Her Empire of Lies

Chapter 1

Lia

“Just try to look like you belong here.” Serena’s voice is a whisper of honey and poison next to my ear. Her perfume, a custom blend I helped her design the marketing campaign for, clings to the air between us. “Smile. You look terrified.”

I force my lips into a shape that might pass for a smile. “I’m fine.”

“Are you? That dress is a choice.” She smoothes the front of her own gown, a column of glittering silver that probably costs more than my family’s car. We’re backstage at the Blackwood Academy Gala, the air thick with the smell of hairspray and money. On the other side of the curtain, hundreds of the country’s richest kids and their parents wait for the main event. For her.

“The theme was starlight,” I say, my voice flat. My navy blue dress feels like a cheap costume next to her supernova.

“Right. Well.” She gives me a pitying look. The same one she gave me when she told me my ideas were good, but my face wasn't ‘brand friendly’. The same look from the day I walked away from her, from the empire I built in the shadows for her. “I just want you to be comfortable. I know this isn't your world.”

My world was a sixteen inch monitor and editing software, turning her clumsy footage into viral gold. My world was a whiteboard covered in content pillars and engagement strategies. I handed her a career, and she talks to me like I’m a charity case.

My phone buzzes in my small clutch. I know without looking it’s my brother, Noah. His message will be something like ‘She’s about to go on! Is she nervous?’ He has no idea. He thinks Serena Vale is a self made goddess of inspiration. He has her poster on his wall.

“Noah sent me the most adorable message this morning,” she continues, her eyes scanning the crowd through a gap in the curtain. “He asked if I could give you a shout out on stage. Sweet, but obviously, no.”

My jaw tightens. “Don’t talk about my brother.”

“Why not? I love my fans.” She finally turns to look at me, her smile perfect, practiced, and utterly fake. A smile I storyboarded for her ‘relatable and real’ phase. “I’m his hero, Lia. You should be happy about that. It’s the closest he’ll ever get to this.”

She gestures vaguely at the shimmering ballroom, the clinking glasses, the soft murmur of generational wealth. Her words are a slap. She knows my scholarship status is a constant, heavy weight. She knows I stay at Blackwood for Noah, for the future it could give him.

“You’re on in five, Ms. Vale,” a stagehand says, his eyes lingering on her.

“Thank you,” she says, her voice instantly shifting, becoming warmer, more gracious. The mask slides perfectly into place. She turns back to me for one last word. “Remember what we talked about. No credit, no drama. You’re just a friend from school. Got it?”

“I remember the agreement I made,” I say through my teeth. The agreement to remain a ghost. The price of my freedom from her.

She pats my arm, a gesture that looks supportive to anyone watching but feels like a brand on my skin. “Good. Now go find a seat in the back. The lighting is more flattering there.”

She sweeps through the curtain to a roar of applause. I watch her on the monitors backstage, my creation taking her throne. She moves with a confidence I programmed, hitting the marks I taught her, her speech flowing with a cadence I wrote. It’s about authenticity, of course. It’s always about authenticity.

I slip out into the ballroom, the noise and light a physical assault. I find an empty chair against the far wall, just as she suggested. The room is a sea of adoring faces, all pointed at the stage, at her. Large screens on either side of the stage show the livestream, the chat scrolling at an impossible speed. Hearts and praise. She is a queen addressing her court.

My phone buzzes again. It is Noah. ‘She looks like an angel.’

I feel a familiar sickness in my stomach. I type back, ‘She does.’

“…and so, as we look to the future, it’s about lifting each other up,” Serena is saying, her voice thick with fake emotion. “It’s about telling the truth. Your truth.”

Behind her, a massive projector screen displays her logo. It’s supposed to transition into a highlight reel of her charity work. The video I stayed up all night editing last year.

The screen flickers.

It goes black for a second. The room murmurs. Serena glances behind her, a tiny crack in her perfect composure.

Then, a new image appears. It’s grainy, shaky. Security camera footage. A familiar stairwell from the west wing of the school. There are two figures.

My blood runs cold.

It’s me. A girl with my hair, my build, wearing my jacket. And there’s Serena. The video has no sound, but the action is brutally clear. My digital self grabs Serena’s arm. They argue. Then, my image shoves her. Hard.

Serena’s likeness tumbles backward, disappearing down the stairs in a flurry of limbs. The video loops. The shove. The fall. Again. And again.

A single, collective gasp sucks the air out of the ballroom. Phones are already up, recording the screen. On the livestream chat, the hearts vanish, replaced by question marks, then accusations. The text flies by, a torrent of hate.

