Chapter 47

POV: Isabella

The silence after the deletion was deafening. It wasn't just the absence of the server’s hum; it was a conceptual void. The Medusa architecture—the complex, jagged web of code that had defined my existence, my market value, and my greatest fear—was gone. Ten years of Eleanor’s obsession and millions of Sterling dollars had been reduced to a sequence of zeros. I felt lighter, yet dangerously hollow. I was a blank slate. Or perhaps, I was merely a dead end.

"Thirty seconds," Liam repeated. His voice was the only thing anchoring me to the room.

I looked at him. He stood there in his damp, wrinkled suit, looking like a man who had already watched his house burn down and was simply waiting for the fire to reach his feet. There was no CEO polish left, no guarded corporate mask. I looked back at the monitor. 100%. The progress bar was a steady, mocking green line.

"Thorne!" I shouted, my voice echoing off the reinforced concrete walls.

The heavy door groaned open. Thorne stepped in, his gaze darting between me, Liam, and the glowing screen. He took in the "Purge Complete" notification, and for a second, a look of pure, unadulterated shock crossed his face. "You did it. You actually pulled the plug."

"The feds are in the lobby, and they aren't coming for a chat," I said, grabbing my laptop and shoving it into my bag with trembling hands. "I'm not going to D.C. as a witness or a victim. I'm going as a brand."

"What are you talking about?" Thorne asked, moving to the security monitors. "The DOJ is expecting a cooperator. If you deviate now, they’ll classify you as a flight risk."

I turned to Liam. He was watching me with an intensity that made my skin prickle. "You want to stop Eleanor? You want to save what’s left of the company before she swallows it whole? Then you're going to help me do something very, very stupid."

Liam didn't hesitate. He didn't ask for a risk assessment or a legal opinion. "I'm already doing it," he said.

"Thorne, cancel the D.C. jet," I commanded. My mind was racing, connecting dots at a speed that felt almost preternatural. "Call Sarah. Use the back channel. Tell her I’m doing an exclusive, live-streamed interview tonight. Not with a news agency—they’re too slow. We go through a crisis PR firm with a direct uplink. We’re going to control the 'unstable' narrative before the morning papers even hit the stands."

"Isabella, you're under a federal warrant for asset protection," Thorne reminded me, his voice tight with caution. "If we move now, we're fugitives."

"The warrant is for 'asset recovery,'" I said, slinging my bag over my shoulder. "If I'm on live television, viewed by millions in real-time, they can't recover me without the whole world watching them treat a woman like a piece of seized property. It’s the ultimate protection. Transparency is the only armor I have left."

We moved. It was a blur of motion, shadow, and adrenaline. Liam led us through a service tunnel I didn't even know existed—a Sterling legacy exit built into the foundation during the initial construction, likely for the very purpose of evading the eyes now watching the front gates. The air in the tunnel was damp and smelled of earth, but it led us to a concealed garage a quarter-mile away.

We were in his car and moving toward New York City before the feds even reached the bunker’s main floor.

The car was a cocoon of speed. Liam was driving, his hands steady on the wheel, his eyes fixed on the rain-slicked road ahead. I was in the passenger seat with my laptop open, my fingers flying across the keys as I drafted the PR strategy. I wasn't writing a confession. I was writing a manifesto.

"You're going to reject the victim narrative entirely," I muttered, more to the screen than to him. "I'm not a lab project. I'm not a mistake. I'm a breakthrough. I'm the first successful instance of human-tech integration that actually functions. If they want to call me 'synthetic' to make me sound small, I'll make them wish they were too. I'll make them see their own limitations."

"You're playing with fire, Isabella," Liam said. He didn't look at me, but I could hear the tension in his jaw. "Eleanor doesn't lose gracefully. She’ll find the weak point in the story."

"I'm the one who lit the fire," I replied. "Let her try to put it out."

