Chapter 13 - Mirrors and Echoes
Back inside the empty, devastated ballroom, the chandeliers hummed softly, casting harsh light over scattered champagne glasses, crushed flowers, and a discarded wedding veil lying like a dead ghost on the white dance floor.
Clara sat alone at the edge of the dais, her heavy silk bridal gown pooling around her like melted wax. Her phone buzzed relentlessly in her lap—notifications from gossip columns, panicked texts from board members, and angry voice messages from her father canceling their financial support. The immaculate life she had engineered had evaporated in less than an hour, leaving her with nothing but her own reflection in a broken mirror.
She picked up a discarded crystal glass, turning it over in her manicured hand. She had spent her entire life believing that love, family, and status were commodities to be traded on an open market—that if you wore the right dress, smiled the right smile, and buried the right secrets, you could buy immunity from the messy, bleeding reality of human failure.
And yet, looking across the empty room, she realized the ultimate truth of the night: the boy with the microphone had burned down a multi-million-dollar empire simply by telling the truth out loud.
A sharp footstep echoed near the entrance. Clara didn't even bother to look up, assuming it was just another hotel staff member coming to sweep up the glass. But the shadow that fell across her wasn't wearing an apron or a suit.
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Maya, Sarah’s former best friend and confidante—the very person Sarah had spoken to on that fateful kitchen phone call—stepped into the light of the dais, a cold, knowing smile playing across her lips.
""Pretty impressive show, isn't it?"" Maya murmured, crossing her arms over her sleek black dress. ""Turns out, you can buy a lot of things in this city, Clara. But you can never buy enough duct tape to keep a kid from telling the truth.""
