Harry's Private Office
The video file possessed simplicity, a deceptive veneer of normality that belied the troubling truth within. A hidden camera, small and insidious, had captured a mundane moment in Mara's study.
There she was, on the screen, an eerie echo of her former self, seated at her imposing desk, the familiar tapestry of leather-bound books and gleaming awards looming behind her like silent witnesses. It was a self-recording, a message from the precipice, made sometime before the night she vanished without a trace.
The years seemed to have prematurely aged her; deep furrows, like cracks in porcelain, framed her eyes, hinting at sleepless nights haunted by unseen anxieties. Yet, her spine was ramrod straight, her expression fixed in a mask of grim determination.
When she began to speak, her voice, though steady, resonated with an unnerving calm, betraying none of the panic one might expect from a woman teetering on the edge. Instead, it carried a conviction that felt as if the very air in the room had turned cold.
"If you're watching this…" she began, her gaze fixed directly into the lens, meeting the unseen eyes of her future audience. "Then something's happened. Something I hoped to prevent, or at least postpone." A pause, a deep breath. "Maybe I've finally uncovered too much. Maybe I've pushed the wrong people too far. But listen to me, Harry, Maisie, Leo, Dash... listen closely." Her voice grew a little stronger, urgency threading through the calm.
"This world, you think you live in? It is lying to you. Everything you've been told, everything you see, especially about the Alucards, the White Angels… none of it is what it seems. It's a carefully constructed facade designed to blind you." She leaned forward slightly, her eyes intense. "Trust your instincts. Trust the things that feel wrong. And if I vanish from your lives. Know this. Know with absolute certainty that I didn't go willingly. I wasn't taken for money or power games, you understand."
She looked directly into the camera, her gaze piercing, sharing a silent understanding with whoever would find this message.
"They're watching," she whispered, the steady voice finally betraying a hint of weariness, of constant, unseen pressure. "They're always watching. Even now."
Then, with a sigh that seemed to carry the weight of the world, she reached out and ended the transmission.
Harry's eyes remained fixed on the screen, his wife's face suspended in pale stillness, serene, almost graceful, yet beneath that calm lay the raw edge of betrayal. The truth she had confessed wasn't just dangerous, it was fatal. It didn't make sense. She knew better. She knew who they were and who he was. And still, she had chosen defiance.
A tremor coursed through his fingers as he reached for the keyboard. The room around him felt colder now, smaller, warped by the gravity of what this meant. Mara hadn't just wandered into danger.
She had picked a side.
And it wasn't his.
Each keystroke echoed like a sentence passed: "Mara – Final Transmission." The words branded the screen, stark and final. He sat back, throat dry, pulse pounding. If the White Angels hadn't taken her, someone else would have.
The click echoed in the suffocating silence, a grim punctuation mark at the end of his wife's desperate life. With that single action, he entombed her last words, her final, frantic warning, within the tangled depths of an encrypted drive.
He wasn't just sealing a message; he was burying a fragment of her soul, a voice reaching out from the edge of madness, or perhaps, from terrifying clarity.
Each layer of encryption felt like a shovel of earth cast onto her grave. Not for the world's protection, but for his. For theirs. Because he knew now.
This hadn't been paranoia. It had been precise.
The signs were unmistakable, familiar in a way that chilled him to the marrow. The White Angels had done this. Or someone even deeper within their hierarchy, someone capable of turning her into a loose end.
And as the final keypress confirmed the lock, a prickling unease burrowed beneath his skin. The game had changed. He felt it in his bones. He was no longer just a figurehead, merely complicit by silence.
For years, he felt like he had been in control. Now, he was outmaneuvered, a once-powerful piece trapped in someone else's chess game.