‘OMG LIA SMITH??’

‘THE SCHOLARSHIP GIRL DID THAT??’

‘EXPEL HER. NOW.’

‘#SerenaValeAssault’

On stage, Serena turns back to the audience. Her face, projected twenty feet high, is a perfect mask of shock and horror. A single tear traces a flawless path down her cheek. The crowd’s gasp turns into a roar of sympathy and anger. The cameras zoom in on her trembling lip.

I can’t breathe. My hands are numb. Every head in the room swivels, a hundred pairs of eyes finding me in my dark corner. They look at me with disgust, with hatred. I am a monster in a navy blue dress.

I am completely and utterly alone, frozen in the spotlight of a lie I never told, destroyed by the very tools I taught her how to use.

Chapter 2

Lia

A hand clamps down on my arm. It’s firm, impersonal. A campus security guard I’ve never seen before.

“This way, Ms. Smith.”

The walk to the dean’s office is a blur of gaping mouths and accusing eyes. The noise of the gala fades behind me, replaced by the ringing in my own ears. Each step feels like I’m walking through water. My navy dress suddenly feels cheap and conspicuous.

The dean’s office is wood paneled and smells like old books and lemon polish. It feels airless. Dean Miller sits behind a desk large enough to land a helicopter on. His face is a tight mask of professional concern, which is somehow worse than anger.

Serena is already here. She’s curled up in a leather armchair, a gray cashmere blanket draped over her shoulders. She looks small and fragile. She looks like a perfect, broken doll.

“Lia. Please, sit.” The dean gestures to the chair opposite Serena. It feels like an interrogation room.

Serena flinches when I move, a tiny, theatrical jerk. Her eyes, red rimmed and glistening, find mine. There’s nothing but triumph in them.

“It’s fake,” I say. My voice comes out as a croak. I clear my throat and try again. “The video. It’s been edited.”

Dean Miller steeples his fingers. “Our IT department verified the footage. It’s from the west wing security server, Lia. The timestamp is legitimate.”

“But it’s not,” I insist, leaning forward. “If you look closely, the pixels around my arm blur for a fraction of a second right before I… before the shove. It’s a splice. A very good one, but it’s there.” I know it is. I taught her the software that could do it.

Serena lets out a soft, watery sob. “I don’t understand why she’s still lying.” Her voice is a whisper, designed for maximum pity. “I thought we were friends. I knew she was jealous, but I never thought… Dean, I’m scared to be at school with her.”

The script is flawless. Every word is a knife.

“Jealous?” The word tastes like acid. “I built your entire brand, Serena. The strategy, the editing, the… everything. You’d be nothing without me.”

Dean Miller holds up a hand. “That’s enough. This is not the time for petty arguments about social media.”

“This isn’t petty. This is the motive,” I plead, looking at his impassive face. “She cut me out, and now she’s trying to destroy me.”

“What I see,” the dean says, his voice losing its patient edge, “is a student who feels threatened and a video that supports her claim. In light of the public nature of this incident, I have no choice. You’re suspended, Ms. Smith. Effective immediately, pending a full disciplinary hearing.”

The words hang in the air. Suspended. Hearing. It’s real.

“You can’t,” I whisper.

“Your parents have been called. They’re on their way.” He stands up. A clear dismissal. “I suggest you go home and think about your actions.”

Serena sniffles into her cashmere blanket, a perfect final punctuation to my execution.

The ride home is silent. My parents don’t ask questions. My mom just keeps gripping my hand, her knuckles white. My dad’s jaw is a hard line as he stares at the road.

When we get inside, the quiet of our small house feels suffocating. My phone buzzes nonstop on the kitchen counter, a hornet’s nest of notifications I can’t bring myself to look at.

I walk down the hall to my brother’s room. The door is slightly ajar, the only light inside the cold blue glow of his phone screen.

“Noah?”

He doesn’t look up. “They sent me the link at school. Like, fifty times.”

My heart sinks. I walk in and sit on the edge of his bed. He finally turns the phone towards me. It’s a screenshot from the livestream chat. The words are a venomous swarm.

Psycho. Monster. Expel the charity case. I hope she rots.

“Noah, I…” My voice breaks. I don’t know what to say. I’m sorry I ruined everything? I’m sorry your hero is a liar?

He finally lifts his head, and his eyes, so much like my own, are steady. He looks past me, toward the poster of Serena smiling benevolently from his wall.

“She tripped, didn’t she?” he asks, his voice quiet but certain. “On her dress. And you reached out to try and catch her.”

