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“Three, two, one… and we’re live!”
The ring light glowed soft amber against Zara Sethi’s face as she smiled into the camera. Behind her, Mumbai’s high-rise cityscape blinked into dusk. Perched in her plush 27th-floor apartment, the beauty influencer with 300K followers began her Friday evening segment—
“Truth & Tea with Zee”.
This week’s theme: Cancel culture and online hate. Her tone was polished, vulnerable. Zara had a way of owning the narrative before it owned her. Comments flooded the screen—hearts, fire emojis, trolls. Standard fare.
Thirty-seven minutes into the livestream, Zara leaned close to the camera, whispered, “There’s something I need to say about last year’s Maldives trip… something I’ve never told anyone.”
The screen froze.
Buffering. Then black.
The livestream ended.
Twelve hours later, Zara was found dead—slumped against the velvet headrest of her designer couch. No sign of forced entry. No wounds. Just her hand locked stiff around a ceramic tea mug.
Forensic reports called it cardiac arrest.
But her fans weren’t buying it. Nor was PR strategist Mihika Roy, who’d helped curate Zara’s online redemption arc after a minor drug possession case buried under NDPS whispers last year. Mihika was one of the last people who spoke to her.
She reviewed the entire livestream archives. Something didn’t sit right. Especially the comments.
Hundreds of people watching. Yet not one had seen her collapse—or even reach for the tea mug again.
And that’s when it clicked.
The death didn’t happen live.
The entire segment had been pre-recorded.
Mihika visited the apartment under the guise of collecting Zara’s remaining skincare sponsorship kits. She noticed the distinct soundproofing foam behind the camera — newer than before. More layered. There were three identical tea mugs near the set — one in the sink, one on a tray, and one clutched in Zara’s hand.
The apartment had a fully operational remote camera and lighting setup — you could program live broadcasts in advance.
She contacted Vivaan Patel, Zara’s ex-boyfriend and cinematographer who’d once set up her streaming rig. He hadn’t spoken to Zara in ten months.
“You can cue live video premieres with chat overlays,” he said. “Everyone thinks it’s real-time. But comments follow the timestamp—they don’t change what was recorded.”
Mihika checked the comments timecode. Right at “the Maldives confession,” the stream froze. But her system logs showed no Wi-Fi outage. Just a scheduled end.
So Zara never planned to confess.
She planned to look like she died doing it.
But then… if it was pre-recorded, someone else had to switch it off.
Only one person had access to Zara’s digital dashboard after her—her paid content assistant, Leher Bhagat. A quiet media student who edited Zara’s reels and answered fanmail.
Mihika noticed something strange on Zara’s shared cloud folder.
A video file titled “Maldives_Truth_FINAL.mov” with a timestamp from two days back. She watched it.
The video had a stuttering start, a deliberate single tear, and a monologue that circled nowhere. The real confession was never about the Maldives.
It was bait.
As the video played, Mihika slowed the footage.
At 32 minutes, Zara tilted her pink ceramic mug toward the camera.
Inverted on the base? A tiny sticker with a QR code.
She scanned it.
An encrypted DropDrive link opened with a single file: “If you’re watching this, I didn’t die of natural causes.”
Zara’s voice came through, nervous but clear:
“I suspect someone’s trying to shut me up before I open a case about R.A.—Ritvik Anand. He made me mule his party drugs last Holi. I kept quiet because… he paid me to. But last week, he became paranoid. Said if I spoke up, my career—and my life—would end. This livestream? It’s fiction. I’m sending a copy to Mihika. My backup plan.”
Mihika froze. She knew Ritvik. PR golden boy, reigning nephew of state minister Anand Rajan. And the same Ritvik who had publicly reconciled with Zara during Lakmé Fashion Week for “the audiences.”
No prints, no poison traces, no foul play. UNLESS the poison was slow-acting.
Mihika retrieved the unused mug from the sink and sent it privately to an independent lab. Trace residues of Carbachol—a compound that increases vagal tone and induces bradycardia fatal in large doses.
Enough to mimic cardiac arrest. Water-soluble. Tasteless. Illegal.
Police brought in Ritvik. Initially confident, he broke within hours.
He’d learned Zara planned a major exposé rebranding herself as a whistleblower. He bought Leher’s silence, accessed her cloud, and replaced the last segment of her livestream with an edited version—one in which she never got past the Maldives decoy.
“I didn’t kill her,” he insisted. “I just wanted to stop her from going viral for the ‘truth.’ That tea mix was supposed to scare her. Not actually… work.”
Zara’s digital ghost outmaneuvered him.
In the end, she wrote the script of her own justice. And made sure the right editor got the final cut.
