Hammer's voice exploded through the feed. "What the hell! They're switching labels live on camera? Folks, that's illegal. I've already called the police. Everyone, start recording."

Aunt Sandra lunged at her phone like a woman possessed and smashed it face down on the floor. "Kill it! Shut it down now!"

The stream went black to the sound of screaming and chaos.

Not long after, I got the notification.

Vivid Stream Media's channel had been permanently banned by the platform for fraudulent operations, selling counterfeit goods, and causing serious public harm. Wade's new account went down with it as it was flagged under the same verified identity.

Aunt Sandra stared at the wreckage of everything she'd spent years building, wiped out in a single night.

After midnight, Wade texted me.

[Lexi, happy now? You pushed us to the edge. My mom's in the hospital. Acute heart attack, the doctor said. Women like you always get what's coming to them.]

I didn't reply.

First thing the next morning, Wade called. His voice was cracked, theatrical, and calculating all at once.

"Please, I'm begging you. Help my mom. The hospital needs surgery fees upfront—$100,000. I lost all $400,000 gambling on sports. If she doesn't get the surgery, she's going to die. You can't just let that happen."

I held the phone and felt nothing. Just a cold, hollow contempt. "You lost it gambling. That's your problem, not mine. Did either of you think about what happened to me when you took my money?"

Wade's voice went unhinged on the other end. "Lexi! Do you have any humanity left in you? That's your aunt. You've got money. Just lend it to us. If you don't, I'll show up at your new office and make sure everyone knows what you are."

I laughed, short and flat. "Go ahead. While you're at it, tell everyone exactly how your mother helped herself to my commission. As for the surgery, you've still got two working hands. Go donate blood."

I hung up and blocked them both.

However, I knew Aunt Sandra. She'd clawed her way up from nothing, and women like her didn't quit.

Sure enough, by that afternoon, she'd launched her counterattack across social media and every local forum she could find. She posted a photo of herself in a hospital bed, oxygen tubes in, the picture of suffering.

The caption: "Driven to this by my own niece. God, are you watching?"

Then the supplier I knew as Craig Donovan, whom Aunt Sandra had bought off, published a lengthy post online.

The title: The Truth Behind Live-Stream Star Lexi Harmon's Rise: How She Really Built Her Numbers.

The post included several blurry screenshots of chat logs, the content explicit—all allegedly discussing exchanges of favors for business deals. There was also a still frame from a surveillance clip, a few seconds long. In it, a woman whose build looked like mine walked into a hotel with an older man, his arm around her.

Craig's post was emphatic.

[Lexi Harmon knows nothing about product sourcing. Every result she ever got came from trading favors with suppliers like me for below-market pricing. Aunt Sandra docked her pay because she discovered Lexi's conduct was damaging the company's reputation.]

It detonated across the internet like a depth charge.

Overnight, the story flipped. From cold-hearted niece to streamer who slept her way to the top. The court of public opinion turned on a dime.

I stared at my phone as the abuse piled up in real time, wave after wave of it, and felt something sink all the way to the bottom.

'Aunt Sandra, you really burned every last principle you had just to destroy me.'

Within half a day, a crowd had gathered outside my new office building. Freelance content creators, rubberneckers, and hired protesters with signs picketing outside the building.

"Lexi Harmon's got no shame! Slept her way up and drove her own aunt to her deathbed!"

"Come look, everyone! The face of a saint and the behavior of a gutter rat!"

My new boss, Owen Chase, called me into his office, his brow tight, his eyes measuring. "Lexi, what exactly is going on?

"This scene outside is doing serious damage to the company's image. The board's position is that you take a leave of absence until the dust settles. If this can't be cleared up, we'll have no choice but to terminate your contract."

I stood across from his desk, jaw locked, forcing myself to stay steady.

"Give me three days." I held his gaze. "If I can't put the people who fabricated this behind bars in three days, I'll resign voluntarily and cover every cent of the penalty fees."

He studied me for a long moment, then nodded. "Three days."

I took a cab straight home. I locked myself in my room and played back Craig's hotel clip frame by frame, over and over.

The build was similar to mine, but if it was a fake, there would be a flaw somewhere. There always was.

I enlarged the footage one frame at a time until I found it—a faint, unnatural distortion along the edge of a mirror in the background.

A classic deepfake artifact.

And the only person with both the technical skills to pull it off and a reason to do Sandra's dirty work was Wade. Wade had studied computer science. He'd always had a taste for that kind of gray-area technical work.

I immediately reached out to a former colleague from Vivid Stream Media's tech department who I'd stayed on good terms with, Derek Mills.

"I need a favor. Can you pull Wade's cloud storage IP login records?"

He hesitated. Then he thought about how Sandra used to grind him down, and his jaw set. "Give me two hours."

In those two hours, the internet reached full boil. Hundreds of comments flooded my personal account.

[Get out of streaming. Go die.]

Mum sat reading them, shaking, tears streaming down her face. "Lexi, how can they do this to you? I'll go after every single one of them myself."

I wrapped my arms around her and rubbed her back. "Mum, don't. The higher they jump right now, the harder they're going to land."

Two hours later, Derek sent me an encrypted archive.

"It's all in there: the original files, the deepfake project files, and the chat logs between Wade and Craig. Craig took $30,000 from Aunt Sandra. Wade handled the fake video. They were going all out to bury you."

I looked at the evidence in my hands.

At eight o'clock that night, I went live across every platform I had. The stream title was: "Let's Settle This Now."