The video titled Starkly: Mara- Final Transmission hadn't come from Mara.
It had been left behind like a ghost in the machine, a slim, polished data drive tucked into Harry Lennox's study drawer, nestled under dull estate paperwork. No password, no markings. Just waiting. A quiet signal from the people who had taken her, and who knew exactly where to plant the seed of their narrative.
He was rewatching the video again, but in a calmer state of mind.
The screen lit up, revealing Mara, seated and composed, clear-eyed but unnervingly artificial. The lighting was too neutral, the seams unduly perfect; Harry recognized it as a constructed image, likely pieced together from countless recordings. Yet her voice cut straight through him.
"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 firmer. Urgency shimmered beneath its calm exterior. "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 slightly toward the lens, her eyes burning with conviction. "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."
Her gaze locked onto the viewer with disarming intensity. Harry felt, impossibly, as though she was speaking directly to him, even now.
"They're watching," she whispered, and for the first time, the steady voice betrayed a note of exhaustion. "They're always watching. Even now."
Then, with a final, weary sigh, she reached forward, and the screen blinked to black.
Harry sat frozen, the silence after the recording louder than any scream. He knew, deep down, what this was. This wasn't a farewell. It was a planted illusion. Not for closure, but control. It was a story left deliberately for him to find, to feed to his children, to keep them passive. To keep them out.
What terrified him most wasn't how real the AI-stitching felt. It was how much he wanted to believe it. How tempting it was to accept the lie. Because facing the truth, that Mara had vanished, not by choice, and that the people who'd done it had left this as a calling card, meant accepting that the war he thought he'd kept from his children had already arrived.
What unsettled Harry most wasn't how convincing the AI-stitching felt, but how deeply he wanted to believe it, how seductively simple it was to accept the lie. Facing the truth that Mara had vanished by deliberate hands, and that the White Angels had left this false comfort, meant admitting the quiet war he'd tried to keep beyond the estate's walls had already breached them.
Still, he rationalized, this was mercy. A controlled sorrow. If the children knew the full extent of what had happened, knew what she'd uncovered, what she might have become, it would destroy them. Maisie especially. And perhaps, in some hushed, selfish corner of his heart, Harry feared that confronting it would unmake him, too.
Better to curate the silence, smoothing over her absence like a stone slipping beneath the surface, ensuring no one looked too closely.
But darkness, once invited, never stays polite.
In the weeks that followed, the carefully crafted illusion began to unravel. Though each child outwardly accepted the sanitized narrative Harry provided, subtle tensions lingered beneath the surface, unshakable unease, a silent dissonance that whispered of something broken, something deeply wrong within both themselves and the house.
Maisie tried to dismiss it. Told herself it was just the stress. That it was normal to miss someone, even if the memory of their departure had been smoothed over like water erasing chalk. But deep down, she sensed that grief had a shape, and that this one didn't belong to absence; it belonged to something stolen.
The house, for all its grandeur, had become a mausoleum for truths unspoken. Despite Harry's efforts, the illusion couldn't hold. The memories might have been rewritten, but something was stirring back to life.