and discretion. It took days of quiet probing: a missed payment here, a trace of wire there, a courier who remembered the wrong time and then the right name. He moved patiently, lying low when needed and letting small openings widen until they became doors for him to step through. The name that kept surfacing belonged to a senior financial officer who kept his reputation scrubbed clean by day and his compromises quiet by night. Connor had watched the man’s habits: the address, the habits of his car, the way the gardener left at dusk. He did not come with a warrant… he went alone, because some men were easier to convince of their own vulnerability when the world was sleeping.The study smelled of tobacco and old money. A lamp burned at one end of the room, spilling a weak halo over shelves of bound reports and art bought for tax re

He reached for the remote and killed the feed.The sudden silence was deafening. The television screen reflected their faces, her pale, his unreadable, before fading into a dark mirror.Kirra stood frozen, the echo of her own name still hanging in the air like static.For a moment, she could almost hear the hum of a thousand voices outside these walls. Strangers debating her morality, dissecting her life, typing judgments into comment sections as if they’d lived it with her.Her voice came out brittle.“They’re not even pretending anymore. They’re calling us thieves.”Connor leaned against the table, arms crossed, eyes distant. “That’s the point. They can’t unmask who leaked the files, so they’ll brand the nearest faces guilty. Guilt sticks faster than truth.”Kirra swallowed hard. “And if it works?”“Then we start again,” he said quietly. “From under the rubble.”There was no panic in his voice, no despair, only the same cold steadiness that made him terrifying in moments like this.

The apartment was quiet except for the steady rhythm of the laptop keys. Connor hadn’t moved since the breach — the red thread of data still pulsing on-screen like a heartbeat.Kirra leaned against the doorframe, arms folded tightly, trying to ground herself in the ordinary sounds — the whir of the fan, the hum of the city below — but nothing about the air felt ordinary anymore.“What is it?” she asked softly.Connor didn’t look away. “A relay.”“Meaning?”“Meaning,” he said, fingers still flying, “the person pulling the strings doesn’t leave fingerprints. They use digital runners — false IDs, off-shore logins, ghost servers bouncing across time zones. But this one…” His tone shifted, colder, sharper. “This one slipped.”Kirra stepped closer, drawn in by the glow of the screen. Numbers shifted, letters rearranged themselves, entire maps of transactions blinking in and out of existence.“Connor—”He cut her off. “Here.”A frozen frame appeared — a metadata tag, timestamped and signed.