THE HEIR'S REVENGE

Chapter 18

Liam sent me a link on a Tuesday morning while I was eating breakfast.

The link was sitting pretty with no messages attached. I clicked on the link holding coffee. I'm the other hand. Lily sat across from me, eating her toast.

It was Sophia Pierce's account, my step sister.

I had known that Sophia used me for her content when I lived with them. She had a social media following that she built carefully since she was young. She posted fashion and lifestyle content.

I was aware that most times I'd appear in her content but I didn't know how many times.

There was a video from three years ago that Soohia had made when I was coming back from the restaurant where I worked. She captioned it “when the help forgets where he belongs”

That particular video has forty thousand likes.

There was a picture she posted too. That picture was my basement with a dirty caption that I couldn't even read. That particular post had sixty five thousand likes.

Then she filmed a video from a year ago when Daniel and his friend were mocking me for something. She made sure to zoom my face in that video. It had over hundreds thousand likes.

There were more.

I scrolled down and I felt pain that I hadn't expected that I'd feel. This has been years ago but realizing that she has been posting about me.

She had documented my own humiliation and made it entertaining for people like herself.

“Brother.” I heard Lily call me. When I looked up she was watching me from across the table with a focused attention. She knew something was wrong but she was hesitating to ask me what it was.

“Sorry.” I said, putting the phone down. “What we're you saying?”

“I wasn't saying anything but you look disturbed.” She said,

“I do?”

“You are making a face. The kind you make when you are thinking about something that happened before.”

I looked at my little cousin again. She was just five years old but she could read people and their expressions.

“Are you okay?”

"I'm fine," I said, but she didn't believe me. When she waited for more explanation but didn't get anymore, she went back to her toast.

It seemed like her videos were going viral all over again because by the time I got to the Campus three different people mentioned it to me even before I got to my first lecture.

They weren't asking from a place of hate but because they were uncertain about how to act.

I didn't give them a response. I simply had no reaction to give, I only acknowledged that I was really the one in the video and moved on.

I didn't want to think about it but those numbers bothered me even during my lecture. Sophia was really cruel to me, thinking about it now.

I could remember at that time when she even got a brand ambassadorship with three companies in the fashion space and her account got verified at that time.

By Tuesday evening, a thread was made by someone unknown and it spread far enough through the whole school but surprisingly the comment shifted.

People who had previously enjoyed her posts and engaged in her content, were now leaving questions under the thread. These questions were just beautiful ones found on the internet. People questioned why she had to ridicule her half brother because of the content.

Sophia Pierce had built her brand by mocking me Ethan Blackwell who had ten billion dollars and was the most recognisable name in the country's business world.

The audience that had celebrated her then had turned against her now and I guess it was all because of my power and money.

This was what they call public reversal. It was faster and more total than ordinary criticism. It was giving the energy of people who felt deceived. People who didn't want to associate themselves with problems anymore.

I checked her account again and I noticed her followers count hydropower almost forty thousand in the next twenty four hours.

I was, of course, too busy to know all this information but because Liam would never mind his business. He sent it to me

I didn't encourage him to do that and I also didn't ask him to stop.

Henry on his own part gave me updates just like Liam did but this time it was more business like. He suggested that we call the lawyer and get ready for a lawsuit.

I didn't think it was time for that but I let him make plans. I'd learnt that Henry was never wrong.

Everyone gossiped and talked about Sophia but eventually she had to come online herself to explain why she did that and how sorry she was.

But she received more backlash than she already has.

The brand partnerships went first.

By the next Thursday, all of the companies sent her termination emails. One of the companies even went as far as issuing a public statement distancing themselves from her. The others blocked her.

It just felt like she had been used and then thrown away.

Sophia lived in a comfortable apartment, the kind of one where a monthly rent was covered by her brand income, so when they cut off partnerships, the income stopped coming but the rent kept increasing.

The news was everywhere on social media.

I heard that she had called Daniel to ask for some money. Emma had told me in one of her increasingly frequent attempts to give me information that she thought would be useful to me.

I didn't want to care about her but the internet was so noisy and she was my sister after all, no matter what happened between us in the past.

I had too much work to be scrolling seamlessly on the internet so I shut out all the noise and focused on my work.

The next night when I was rounding off with my work, I saw her text. The night was quiet since it was after ten pm and Lily was already asleep.