Reformed Villain’s Ex: Don’t Love Me, It’s Futile

Chapter 18 — The Feed That Ate the Night

The screen blacked out the way nightmares like to announce themselves: dramatic, self-important, and with the smug timing of a villain who’s done this before. For one terrible second the overlay of the rival feed went full void—just a smear of gray—and then it snapped back with the slow, clinical calm of someone who enjoys watching people crawl through glass.

My heart was a drum solo. Oliver swore into his headset in a language I couldn’t translate but intuitively respected. Damien’s jaw made its one steady decision: move. Mason’s fingers were a blur, toggling feeds, calling contacts, trying to outrun a blackout with bandwidth. Elliot barked orders like he was auditioning for a more efficient government.

On the main screen—the one that mattered because it showed the ledger receipts we’d just forced on the world—our evidence scrolled like a righteous ticker. Bank transfers. Timestamped PDFs. Annotations. People in comment threads were already composing angry manifestos and supportive memes. For a glorious, hair-raising thirty seconds, we owned the story.

And on the rival overlay, a man in a dark suit stepped into Rowan’s bedroom and then—magically, infuriatingly—vanished. The clip cut from reality to clean mattress like a stage trick, and whatever had been there before the cut had been trimmed away with surgical indifference.

“I saw him,” Mason said, voice thin. “He walked in. Looked like he checked for kids.”

“No,” Oliver said, already pulling the deepest forensic from his sleeve. “He *staged* the clip. It’s composited. They spliced pre-recorded footage and inserted a figure. But they also overlaid a live feed from the house. Whoever did this is advanced. They know how to spoof a loop and make it look live.”

“You’re telling me the man we saw wasn’t really in the room?” I said, though it felt like asking whether a hurricane was, in fact, wet.

“I’m telling you the sequence was engineered to trigger panic,” Elliot said. “But triggering panic is their game. We need to know if they merely scared us or if they used that chaos to do something while we were busy looking at pixels.”

A beat. The room smelled like burnt coffee and ten thousand notifications. The most dangerous thing about panic is that it makes you predictable.

Damien didn’t want to be predictable. He wanted to be practical. “Secure the house,” he said. “Now. Physical sweep. Cameras on every street. Call neighbors. Lock exits.”

“On it,” Oliver said. “Mason, legal—get a warrant ready for any ISP we can get. If they spoofed streams, we trace routing now. We find the proxy.”

Mason plunged into motion with the kind of focus usually reserved for men trying to stop proposals from dying in committee. Phones were out. People were moving like a well-branded, slightly scandalous band.

I felt raw. Adrenaline is the economy of crisis; it fuels terrible humor and the occasional brilliant plan. “Rowan,” I said, because names are anchors and anchors have a way of landing boats.

“He’s okay,” Damien said. “He’s with Maya.”

Maya. There was the small, bright shard of relief. She’d stayed behind at the safe house as agreed; she’d been our human Trojan horse during the gala run. If she had him, then this was a taunt, not a horror. But Maya’s presence could also be a setup. People who used to run ledger lines for sociopaths usually carry a neat little trunk of indecipherable contradictions.

My phone buzzed. Unknown number. The same cadence, the same old ghostly whisper we’d been dancing with for days.

*Nice show. You lit the stage. Now watch the play.*

Under it, a link. A clip.

I didn’t click.

I made the mistake of letting Mason click.

The clip opened on the rival site, sharp and grainy. Someone had filmed our house’s exterior from a side alley; the timestamp matched the blackout. A black van idled at the curb. The passenger door opened. A figure—small, bundled, indistinct—was carried swiftly into the van. The camera shook like the operator had stopped breathing.

“You—” Oliver began.

“We need that full frame,” Elliot said. “Freeze it. Extract the pixels. Enhance it. Who filmed it?”

Mason’s hands were shaking. “Doorbell cam,” he said. “Neighbor’s feed. He told us he’d been watching the pier livestream and thought he saw movement. He recorded without realizing the overlay was happening.”

The image was low-res but unmistakable in the sick way that important things are: a shape moved into a vehicle. A small bundle. A van. A driver. The license plate blurred like escape art, but Oliver was already running code, layering frames, amplifying contrast, tracking the van’s movement across the few seconds the clip gave them.

My stomach dropped the whole way to the floor. This was what I’d been trying to stave off—when drama became method and method had the circumference of a child’s life.

“No—no,” I said, the words small and ragged. “They cannot—”

“They can,” Mason said. “They’ll do whatever gets an audience. They probably never intended to show it. But they did.”

Damien’s eyes were a different color—worked steel instead of sympathetic gray. “Find the van,” he ordered. “Now.”

