Author's Note: This is a work of fiction. All characters, events, and scenarios depicted in this chapter — including portrayals of real public figures — are entirely fictional and invented for narrative purposes. No real events or actions are implied or represented.
Lucas looked at the man for a long moment. Studied him. Something flickered behind his eyes — not anger, not annoyance, something closer to recognition. The faintest smile crossed his face and disappeared.
"That's a good question," Lucas said. "And I understand why you're asking it. But the identity of the source is protected. That's not for this press conference, and it's not for public discussion. It'll come out in the appropriate legal setting, under the appropriate protections."
The reporter didn't sit down. "With all due respect, Mr. Knight, you're asking the public to take your word for it. You're showing evidence with no verifiable chain of custody and refusing to name the source. How is that different from what you're accusing Geoffrey Eckstein of doing — making claims without accountability?"
Lucas opened his mouth to respond, but before he could, another reporter — a woman three rows ahead, from an outlet nobody in the room had heard of — stood up without being called on.
"I'd like to follow up on that. If you can't tell us who the source is, can you at least confirm whether this person has a personal vendetta against Myla Knight or Geoffrey Eckstein? Because if the evidence was gathered by someone with a motive, that changes the entire credibility of what you've presented."
Then another, two seats over. A man with press credentials from a digital outlet that had launched six months ago and had no discernible editorial history.
"Mr. Knight, are you protecting the source because their identity would undermine the evidence? Is that why you won't say who it is?"
The pattern was becoming obvious. Three reporters from three outlets nobody recognized, all pushing the same angle, all standing up within seconds of each other.
The legitimate press in the room started exchanging glances. A Reuters correspondent raised an eyebrow at the BBC journalist beside her. The CNN cameraman panned briefly to capture the three standing figures before swinging back to Lucas.
Lucas stayed calm. He gripped the sides of the podium loosely, let the noise settle, and spoke evenly.
"I understand the skepticism. I'd be skeptical too. But revealing a source in a press conference before the case reaches discovery would compromise the legal process and potentially put that person at risk. I'm not going to do that. The evidence has been submitted to the court. It will be examined, challenged, and verified through the proper channels. That's how this works. I'm not going to —"
"I am the one who exposed my wife."
The voice came from the left side of the stage.
Every head in the room turned at once.
Jennifer was standing at the edge of the stage entrance, both hands gripping the handles of a wheelchair. And in that wheelchair sat a man who looked like he'd been carved down by time and illness to something essential — thin, pale, oxygen tube looped behind his ears, but sitting upright with a jaw set in a way that made it clear nobody had forced him to be here.
The room went still. Not quiet — still. The kind of stillness where two hundred people stop breathing at the same time.
Lucas's expression shifted. It was subtle — most people watching on their screens wouldn't have caught it — but the reporters in the front row saw it.
His eyes widened slightly. His grip on the podium tightened. He looked at Jennifer, and the look she gave him back said everything: I tried to stop him. He wouldn't listen.
Neil, standing off to the side, closed his eyes for exactly one second. When he opened them, his face was professionally neutral, but anyone who knew him could see the calculation happening behind it — the legal implications rewriting themselves in real time.
Jennifer wheeled the man to the edge of the podium. He raised one hand — thin, spotted, but steady — and the room somehow got even quieter.
"My name is Vince Knight." His voice was rough, worn down by whatever was eating him from the inside, but it carried. "I am Myla Knight's husband. And I am Lucas Knight's father."
The murmur that ripped through the room was physical. Reporters grabbed each other's arms. Cameras swung wildly. Two photographers nearly collided trying to get the angle. Someone in the back row said "Oh my God" loud enough for the microphones to pick it up.
"I am the one who investigated my wife," Vince continued. "I am the one who found the evidence. And I am the one who gave it to my son."
The room erupted. Every reporter was on their feet. Questions came from every direction, overlapping, incomprehensible, a wall of noise crashing against the stage. Camera shutters sounded like a hailstorm. The livestream viewer count, already high, spiked so fast that YouTube's counter visibly lagged trying to keep up.
Lucas stood at the podium and didn't move. His face was controlled, but his eyes — fixed on the old man in the wheelchair — held something complicated. Something he hadn't planned on showing the world today.