The air leaves my lungs in a rush. I can only stare at him, stunned into silence.

“How did you know that?”

“Because you’re you,” he says, as if it’s the simplest thing in the world. He looks back at his phone, his expression hardening with a resolve that looks so much older than his twelve years.

“What are you doing?” I ask.

He turns the screen back to me. He’s in the comments section of the gala video, which already has over a million views.

His little profile icon is buried in a sea of hate, but his words are there. A tiny shield against a hurricane.

‘You’re all wrong. My sister would never do that. YOU DON’T KNOW HER.’

My vision blurs. He looks up at me again, his fierce loyalty a beacon in the crushing darkness.

“I know you wouldn’t do that,” he says again, his voice firm. “And we’re not going to let her get away with it.”

He says ‘we’.

And just like that, a tiny, hot spark of anger burns through the shock and despair. He’s right. Serena may have written this scene, but I’ll be damned if I let her write the ending.

Chapter 3

Adrian

The sound of the gala is still in my ears. The collective gasp. The roar of the online mob. A perfectly executed character assassination, live for the whole world to see.

From my spot on the stage, just a few feet behind Serena, I had a front row seat. I watched her face crumble on cue. I watched the room turn on Lia Smith in an instant.

They all saw an assault. I saw a performance.

I saw what an online smear campaign did to my sister. The whispers that became shouts. The screen that became a prison. It broke something in her that never quite healed. I will not watch it happen again.

Back in my room, the silence is a welcome relief. My monitor glows, the only light source. As student council president, I have administrative access to the school's cloud server. It takes me less than thirty seconds to locate the master file of the gala livestream.

I download the 4K source file. Not the compressed version everyone is sharing, but the raw data.

I open my editing suite, the same one I used to make campaign videos. I drop the file onto the timeline. I find the exact moment the screen flickered.

My fingers move across the keyboard. I isolate the clip. The grainy security footage of the stairwell. I play it at full speed. Lia shoves Serena. Serena falls.

I play it again at half speed. The movements look jerky, unnatural.

I play it frame by frame.

Forward. Back. Forward. Back.

There.

The flicker I saw in the ballroom. A single frame where the timestamp in the corner of the footage jumps. It skips a millisecond. It goes from 14:32:05.12 to 14:32:05.14. It skips .13 entirely.

It’s almost perfect. An edit so clean you would never see it unless you were looking for it. Unless you knew what a lie looked like up close.

“Got you,” I whisper to the empty room.

I zoom in, pushing the magnification to its limit. The pixels warp and distort, but I see it. Right where Lia’s hand meets Serena’s arm, there’s a microscopic smear of digital artifacting. A ghost in the machine.

It’s a splice. It’s definitive proof of manipulation.

My jaw tightens. Knowing the video is fake is one thing. Understanding why is another.

Jealousy is the easy answer. The one Serena is selling. A poor scholarship kid lashing out at the golden girl. It’s a story that writes itself.

It’s too neat. Too simple.

I minimize the video file and open a new browser tab. I don’t search for Serena’s latest posts. I search for her first ones. The videos from two years ago, before the major brand deals and the talk show appearances.

Her first viral hit was a campaign for a local animal shelter. It was surprisingly sophisticated for a sixteen year old. The editing was crisp, the graphics were clean, the rollout strategy was flawless.

It was too good.

I leave her public profile and go back to the school server. I navigate to the archives for student project submissions. I type in ‘Serena Vale’ and the year of the campaign.

A single project file appears. ‘Blackwood Paws Charity Drive Proposal.’

I open the document. It’s a detailed presentation, outlining the entire campaign. The target demographics, the content schedule, the technical specs. I scroll through pages of data, all under Serena’s name.

But digital files have memories. They have metadata.

I dig into the file’s properties, looking at the revision history. Most of it is logged under Serena’s student ID.

Except for one entry. An early draft of the technical execution plan.

It was uploaded from an external account. An account that was scrubbed almost immediately after. But the name is still there, buried in a single line of code in the document’s original notes.

A credit, so small it’s almost invisible.

‘Initial creative and technical framework by L.S. Creative.’

L.S.

Lia Smith.

Everything clicks into place. It’s not a story about jealousy. It’s a story about a ghostwriter stepping out of the shadows.

Lia didn’t attack Serena. She created her.

Serena didn’t just frame a rival. She tried to bury her architect.

I lean back in my chair, the screen reflecting in my eyes. The mob can have their villain. I’ve just found the truth.

And I know exactly who I need to talk to.