Chapter 4: The Shadow War
That night, Rowan’s exposé dropped on their digital platform, hitting a hundred thousand views instantly. The public unanimously condemned Vance and his mother.
But barely two hours later, Vance posted a video on social media. He wore a wrinkled white shirt, his eyes red. He sat next to a hospital bed where Eleanor lay wearing an oxygen mask, looking incredibly weak.
“Sloan, I know I was wrong,” Vance choked out, playing the broken, humble man. “I shouldn’t have yelled at you. But Mom is in the ER right now. Her heart is failing. She regrets everything. Five years of marriage… are you really going to push us until my mother dies? Come home, Sloan. If you drop the charges, I’ll beg for forgiveness.”
“He’s acting,” Darcy slammed her hand on her desk. “That oxygen mask isn’t even strapped on correctly.”
But the internet didn’t care. In this country, weaponized forgiveness is constantly used as a chain around the victim’s neck. The comment section became a war zone, attacking me for being “vindictive” and “heartless.”
The digital storm came harder the next morning. Anonymous gossip accounts suddenly dropped a massive photo dump. Pictures of me in college at a frat party, and paparazzi-style photos of me having coffee with a male client.
The headlines were vile: EXPOSED: The Real Face of the 60-Dish Wife. Where Did Her Luxury Bags Come From?
They implied I was promiscuous, claimed my designer bag was bought by a “sugar daddy,” and spread a rumor that my infertility wasn’t from medical coercion, but from a reckless college lifestyle.
I was shaking with so much rage I could barely breathe. Some of those photos were buried in an old, password-protected external hard drive in my home office. Only Vance had access. He was leveraging my privacy to manipulate the internet.
My mother called, sobbing that reporters were outside their house. Then, my HR department called to place me on “indefinite unpaid leave” due to the negative PR.
Vance sent a text: “Drop the charges, say the audio was edited, and all this disappears. A divorced woman with a ruined reputation is nothing without me.”
It was extortion.
Darcy poured me a glass of water. “This isn’t random internet hate, Sloan. This is a coordinated smear campaign using a bot farm. Vance doesn’t have the brains for this. There is a professional crisis firm behind him.”
I remembered the $300,000 payout Eleanor was hoarding from a land sale. “They went all in to destroy me.”
We met Rowan and her cyber-security consultant, Silas, at a discreet coffee shop. Silas’s fingers flew across his laptop, tracing the IP addresses of the bot accounts.
“Got them,” Silas pointed to a node. “The login IPs over the last twenty-four hours all ping back to a commercial building in the Loop. Specifically, an office suite on LaSalle Street.”
Darcy’s face drained of color, replaced by a dark grin. “LaSalle Street. That’s the exact floor of Sterling & Associates law firm and a boutique PR consultancy attached to it.”
Sterling was a shark—one of the most hated, ruthless defense attorneys in Chicago. His signature move was using a shadow PR firm to run character assassinations on his clients’ spouses, forcing them to settle for pennies out of sheer humiliation.
“We need hard financial proof that kills them in one strike,” I said, my eyes glinting like ice. “Darcy, draft a cease and desist. I am going to respond publicly.”
At 3 PM, I posted a single, lethal statement across my accounts, attaching photos of the stamped FBI Cyber Crime complaint and police reports.
“The collapse of a marriage is not a shield for federal crimes. To the cowards hiding behind screens, using money to manipulate public opinion: I will not compromise. I will not back down. See you in court.”
The public opinion instantly fractured. But to truly bury them, I needed to prove Vance paid Sterling’s shadow firm.
Sitting in Darcy’s office, I pulled up Vance’s old burner email account. He was stupidly arrogant; I guessed his password on the second try. My eyes scanned the bank statements.
“Darcy, look at this.” My voice trembled with adrenaline. “Three days ago, a deposit hit this account. Three hundred thousand dollars from Eleanor. And on that exact same afternoon, Vance wired two hundred thousand to an LLC named Nova Digital Communications Group.”
Darcy sprinted to her desk and logged into the state registry. “The shadow director of this LLC is a man named Sterling Vance. It’s Sterling’s middle name. He uses a shell company to bypass ethics rules. The money didn’t go to a random PR agency—it went straight into his own lawyer’s pocket!”
We had uncovered a highly organized, filthy syndicate. Sterling brought criminal warfare into a civil divorce.
It was time to use the criminal justice system to throw them in a cage.
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