He hadn't wanted this. Vince was supposed to stay at the hospital. His testimony was supposed to come through a deposition, controlled, protected, legally airtight. Not on a stage in front of three hundred journalists and a global livestream.
But the old man had decided. And looking at him now — sitting in that wheelchair with the same stubborn set to his jaw that Lucas saw in his own mirror every morning — Lucas understood that no one had ever talked Vince Knight out of anything, and today wasn't going to be the day that changed.
Neil leaned in close. "We need to manage this carefully," he murmured.
Lucas gave the smallest nod. Then he stepped back from the podium and let his father have the microphone.
---
Seven hundred miles away, in a conference room on the thirty-second floor of a building in Las Vegas, Myla Knight watched her husband's face fill a sixty-five-inch screen.
The room was silent. Her lead attorney sat to her left. Two associates sat across the table. A paralegal had frozen mid-note, pen hovering above a yellow legal pad.
Nobody moved.
Myla's hand was pressed flat against the conference table. Her fingers were white. On the screen, Vince was still talking — explaining calmly, methodically, how he'd spent months quietly gathering the evidence that his son had just projected onto a wall in front of the world.
She could see him. She could see what he looked like — the sunken cheeks, the oxygen tube, the way his suit hung off his shoulders like it had been fitted for a man twenty pounds heavier. He looked terrible.
He looked like a man whose body was failing him in ways that didn't have a simple explanation.
She didn't care.
Not about the wheelchair. Not about the tube. Not about whatever was eating him alive from the inside. The only thing she felt looking at her husband's face on that screen was a fury so hot it dried out her throat.
"Th—" The sound caught. She swallowed. Tried again. "This... this piece of shit."
Her voice cracked on the last word. Not from concern. Not from grief. From betrayal so raw it sat in her chest like a coal.
She'd suspected. When the lawsuit dropped, when the evidence was too specific, too precise, too clearly sourced from someone inside her life — she'd known.
But suspecting it in a conference room and watching your husband announce it on live television in front of the entire world were two very different things.
The lead attorney, a man named Harwick who'd been practicing for thirty-one years and had seen most things, picked up his pen and set it back down again. He looked at the associates. They looked back.
He'd noticed something. They all had. Their client's husband was on a screen looking like a man who might not see the end of the year — and Myla hadn't asked a single question about his health.
Hadn't flinched at the wheelchair. Hadn't said what happened to him or is he okay or even how long has he been like that. The only thing that had come out of her mouth was rage that he'd talked.
Harwick filed that away and moved on. He'd deal with what it meant later.
"This is a problem," he said.
Nobody responded, because nobody needed to.
The problem wasn't just that Vince was a witness. Witnesses could be challenged. Credibility could be attacked. Motives could be questioned.
The problem was who Vince was.
If he'd been a stranger — an investigator, a journalist, a former associate with an axe to grind — Harwick could have torn him apart. Bias. Compensation. Vendetta. The jury would hear "paid informant" or "disgruntled former contact" and the doubt would plant itself naturally.
But Vince was Myla's husband. He lived in her house. He had legal access to shared accounts, shared devices, shared financial records. He didn't need to hack anything or surveil anyone.
Everything he'd gathered, he'd gathered from inside the marriage — which meant chain of custody was airtight, and any challenge to how he obtained the evidence would collapse the moment a judge looked at the marital access precedent.
Worse — and this was the part that made Harwick's stomach tighten — Vince had no obvious financial motive. The man looked like he was in serious physical decline. He wasn't positioning himself for a book deal or a media career.
From the look of things, he might not be around long enough for either. He was a man who appeared to be running out of time, and he'd chosen to spend what he had left exposing his own wife to protect a son he'd been estranged from for decades. That story was so clean, so human, so impossibly sympathetic that no jury in the country would look at him and think liar.
And then there was the other edge of the blade. Vince was Lucas's father. Which meant the defense could argue he was biased toward his son — that he'd fabricated or exaggerated evidence to help Lucas win.
But that argument cut itself. Vince and Lucas had been estranged for years.
The estrangement was public, documented, well-known. If Vince was biased toward Lucas, he had a strange way of showing it — years of absence, no contact, no relationship.
