Chapter 197 The Last Copy
“Yes, yes, right there,” Veronica breathed, eyes glazed as she stared at the night sky through the window. Her lips bit down hard. “Don’t move—yesss.” She smiled, then let out a long sigh of relief.
She straightened and began smoothing her skirt, turning to the man behind her with a practiced smile.
His smirk deepened. “I like a woman who knows what she wants,” he murmured, closing the distance. She took a small step back but kept the smile in place.
“Of course.” She ran a hand through her hair. The man opened his mouth, about to say something, when there was a knock at the door.
Veronica frowned and moved toward it. “Are you expecting someone?” the man asked.
She paused, then pulled the door open. Standing on the doorstep was someone she never expected to see.
“Well, well, well…”
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“I will be fine,” Veronica told Martin, who watched her nervously as Knight and a few of his men filled her living room.
“Are you sure?” he asked again. Veronica exhaled, irritation flickering across her face even though she knew he meant well.
“Yes. He looks like a demon, but don’t let that fool you,” she chuckled, glancing at Knight—though inside she knew the line was a lie.
Martin nodded and left. The click of the door made Veronica’s heart slam against her ribs. She turned—and nearly jumped when Knight stood right in front of her.
“Geez, don’t you know what personal space is?” she muttered, sliding away.
“If you don’t want me to put a bullet in your skull, tell me who has the original copy of that video,” he said, voice eerily calm. Veronica would have laughed if she thought he was bluffing. She knew him too well.
She folded herself onto the couch, crossing her legs. “You forced me out of the country because of your little wifey, and now I’m back and you want to play the blaming game?” Her tone was sharp. “If you’re not going to sit and talk like a normal person, you can walk out. I don’t have time for this.”
Knight said nothing for a long, tight moment. Then he crossed the room and sat. Veronica exhaled.
“Now tell me what’s going on. What video?” she challenged.
“The video you made of my wife.” His voice tightened. At the words, Veronica felt a flicker of something—guilt, maybe, or the memory of what she’d done to Genesis. Jealousy had clouded her judgment then; she regretted it now, not because she’d grown kinder, but because it had taken her best friend away.
She rubbed her fingers along the couch arm. “What about it? I thought you destroyed every last video.”
“I thought I did,” Knight said, fixing her with a stare. Veronica offered a humorless laugh.
“You think I took a copy? You don’t even remember what happened clearly. You told your brute”—she jerked her chin at Damon—“to tie me to a chair. When exactly did I have time to snatch one of the drives?”
Knight’s jaw tightened. “All of them were destroyed. Every single one. I made sure of it.” He leaned in, eyes narrowing. “But now… one video of Genesis is on the dark web.”
Veronica froze. The words hit like a blow. For a heartbeat she thought she’d misheard, then saw the storm in his eyes and the lie collapsed. Her smirk faltered.
“That’s not possible,” she whispered, shaking her head. Her breath came shallow. “No… you—” She cut off, then forced out, “Show me.”
Without a word, Knight flicked two fingers toward Damon. The man stepped forward, pulling out a separate phone from inside his jacket. It was older, scuffed, the kind of device meant for things no normal phone should ever touch. He tapped quickly, his face impassive, and then turned the screen so Veronica could see.
The page that loaded looked like a ruined mirror of a normal streaming site — black background, jagged grids of thumbnails, crude neon text, and counters with obscene view numbers. No friendly UI, no advertisers, just tags and chatter in broken, hateful comments. It smelled of something rotten: exploitation, anonymity, and money changing hands in corners where law didn’t reach.
Damon’s jaw was tight. He scrolled slowly, pulling a clip into a contained, read-only viewer. Knight didn’t look away.
The thumbnail made Veronica’s stomach turn before the player started: a blurred, half-covered genesis in a chair, crying and shaking, water and light catching on her skin. The sound was muted at first; their was overlaid subtitles for privacy, but there was no question what it was — it was the same scene like that day , the same chair, the same set of cruel hands at work. The clip was short, hit the dark web’s algorithm, and already had thousands — tens of thousands — of views and a stream of disgusting, predatory comments.
Knight’s hands went white on the armrest. “Goddamn it.”
Damon zoomed in on the uploader metadata the tech could pull — not a real name, just an account handle. The handle was scrambled, the site using throwaway IDs and proxy tags: Missio_93___AM. The tech tried to trace the origin but the post had been routed through multiple nodes and scrubbed.
“We tried chasing this uploader,” Damon said. “They used bounce relays, throwaway wallets. Whoever posted it made it purposefully hard to trace.”
Veronica, who had been watching with a face that had finally lost its practiced bravado, leaned forward, eyes narrowing at the screen. She read the handle out loud, fingers worrying the hem of her skirt. “Missio… missio — that rings a bell.” She swallowed. “Wait. The suffix — AM.”
Damon scrolled, bringing up a tiny corner of the uploader’s comment history: a handful of short, crude messages, a posting time, a payment hash. Nothing useful. “Nothing matches. The uploader’s scrubbed the trail.”
Veronica’s face went still — the motion of thought quick, precise. “No,” she said slowly. “Listen.” She turned to Knight. “The cameraman — the one who had the personal camera that day. He’d written a tag on the side of the device. I remember because I laughed at it: he’d scrawled his name with a sticker. Miss- something.”
Knight snapped his head toward her. “You were going to take a copy from him?”
“I was,” Veronica admitted, the confession small and brittle. “The hired rig on the stand had glitched. He used his own personal camera as a backup to capture one angle. I planned to get it from him later — before you came.” She swallowed hard. “The half-tag on the uploader — ‘Missio’ — that matches how he labeled his gear.”
Damon’s voice dropped. “So the uploader could be the cameraman, or someone using his tag. Or both.”
Damon shook his head. “So if he's missio, and he's not working alone, who is this “AM",
Veronica’s eyes darkened. “Amanda.”
The name landed like a stone.
Knight’s mouth went hard. “Amanda?”
Veronica nodded, slow as a confession. “Amanda was there. Amanda helped me coordinate everything. She’s… my friend. Or was my friend, she knows people. If someone wanted a scapegoat or a partner with access, Amanda fits.” Her fingers moved in a tiny, practised gesture — the old habit of orchestrating details — but her expression was raw now, edged with fear.
Leonardo rubbed his face. “If the cameraman stashed a clip and handed it to Amanda, or she grabbed it, that explains how a single video survived the purge. It also explains how it leaked to the kind of buyers who traffic in this garbage.”
Knight’s eyes were ice. He let the silence sit between them like a thing that could be sharpened. “Find them,” he said, voice small and lethal. “Quietly. Amanda first. Then the cameraman.”
Damon was already moving, fingers on an earpiece. “On it.”
Veronica folded her hands, suddenly small and animalistic with guilt. “I would have gotten the footage. I meant to get it. I didn’t foresee..” She stopped, and the rest was a hollow apology.
Knight’s head turned. “They won’t live to market another thing.”