Chapter 6 - Unedited Footage
The surgery lasted eight hours.
When I woke, the world was a haze of chemical warmth and the deep, throbbing ache of freshly cut muscle and bone. But as the fog of general anesthesia receded, Dr. Thorne approached the foot of my bed. He took a small metal probe and lightly scraped the arch of my left foot.
A sudden, sharp impulse flared through my ankle. My big toe twitched upward.
"There it is," Dr. Thorne murmured, a rare smile breaking across his exhausted face. "The conduction pathways are intact. It will take months of agonizing physical therapy, Audrey. But your cord is breathing again."
I closed my eyes and let a single tear roll down into the pillow. I wasn't broken. Not permanently.
By noon the following day, Victoria was back in my private room, which was now guarded by two private security personnel stationed outside the heavy oak doors. Sitting beside her was Chloe, holding an external hard drive with a braided red cable.
Chloe looked pale, her hands shaking as she plugged the drive into Victoria’s laptop.
"She kept the raw feed on a shared cloud server she used for her content team," Chloe explained, her voice trembling with nerves and righteous anger. "She forgot I still had administrative backend access. Audrey... she didn't just plan this yesterday. She’s been staging this for three weeks."
Victoria clicked play.
The screen lit up with a high-definition view from a camera concealed inside an ornamental planter directly behind the mezzanine railing.
The audio was horrifyingly pristine.
On the screen, Taryn was speaking to her videographer twenty minutes before the ceremony began.
*"Make sure you catch the height difference,"* Taryn was saying, her tone brisk, professional, chillingly callous. *"When Audrey comes up, I'm going to lean in like I'm hugging her. I’ll clip her heels with my dress train, and when she reaches for the rail, I'll give her the shove. It has to look like an overreaction to a prank. If she falls, she lands on the runner carpet. It’ll blow up TikTok. Five million views minimum before midnight."*
The videographer’s voice sounded hesitant: *"Taryn, her back is already messed up. What if she hits the marble off the runner?"*
Taryn had turned to the lens, laughing that familiar, musical laugh.
*"Then it's even more dramatic, isn't it? Dad will clean it up. He always does."*
The video continued. It showed the entire sequence: me walking onto the mezzanine, the fake smile on Taryn’s face, the precise moment her hands thrust forward into my spine, and the horrifying, echoing crack as my body plummeted down to the marble floor below.
It captured her standing at the edge, peering over with an expression of ecstatic triumph before contorting her face into an artificial scream of horror.
"We have the metadata," Victoria stated, her voice cold as an executioner's blade. "We have the cloud logs, the uncompressed 4K video, and Chloe's sworn deposition. This is not reckless endangerment. This is premeditated aggravated assault resulting in catastrophic bodily injury. In the state of Georgia, that is a Class A felony carrying up to twenty years."
"What about my parents?" I asked, my voice steady now, hardened like tempered steel.
"Your father used the firm's escrow account to wire twenty-five thousand dollars to the venue manager to overwrite the ballroom hard drives," Victoria replied, pulling out another document. "That is obstruction of justice and witness tampering. And your mother’s forged power-of-attorney constitutes grand larceny and identity fraud."
"Don't release it to the police yet," I said softly.
Victoria looked up, her eyebrows raised in surprise. "Audrey, this is an open-and-shut arrest warrant."
"If we give it to the police now, my father’s lawyers will have Taryn out on bail in two hours, and the story will be buried behind sealed records and gag orders," I said, looking out the hospital window toward the skyline of Savannah. "Tonight is the Vance-Harrington annual charity gala. The merger between Evan’s family and mine is being announced at eight o'clock. The entire press corps of Georgia will be in that ballroom."
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A slow, vicious smile spread across Victoria Sterling’s face.
"I’ll arrange the media stream," she said.