The reconciliation was recent, and from the look of Vince's condition, likely driven by whatever was happening to his health. A jury would see a sick old man trying to make things right before he couldn't anymore, not a co-conspirator manufacturing evidence.
Harwick could argue bias. Any attorney could argue anything. But arguing it convincingly in front of twelve people watching a frail man in a wheelchair explain why he turned on his own wife to save the son he'd abandoned — that was a different thing entirely.
"We need to rethink everything..." Harwick said quietly.
Myla wasn't listening. Her eyes were locked on the screen, on Vince's face, on the mouth that had kissed her good morning for years now calmly dismantling her life on national television.
The man who had given her everything — the name, the money, the lifestyle, the access to circles she'd never have touched on her own — was sitting in a wheelchair on a stage taking it all away.
And she still wasn't looking at the oxygen tube. She was looking at his mouth, waiting for it to stop moving, calculating what she could still salvage from the wreckage he was building in real time.
"After everything you gave me," she whispered to the screen, "you're the one who takes it back."
---
Across town, Geoffrey's team watched the same broadcast.
The conference room was quiet in the worst possible way — the kind of quiet that settled in when everyone in the room realized the situation had just gotten significantly harder and nobody wanted to be the first to say it out loud.
Dominic had his hands flat on the table. Giselle was staring at her phone without reading it.
Geoffrey stood at the window with his back to the screen.
"Vince Knight..." he said. Not a question. Just the name, sitting in his mouth like something rotten.
Nobody responded.
"His own father." Geoffrey turned around. His face was controlled, but his eyes were livid. "That useless woman couldn't even keep her own husband in line. She had one job — keep her house quiet — and instead she handed every piece of evidence directly to the other side through the man sleeping next to her."
Dominic started to speak, but Geoffrey cut him off.
"I don't want strategy right now. I want to know how Myla Knight managed to be this stupid. She knew what she was involved in. She knew the stakes. And she let her husband — a man who apparently had access to everything — walk it straight to Lucas." He slammed his palm on the table. "This is her mess. All of it."
Giselle looked up. "What do you want us to do?"
"What I've already told you. No contact with her. She's on her own."
---
The press conference ended with Vince still on that stage, and the aftershock didn't stop at the building doors.
It went everywhere.
Within the hour, every major network had cut to the footage. Within two hours, every cable news panel had assembled their legal analysts, their entertainment correspondents, their retired prosecutors.
By evening, it was the only story. Not just in America — internationally. BBC, Sky News, Al Jazeera, NHK. Lucas Knight's estranged father turning on his own wife to side with the son he'd abandoned. It wrote itself.
Social media was chaos.
"Vince Knight just showed up in a WHEELCHAIR and told the world he's the one who exposed his own WIFE. I am on the floor. I am physically on the floor right now."
"wait so let me get this straight — Lucas's dad, who hasn't been in his life for YEARS, secretly investigated Myla, gathered the evidence himself, and gave it to Lucas?? this is a movie. this is literally a movie."
"does anyone else think Vince looks really sick?? like genuinely sick?? the wheelchair, the oxygen, the way his hands were shaking. something is wrong with that man and nobody's talking about it."
"the fact that Vince chose his son over his wife after years of not being in Lucas's life… I don't care what anyone says, that's a man trying to make things right before it's too late."
"Myla is FINISHED. her own husband. her OWN HUSBAND. there's no spinning this."
The topic dominated every platform, every group chat, every dinner table for the next twenty-four hours.
Pundits argued about the legal implications. Fans made edits. Conspiracy theorists spun new threads. But the overwhelming consensus — the thing that cut through all the noise — was simple: Lucas had the evidence. Lucas had the witness. And Geoffrey had been caught lying on camera.
---
The next morning, the defamation hearing arrived.
Geoffrey Eckstein v. Netflix, Inc. and Warner Bros. Discovery. The case he'd filed months ago, before the world had turned upside down. Before the civil suit. Before Vince. Before any of this.
The courthouse on Centre Street was a circus before the doors even opened.
Media trucks lined the block from Foley Square to Worth Street. Barricades had gone up overnight. NYPD had a visible presence on every corner. Camera crews jockeyed for position on the courthouse steps.
