The Wife Who Returned
His hands were steady, but the tension in his shoulders betrayed him.
Seraphine knelt opposite him, knees brushing the edge of the rug. She didn’t sit. She couldn’t. Not when every cell in her body screamed to close the distance she had created.
Lucien’s voice stayed quiet, controlled, but the undercurrent of exhaustion bled through. “The photo was manipulated. Deepfake markers are everywhere once you know where to look. Pixel inconsistencies at the jawline, unnatural shadow gradients on the woman’s cheek, timestamp mismatches in the metadata. The woman herself is a stock image. Face-swapped. Professional work, but not perfect. Someone with great skills and a very specific motive did this.”