All Chapters of Breaking The Spotlight: Chapter 161 - Chapter 170

Morning arrived like an alarm clock, brash, unavoidable, and loud enough to bruise. For an hour the penthouse existed as a theater of screens: scrolling headlines, morning shows replaying the dashcam footage, social feeds piling on takes and punditry. The world wanted a narrative, and the world was ravenous.Adrian watched it all with the cold attention of a man assessing a floor plan for an assault. He didn't flinch at the noise; he catalogued it. Which outlets leaned sensational, which broadcasters smelled blood and circled, which columnists were already angling for the kind of scoops that paid for retreats. He’d expected the backlash, he’d built contingency into contingency, but expectation did not dull the ache at the sight of her name smeared across a dozen banners. Luna sprawled on the couch in his hoodie, eyes red, fingers curled into the fabric as if it were a lifeline. For once, the warrior looked like she needed a shield.“Turn it off,” she said without looking up, voice dry

The servers hummed like a heartbeat beneath the penthouse floor. The city outside was still drenched in night, lights bleeding into the black sky like a restless pulse. Elias sat at the central terminal, sleeves rolled up, fingers dancing across encrypted layers of data. Beside him, Damien’s expression was carved in steel, calm, focused, but with an edge that warned he’d been here before.Adrian stood at the head of the room, the weight of command stitched into his posture. He wasn’t pacing, but the tension in his jaw told a different story. Every second that passed meant the attacker was still out there, watching, calculating, waiting to strike again.“This isn’t amateur work,” Elias muttered, voice clipped. He zoomed in on a flickering strand of encrypted traffic moving through offshore servers. “He’s masking his origin behind military-grade rerouting. It’s clean. Too clean.”Damien leaned forward, eyes narrowing as he scanned the data streams. “I’ve seen this before. Not exactly th

The morning after the rooftop incident, the city felt hollow. Luna woke to the soft hum of Adrian’s security system running through the apartment. Every sensor, every motion detector, every blind corner she had walked past unthinking yesterday now carried a shadow, but today, the fear was mingled with something else, a sharp, almost intoxicating awareness that the game had changed.Adrian was already at the console, sleeves rolled up, his fingers moving over the tablet with the precision of a master strategist. He didn’t look up when she entered the room, but she felt the weight of his gaze in every corner of the space.“You slept?” he asked without turning.“Fitfully,” she admitted, brushing a strand of hair from her face. “I keep replaying everything. Last night.”He didn’t answer immediately. Instead, he swiped across the tablet, bringing up multiple heat maps, network pings, and digital traces. “He left something,” Adrian said finally, voice low, clipped. “Not just the feather. A

The audio hit the internet before dawn. A grainy, muffled clip, the kind that sounded stolen, not shared. At first, it was just noise: heavy breathing, the distant hum of studio monitors, and a voice breaking under the weight of exhaustion. Then came Luna’s words, desperate and cracked.“I can’t do this anymore… I’m drowning in my own name…”By the time Adrian woke, the clip had already gone viral.Headlines screamed across every platform:Luna Breakdown?Pop Icon’s Mental Health Crisis ExposedLeaked Audio Raises Questions About Star’s StabilityThe vultures didn’t even wait for confirmation. They just circled.Luna sat on the edge of the bed, the phone clutched in her hands, replaying the sound she didn’t remember giving anyone permission to hear. Each replay chipped away at the fragile calm she’d built over the last few weeks.“That was years ago,” she whispered, “I was twenty-four, overworked, terrified. He...”“Vega recorded it,” Adrian finished quietly, already standing, already

The next morning began with a heavy silence, the kind that settles after a global storm, but silence, Luna had learned, was never empty, it hummed with anticipation, waiting for the next hit.Sinclair Tower’s top floor became a war room. Every wall screen flickered with feeds, news anchors dissecting Vega’s video, social platforms boiling over with split opinions, and headlines that screamed “The War of Truths.”Adrian stood at the center of it all, sleeves rolled up, his expression carved from focus. “Every second that video stays viral, Vega controls the tone,” he said. “We need to fracture the narrative before it calcifies.”Celeste’s holographic feed projected from one of the monitors, sleek and composed even across a thousand miles. “Agreed. The public loves redemption stories, but they love exposure more. If Vega wants to play the wounded genius, we show the receipts. Every manipulation, every coercion, every NDA he buried.”Damien leaned against the console. “My team traced som