Overhead, at least two news helicopters held steady in the gray sky.
The crowd was enormous.
They pressed against the barricades with signs and phones raised. Most of them were there for Lucas. The signs made that clear — "JUSTICE FOR LUCAS" and "GEOFFREY IS A PREDATOR" and "PROTECT THE CHILDREN" in block letters held above heads.
A group near the front had printed Daciana's blurred documentary still on poster board with the words "SHE WAS SIX" underneath it. A few people were chanting. Most were just loud.
The high-profile arrivals started early.
Ted Sarandos came first, stepping out of a black sedan in a charcoal suit. He paused on the steps long enough for the cameras to get what they needed.
"Mr. Sarandos, any comment on today's proceedings?"
"We're confident in our position and looking forward to presenting it to the court." Clean, rehearsed, gone.
Reed Hastings followed a few minutes later, quieter, no comment, straight through the doors.
Tobias arrived with Warner's legal counsel and stopped briefly for the cameras. "We've said from the beginning that our documentaries were responsibly produced and factually supported. We stand by that. We'll let the court do its work."
Then Geoffrey.
He came out of a black SUV flanked by Dominic and two security guards. The crowd noise shifted — the cheering stopped and the jeering started. Someone yelled something about Daciana that made Geoffrey's jaw tighten, but he didn't acknowledge it.
He walked the steps without stopping, Dominic close behind, and pushed through the courthouse doors without a word to the press.
And finally, Lucas.
He stepped out with Neil on his right and his legal team behind them. The crowd erupted. The noise was deafening — not organized, not rehearsed, just raw, loud, unmistakable support from hundreds of people who had followed this story from the beginning and had decided whose side they were on.
A reporter shoved a microphone forward. "Lucas, what are you expecting from today's hearing?"
Lucas stopped. Looked at the camera. "I'm expecting the truth to hold up. That's all I've ever expected."
He went inside.
The doors closed. The noise stayed outside.
---
Inside the courthouse, the energy was different. Controlled. Formal. The kind of quiet that courtrooms enforce not with rules but with architecture — high ceilings, heavy wood, the weight of the room itself pressing down on everyone in it.
Lucas found Ted, Reed, and Tobias in the gallery and exchanged brief handshakes. A few words, nothing heavy. Ted squeezed his shoulder. Tobias gave him a look that said give them hell without saying anything.
Then Lucas turned and saw Geoffrey.
He was already seated at the plaintiff's table with Dominic and his legal team. Their eyes locked across the courtroom. Neither looked away. Geoffrey's expression was flat, controlled, unreadable. Lucas's was calm in the way that only someone who knew exactly how this was going to end could be.
The reporters in the gallery — credentialed, no cameras allowed, notebooks and pens only — caught the moment. Every one of them wrote it down. The tension between the two men was physical, something you could feel in the space between the tables like static before a storm.
Then the bailiff called the room to order, and the hearing began.
---
Geoffrey's legal team came out swinging.
Dominic was sharp, prepared, and relentless. He laid out the defamation case with precision — the documentaries had been produced with the deliberate intent to destroy Geoffrey Eckstein's reputation, funded and influenced by a stakeholder with a personal vendetta, distributed on platforms that profited from sensationalism at the expense of truth.
He cited specific claims from the documentaries that he argued were unsubstantiated, misleading, or taken out of context. He questioned the editorial independence of both productions, noting Lucas Knight's financial connections to both Netflix and Warner.
It was effective. For the first hour, the momentum belonged to Geoffrey.
Lucas was called to respond to specific questions about his involvement with the platforms and his role in greenlighting the documentary projects.
He answered carefully, directly, without hesitation — but the framing was difficult. Dominic had structured his questions to make Lucas's stakeholder position look like editorial control, and the distinction between influence and interference was thin enough that it took real effort to hold the line.
The judge listened. The gallery watched. For a stretch, it felt like Geoffrey's case might actually have legs.
Then the defense shifted.
Netflix and Warner's legal teams introduced the editorial disclaimers embedded in every documentary — clear, on-screen language stating that the content represented investigative findings and included speculative analysis where noted.
