Chapter 4 - Hijacking the AltarThe heavy oak side door swung open with a muffled creak, plunging me into the dim, incense-scented quiet of the chapel’s sacristy. Through the mahogany partition, I could hear the majestic swell of the wedding march echoing through the vaulted ceiling. The guests were standing. The ceremony was at its climax.
On the desk in the audio-visual booth sat the master control console for the entire venue—speakers, microphones, and the live video feed broadcasting the ceremony to the overflow room and online for distant relatives.
My fingers flew across the keyboard. It didn't take a genius to hack a basic venue soundboard; my fiancé had left his universal admin password taped to the bottom of the monitor three days ago when we did our tech check. Classic arrogance.
"Clara? What are you doing?"
I spun around. One of the groomsmen—my fiancé’s lead corporate lawyer, thrust into bridal party duty—stood in the doorway, staring at my disheveled hair and the torn lace of my dress.
"Saving myself a lot of legal fees," I snapped.
Before he could lunge across the room, I grabbed a heavy brass candlestick from the altar table and hurled it directly at the master circuit breaker panel on the wall. With a deafening CRACK, the ambient lighting in the main chapel flickered and died, plunging the pews into sudden, murmuring darkness.
At the same time, I hit the master override button on the soundboard and shoved the primary microphone slider all the way to maximum.
I leaned into the mic, my voice booming through every speaker inside the chapel, echoing off the stained-glass windows with terrifying clarity.
"Ladies and gentlemen," I announced, my voice steady, cold, and amplified a hundred times over. "If you are seated in rows one through ten, I suggest checking your programs. Today’s event has been canceled due to corporate fraud, bigamy, and an active federal investigation."
The murmuring in the chapel instantly erupted into absolute, deafening chaos.
Through the small observation window, I saw my fiancé—standing at the altar in his pristine tuxedo—freeze mid-sentence. His head whipped around toward the sound booth, his face draining of every drop of color until he looked like a corpse carved from marble.
Footsteps pounded down the hallway outside the AV room. The door handle rattled violently.
"Clara! Open this door right now!" my fiancé’s voice screamed from the corridor, stripped of all its smooth corporate charm, sounding panicked, shrill, and utterly unhinged.
I didn't answer. I pulled a USB drive from my pocket—containing every single financial discrepancy, shell corporation record, and encrypted text message I had quietly downloaded from his open laptop the night before—and plugged it directly into the master broadcast port.
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"Enjoy the reception, everyone," I whispered into the mic. "The livestream is now playing in federal courtrooms across the state."
I hit upload, grabbed my heavy silk train, and dove straight through the back emergency exit before the handle even finished turning.