We reached the PR firm’s studio in a non-descript building in Manhattan at 11:00 PM. The city was a glowing, indifferent grid of light below us, millions of people sleeping or working, completely unaware of the war being waged in a sleek, white-walled room on the 42nd floor. The studio was a vacuum of high-end cameras and blinding LED panels.

"You have five minutes of prep," the PR director said, a harried man with a headset who looked like he hadn't slept in a week. "We’re going live on three major social platforms and a direct satellite feed simultaneously. Isabella, remember: stay calm. Stay precise. If they ask about the Sterling Trust, deflect. Don't mention the funding yet. We need to keep the focus on your personhood."

"I'm going to mention everything," I said, stepping onto the small stage.

I sat in the minimalist chair. A stylist rushed forward to touch up my makeup, masking the dark circles of exhaustion under my eyes. I looked past the lens and saw Liam. He was standing behind the primary camera, his arms crossed, looking like he was holding his breath. For a second, our eyes locked, and I saw the man who had stood in the rain for six hours. I looked away.

"And... we're live in three, two..."

I looked directly into the lens. I didn't use a script. I didn't use the teleprompter. I talked to the world as if I were talking to myself in a mirror. I told them about the bridge. I told them about the 'identity truth' and the moment I realized my memories were interwoven with code. But I didn't cry. I didn't plead for mercy or understanding. I spoke with the cold, measured authority of a woman who had seen the bottom of her own soul and found it wasn't empty.

"They want to call me an asset," I told the millions of viewers whose comments were scrolling too fast to read. "They use words like 'proprietary' and 'unstable' because those are words you use for things you own. If I'm an asset, they can seize me. They can dismantle me. But a woman owns herself. And a Vane? A Vane owns the room she stands in."

I ended the interview with a quiet, devastating smile—the kind of smile Eleanor used right before she closed a deal. "See you at the shareholder meeting on Thursday."

The red light on the camera died. The studio fell into a heavy, ringing silence.

"Well?" I asked, standing up. My legs felt like lead.

The PR director was staring at his tablet, his brow furrowed. "It’s... it’s going viral. Faster than anything I’ve ever seen. But Isabella, it’s not going the way we expected. The sentiment is shifting, but not toward sympathy."

"What do you mean?" I stepped off the stage, my heart beginning to race.

He turned the screen around. It was a clip of the final ten seconds of the interview—the smile. But it wasn't the clean feed from the studio. Someone had intercepted the signal.

"Someone edited the clip in real-time," Thorne said, entering the room with his own device. "They added a biometric overlay. Look."

In the corner of the video, a series of graphs and numbers had been superimposed. My heart rate, my pulse, my neural activity, and my galvanic skin response were all mapped out in glowing blue lines. And they were perfectly, hauntingly flat.

"I didn't have a biometric monitor on," I whispered, a chill creeping up my spine.

"It was a remote scan," Liam said, his voice a low whisper of horror as he stepped closer to the screen. "The studio has high-fidelity sensors for motion capture. Someone hacked the environmental feed. Eleanor. She used the sensors to monitor you while you spoke. She’s showing the world that the 'unstable' narrative was a lie, but she’s proving something a thousand times worse."

I looked at the screen. The numbers were right there, stark and undeniable. 60 BPM. It hadn't moved a single beat, not even when I spoke about the trauma of the bridge or the betrayal of my family. Zero fluctuation. Zero emotional spike.

"She’s proving I'm a machine," I said. My voice sounded foreign to my own ears. "She’s showing them that I don't feel the things I'm saying."

The cliffhanger wasn't the viral clip or the biometric data. It was the pop-up notification that flashed across the bottom of the screen a second later, a real-time market sentiment poll from a major financial news network.

NEW POLL: 74% OF STERLING-VANE SHAREHOLDERS VOTE TO CLASSIFY ISABELLA VANE AS 'EQUIPMENT' SUBJECT TO SEIZURE.

Eleanor hadn't tried to fight my words. She had simply provided the data that rendered them irrelevant. She had won the PR war by giving the world exactly what I had tried to hide: the physiological proof that I was too perfect, too controlled, and too cold to be human.