They walked the court through the editorial review process, the fact-checking protocols, the legal clearance each episode had undergone before release. Every claim Geoffrey's team had flagged as defamatory was matched against source documentation — on-the-record testimony from victims, financial records obtained through legal channels, and public filings that corroborated the documentary's core allegations.
Then came the pivot.
Warner's lead counsel stood and addressed the court directly. "Your Honor, the plaintiff has characterized these documentaries as a coordinated smear campaign. But the content of those documentaries is not fiction. It is not speculation. It is investigative journalism built on the testimony of real victims and supported by documentary evidence that has not been challenged on its merits — only on the grounds that it was published at all."
She paused.
"Furthermore, the evidence presented in these documentaries raises serious questions about the plaintiff's conduct that warrant independent investigation. If Mr. Eckstein's concern is that these documentaries have damaged his reputation, we would respectfully suggest that the conduct documented in them is what damaged his reputation — not the act of reporting on it."
The courtroom shifted. Reporters scribbled faster. Geoffrey's face didn't change, but Dominic's pen stopped moving for a fraction of a second.
The judge asked clarifying questions. Both sides responded.
The hearing proceeded through its remaining procedural motions without further fireworks, and after three hours, it adjourned. No ruling. No verdict. No dramatic conclusion — just the grinding machinery of the legal system doing what it does, slowly and without regard for the audience watching from outside.
As the courtroom emptied, Lucas stood and gathered his things.
Jack and Simon were already flanking him before he noticed Geoffrey walking over. They didn't step forward — they just existed, solidly, in a way that made the space around Lucas feel smaller and harder to enter.
Geoffrey stopped. Raised both hands like he was surrendering something. "Easy. Just talking."
Jack looked at him the way you look at a door you're deciding whether to close.
Geoffrey ignored them both and found Lucas's eyes.
"Yesterday was impressive," he said quietly. Casually. Like they were discussing a film. "The wheelchair. Your father up there looking like a saint." He smoothed his tie. "You know how to put on a show, Lucas. I'll give you that. But this is a courtroom. Not a press conference. What gets applause out there doesn't mean anything in here."
Lucas let him finish.
Then he stepped past Jack, close enough that Geoffrey could hear him without anyone else catching it.
"You told the whole world you've never met Myla. On camera. With a smile on your face." Lucas's voice was even. Almost friendly. "And then I showed the receipts. Emails, social media, device logs..."
"And that's just what I was willing to share at a press conference." He held Geoffrey's gaze. "I'm going to put you behind bars, Geoffrey. You and everyone connected to what you did. Not just Myla. All of them. And when I'm done, that viral interview of yours is going to be the first thing they play in every documentary about how you went down."
Geoffrey's face went still. The casual mask cracked for just a second — his jaw clenched, his nostrils flared — and then he put it back on. But they both knew Lucas had seen it.
He turned and walked without saying anything else. Dominic followed, briefcase in hand, eyes on the floor.
Lucas watched him until the doors closed.
Neil showed up beside him, rolling his neck like he'd been tensing every muscle in his body for the last three hours.
"So," Neil said. "That was fun."
"Neil."
"I know, I know." He held up a hand. "Look — this thing is going to take a while. Could be a year. Could be longer. Courts like this don't move fast, especially when someone like Geoffrey has the money to file motion after motion and drag every hearing out as long as possible. His lawyers are going to stall. That's their whole strategy now."
Lucas exhaled. "I know how it works."
"Right. So." Neil pulled out his phone. "In the meantime, you've still got a career. Super Bowl halftime is locked for February 2024. F1 ambassador starts after that, and Apple's holding the F1 film until you're free." He scrolled. "Point is — the lawsuit runs on its own clock, and your schedule runs on yours. They don't have to compete."
Lucas looked at him sideways. "My father just showed up on live television in a wheelchair without telling me, and you're standing here talking about the Super Bowl."
Neil put his phone away. "Yes. Because your legal team handles the lawsuit, and I handle you. And you've got commitments that don't pause because Geoffrey Eckstein decided to become a problem." He paused. "That's not me being cold. That's me doing my job so you can focus on doing yours."
Lucas shook his head slowly. "You really are something, Neil."
"I've been told."
They walked out of the courthouse together.