Chapter 7: The Screaming Dawn

The digital silence lasted for seven minutes.

Seven minutes of a suspended, crystalline quiet where the only movement was the slow swirl of leftover scotch in Ethan's glass and the blinking cursor on a blank command line. Then, on the pristine white page of The Isabella Chronicle, a number changed.

Views: 1

Someone, somewhere, had opened the email. The first spectator had entered the gallery. A moment later, another.

Views: 3

Then, a flicker.

Views: 8

His phone, sitting dark and silent on the desk, suddenly vibrated, a harsh, angry buzz against the polished wood. The screen lit up. LEO MARTINEZ. His best friend. His co-founder. The only person in the world who might have been able to talk him down from this ledge, had he known he was on it.

Ethan let it vibrate, watching the view counter climb. 17. 24. He picked up the phone on the fourth buzz.

“Ethan,” Leo’s voice was tight, strained, a mixture of disbelief and horror. “Tell me you didn’t do this. Please, man, tell me this is some kind of sick joke.”

“It’s no joke, Leo,” Ethan said, his own voice calm, level. He sounded like he was discussing a server migration.

“Jesus Christ, Ethan! A website? You sent it to everyone! I got it, my wife got it, half our board probably has it by now! Take it down. Right now. Whatever she did, this is… this is scorched earth. This is insane.”

Ethan stared at the counter. 37. He pictured Leo in his warm, perfectly normal home, his wife looking over his shoulder, both of them staring at the curated ugliness of the Chronicle. Collateral damage. He felt a flicker of something, a shadow of regret, but it was distant, like a memory of an emotion rather than the emotion itself.

“The earth was already scorched, Leo. I’m just lighting a match to see the damage more clearly.”

“This isn’t you!” Leo’s voice was rising, pleading. “The man I started a company with doesn’t do this. You can still fix this. Delete it before it goes viral. We can manage the fallout.”

“There’s nothing to fix,” Ethan said, the finality in his voice like a slammed door. “And there’s nothing to manage. It’s done.”

He ended the call, the silence rushing back in, heavier this time, freighted with the weight of a severed friendship. He placed the phone back on the desk. The screen immediately lit up again.

Isabella.

This was it. The main event. He took a breath, a slow, deliberate intake of air, and answered, putting the call on speaker.

“Ethan?” Her voice was hesitant, laced with confusion. Not angry. Not yet. “My mother just called me, hysterical. She said she got some… bizarre email. Something with my name on it? Genevieve just texted me about it too. Is our server hacked? Is it some kind of virus?”

The naivety of it, the assumption that this was a technical problem, an external attack, was almost pitiable.

“It’s not a virus, Bella,” he said, his voice a flat, sterile thing. The view counter clicked past fifty. 52.

There was a pause on the other end of the line. He could hear the faint sound of a mouse clicking. She was at her laptop. She was opening the link.

“What do you mean it’s not a… what is this?” Her voice was a whisper. He could visualize her perfectly: sitting up in their bed, the silk robe he’d bought her in Paris wrapped around her, her face illuminated by the glow of the screen. The same screen she’d used to mock him to her lover.

He remained silent. He let the website speak for him. He watched the counter. 68. 75. Friends texting friends. Husbands showing wives. The cascade was working perfectly.

The silence stretched, thick with her dawning horror. Then, a sharp intake of breath. A choked sound, half gasp, half sob.

“Ethan…” Her voice was shaking, unrecognizable. “What have you done?”

“I’ve organized the data,” he replied, the words as cold and precise as the code he wrote. “I thought you’d appreciate the minimalist aesthetic.”

“You bastard!” The scream was sudden, a raw, ragged tear in the fabric of the night. The polished socialite was gone, replaced by a cornered, feral animal. “You psychotic fucking bastard! You take this down! You take this down right now!”

“Why? It’s just information. The texts. The photos. The timelines. It’s all accurate, isn’t it?”

Views: 93.

“This is my life! My family! My career! You’re destroying me!”

“You destroyed us first,” he said, and for the first time, a sliver of the cold fury broke through his calm facade. “You just did it quietly. I prefer a more public approach.”

“I’ll ruin you!” she shrieked, her voice cracking with a mixture of rage and panic. “I’ll tell everyone you’re insane! I’ll get the best lawyers in the city! I’ll take everything from you!”

Ethan let out a short, hollow laugh. The sound was devoid of any humor. “Take everything? Isabella, you have nothing that I want. You were just a liability in an insecure system. I’m just… patching the vulnerability.”

He saw the number cross a threshold. 101. The triple digits felt significant. The shame was now officially a public spectacle.

“Please,” her voice suddenly broke, the anger collapsing into a desperate, pleading sob. “Ethan, please. Don’t do this. I’ll do anything. Please, just take it down.”

It was a masterful performance. The beautiful, broken queen, begging for mercy. Three months ago, it would have shattered his heart. Now, it was just noise. He leaned forward, closer to the phone’s microphone.

“Let me play something for you, Bella,” he said softly.

He clicked the play button on the embedded audio file on his screen. Her own voice, syrupy and condescending, filled the silent office and echoed back at her through the phone.

“Oh, Ethan… He’s sweet. He’s stable… A walking, talking bank account with a decent algorithm…”

A strangled cry came from the phone.

“…But a man? A real man? Not like you.”

He clicked stop. The silence that followed was absolute, a vacuum where all her lies and manipulations had once existed.

Her next words were not a scream, but a low, venomous hiss, poisoned with the purest hatred he had ever heard. “I will see you burn for this.”

“Too late,” Ethan said, his voice as empty as the space in his chest. “I’m already ashes.”

He ended the call, plunging the room back into his chosen silence. The dropped call felt chillingly final, a guillotine blade severing the last thread of his old life.

He looked at his screen. The number was no longer climbing. It was exploding.

Views: 287.

Views: 341.

Views: 419.

The world wasn’t just watching. It was gathering. The screaming had begun, and it was echoing far beyond the walls of their home, across the entire digital landscape he had just set ablaze.