Oliver tapped keys like a pianist with a mission. “Plate’s partial,” he said. “Maybe… 7? Maybe a 3? If we run it against the vehicle registry with the area tiles… there’s a match. A rental service. Short-term contract. One-day window.”

“It’s a rental,” Elliot said. “They always use rentals. Willing to pay cash. Lacks loyalty.”

“We need to be faster than their clean-up,” Mason said. “If they’re smart, they changed plates. If they’re really smart, they dumped the kid into a safe place and put on a show.”

That last idea was a razor’s edge. If Rowan was safe, then this was elaborate torture. If he wasn’t… the sky turned unfamiliar.

“Call the neighbor,” I said. “Get every frame. Ask for timestamps. Who approached the van? Any voices? Any distinctive shoes?”

Mason dialed numbers. He was a man who usually made chaos look curated, and right now he sounded like a person who’d just been dunked in cold water. The neighbor answered, voice trembling. “I—I swear I saw someone carry something. It looked like a kid. The driver had no face in my feed. I called it in, but—”

“You did the right thing,” Damien said. “Hold on to your footage. Lock your camera.”

Oliver pulled in public cameras, traffic cams, a delivery van cam the city thought was mundane and paid no attention to. Patterns emerged like confessions: the van left, turned two blocks where a shadowed alley promised invisibility, then hopped onto a highway route consistent with a long-gap rental.

My phone buzzed again. Another clip.

“Stop opening those,” I warned. But I opened it anyway because humans are tragically curious and also because I wanted to see what horror would look like when it was framed by pixels.

This one came from a different source—somebody upstream of their network with either a conveniently guiltless conscience or a grudge. The clip was a few frames of a hooded man carrying what looked, in the blurry, to be my son's small jacket. The background had a wall with a mural I'm pretty sure belonged to a community center five miles away. The van was visible in the back, but farther down the street. The hooded man glanced up. The camera shook. A voice whispered, barely audible: “We have him.”

We all heard the whisper. It was not a voice that made promises. It made deals.

“You hear that?” Mason whispered.

I wanted to answer with the kind of violence that gets people removed from polite company. Instead I breathed and asked the more useful question: “Who recorded that? Where did that clip come from?”

Elliot’s phone chimed. “Maya’s secure channel flagged some transmission. She says she’s being tailed. She thinks the van’s a shell. She’s trying to intercept.”

“Bring her to us,” Damien ordered. “No solo moves.”

“She’s on foot,” Elliot replied. “She says she’s close. She’s trying to trade a contact for proof.”

“Taylor,” I said, “call my friend at the community center. Ask about van movement, about the mural. Anyone who remembers what the driver looked like. We need neighbors, cameras, witnesses.”

It became a frantic ballet—people dialing, feeds slicing, lawyers drafting emergency paperwork that might never be served in time. The ledger was still streaming across channels, the receipts like mortar holding together one wall of defense. But mortar doesn’t stop a determined excavation.

My phone buzzed again.

Unknown number.

*Tick-tock,* it said. *Nice receipts. Nice show. But people get bored. We speed things up.*

The cold in my gut was not the season. It was the knowledge that someone had escalated from threats to demonstration and now—now—they were accelerating.

“Stop the feeds,” Elliot said bluntly. “We’re giving them oxygen. If they’re playing to a crowd they’ll keep doing this. Pull everything private. We push only to secure channels.”

“No,” I said, surprising myself with how steady the word felt. “We don’t pull. We flood. Stopping broadcast gives them a win. They want panic; we starve it by staying louder and faster. Push everything now—legal filings, ledger, timestamps, vehicle info—throw it all at once. Make them drown in our transparency.”

Damien’s face made a grid of decision. “We flood,” he agreed slowly. “Legal auto-fills the emergency motions. Oliver, trace that van DVR. Mason, mobilize PR—demand custody checks publicly. Put pressure on law enforcement. Make the world a noisy courtroom.”

They moved. People were running on adrenaline, on justice, on the fierce protective logic of parents sharpened by fear. Lines of code, legal templates, viral posts—everything meshed into an ugly, brilliant machine.

For a second, there was a sense of control. We were not being spectators. We were participants. We were noisy, messy, and very, very public.

Then my phone screamed a new text that made even my bravest laugh stall.

An image loaded.

Rowan. Sitting in the backseat of a van. Awake, eyes huge, clutching his small dinosaur. Behind him, a figure leaned in, half-shadow, a hand on the seat by him. The timestamp was recent. My hands went numb.

Under it: *You wanted proof. Here’s proof. Decide fast.*

The world narrowed to the size of my son’s face lit by the van’s interior light.

Cliffhanger: The image’s metadata revealed GPS coordinates—coordinates that led not to a warehouse or a highway, but to a small church parking lot on the outskirts of the city. Oliver’s screen pinged: the feed from that camera—one we hadn’t yet patched—was coming online.