Page 38 of The Maverick

Vanessa froze. “No. Of course not.”

“There’s a thread on Reddit. Private leak. Not the official ARC. It’s your manuscript, but… the ending is different.”

“Different how?”

Trina hesitated. “You need to see it. It’s—violent. Very personal. And it reads like you wrote it.”

Her blood iced over.

“I’ll email you the screenshots,” Trina said gently. “I’m so sorry.”

The call ended. Vanessa stared at the screen until the message notification popped up. Then she clicked. She stared down at the phone, hands trembling, stomach hollow.

“Vanessa?” Hawke sat up, voice sharp. “What is it?”

She looked at him, barely able to find the words.

“He’s in my head,” she whispered. “And now he’s trying to rewrite me.”

Vanessa stared at the words on her phone screen, bile rising in her throat. She recognized the syntax. The phrasing. Even the cadence. Whoever had written this had studied her—devoured her work, her voice, her patterns. But this wasn’t a fan fiction.

It was a warning.

She lowered the phone slowly, like if she moved too fast it would all be real. Hawke sat across from her, half-dressed, hands braced on his knees. He didn’t ask what was wrong again. He just waited—still, quiet, steady—like he always did when she was teetering on a cliff.

“He rewrote my ending,” she said finally, voice flat.

Hawke’s gaze sharpened. “What do you mean?”

“He took my private draft—the one I haven’t shared with anyone except Trina—and replaced the ending. Then uploaded it as a leak under my name. Same file style. Same formatting. It even has the same digital watermark embedded in my template.” She blinked, fingers tightening around the phone. “Except instead of the heroine walking away… she gets caught. Forced to submit. She loses everything.”

Hawke didn’t move. But she felt the shift in the room like the pressure drop before a storm.

“I think…” She swallowed, forcing the words out. “I think he’s not just watching me. I think he thinks he’s part of the story. Like I wrote him in, and now he’s rewriting the ending to match his fantasy.”

She stood, pulling on his shirt. She couldn’t sit still anymore. Couldn’t breathe in that bed with the fictional scene echoing in her head. “It’s not just a message anymore. It’s a script. And I’m supposed to follow it.”

Hawke was already on his feet. “Forward me the file. Now.”

She did, fingers fumbling with the touch screen. He caught her wrist gently and steadied her hand.

“I’ve got it,” he said. “You’re safe. We’re going to trace every byte of this bastard’s digital trail.”

“I don’t think he even wants to kill me,” she said, heart hammering. “I think he wants to write a new version of me. To control me. Like I’m some character he can mold into what he wants.”

Hawke’s jaw flexed, eyes going glacial. “Then he picked the wrong woman.”

A few minutes later, Hawke looped Reed in via a secure call. Hawke had connected the cabin’s system into the Spur’s secure uplink and uploaded the corrupted draft for analysis.

“Got the file,” Reed said through the speaker. “Hold up. There’s a mirrored signature in the footer. Someone duplicated your template, altering it with shell encoding.

Vanessa sat back down, hands folded tightly in her lap. “English, Reed.”

“It means they copied your manuscript and rewrote parts but used a cloned version of your document settings. Which means they’ve had access to your original files—either from the cloud or your hard drive.”

“I don’t use cloud backup,” Vanessa said. “Trina and I transfer via encrypted flash drive, hand-to-hand.”

“Then someone pulled it from your laptop,” Hawke said. “Which means the breach happened before you got the first letter.”

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