Chapter Forty – The Thread The weekend was supposed to give Yn space to breathe. It didn’t. By Saturday night, she was still scrolling through the leaked screenshots, looking for anything she’d missed. Her eyes were tired, but her mind wouldn’t stop turning over the details — the cropping, the timestamps, the strange way certain messages had been paired together. Then she saw it. A tiny icon in the corner of one screenshot — barely visible unless you zoomed in. It wasn’t hers. It wasn’t from her phone. It was from Malachi’s. Her stomach dropped. She checked again, comparing the font, the layout, the way the messages were displayed. It was unmistakable. Whoever had leaked her private conversations had access to Malachi’s device — or Malachi himself had been the source. The realization hit like ice. If it wasn’t him, it meant someone close enough to him had done it. But if it was him… then every word he’d thrown at her in the hallway wasn’t just anger. It was cover. She stared at the screen, her pulse pounding. Confronting him would mean stepping back into the fire — into the crowd, the whispers, the cameras. It would mean risking another public scene. But letting it go would mean giving the mastermind more time to twist the knife. Her phone buzzed. A new message. From an unknown number: You’re looking in the right place. Yn’s breath caught. Someone was watching her. And now, whether she liked it or not, Malachi was part of the hunt.
