CHAPTER IX
The world didn't end the night Elara confronted her father.
But it shifted — subtly, dangerously.
The house felt colder the next morning. Not in temperature, but in spirit. Like something sacred had been broken, and everyone knew but dared not speak it aloud.
Elara moved through the halls of the Bello estate like a ghost. Zainab wouldn't meet her eyes. Khalid had disappeared. And her mother, as always, retreated into silence, like grief was her preferred language.
By 10 a.m., the press knew.
Not everything. But enough.
An anonymous blog post leaked segments of audio and documents. Names were redacted, but implications weren't. Allegations of financial manipulation. Blackmail. Disappearances. The media didn't scream — it whispered. And those whispers multiplied faster than fire.
Elara watched from the small sitting room off the veranda as her father paced. He hadn't raised his voice once. That was what terrified her.
He didn't need to.
He was the kind of man who could crush a person with stillness.
"You've made yourself a martyr," he said quietly, staring out the tall glass windows.
"I didn't leak it all," Elara replied.
He turned, slowly. "But you will."
She said nothing.
He approached her like a man approaching a precipice.
"There are things in this family you still don't understand," he said. "Things I protected you from."
"You mean secrets you buried."
"No," he said. "Truths too dangerous to survive in daylight."
Elara almost laughed. "And what are you? The night?"
"I am the reason you're alive."
She stood. "I'm the reason Amara isn't."
A pause.
A crack.
For the first time in her life, Elara saw something in her father's expression that looked like loss.
That afternoon, she went to Kayra.
They met at a rooftop bar in Lekki, far from Banana Island, far from civility.
Kayra looked exhausted — her skin dull, eyes ringed by sleepless nights.
"You have no idea how big this is," she said, tossing her phone onto the table. "I've had three death threats in forty-eight hours. One of them had my name spelled right."
Elara sipped her drink. "Is that progress?"
Kayra didn't smile.
"You have to understand something, Elara," she said, leaning forward. "Your father isn't just a businessman. He's a system. He's tied to politicians, police commissioners, heads of banks. If you keep going—"
"He'll destroy me. I know."
"No," Kayra said. "He'll make it look like you destroyed yourself."
By nightfall, her phone was flooded.
Private numbers. Unknown messages. Photos of her walking through school. Pictures of Halima from weeks ago.
One video.
She pressed play.
Halima, tied to a chair. Crying. Pleading.
"I didn't say anything. I didn't—please, don't—"
The video cut off.
Elara dropped the phone.
She barely slept that night.
Instead, she paced. Wrote notes on napkins. Connected dots in her head that had previously been too painful to look at straight. Her father wasn't just reacting. He was anticipating. Always had been. He was three steps ahead of every mistake she made, every emotion she felt.
She thought of Tife, of Axle, of Halima.
How many people had been sacrificed to preserve a name?
The next morning, Elara did something reckless.
She went to the press herself.
Not the Kayra type. Not rogue bloggers or Twitter activists.
She walked into the offices of The Lagos Journal, dressed in black, carrying nothing but a flash drive and her full name.
"I want to speak to the editor," she said.
It took them forty minutes to verify her identity, and another twenty to realize she was serious.
The editor, a stern woman with sharp cheekbones and tired eyes, said, "Do you understand what this means?"
"I do."
"You're naming names."
"Yes."
"You're implicating your father in murder, extortion, and cover-ups."
"Yes."
"If you're wrong—"
"I'm not."
The woman studied her. Then reached across the table and took the drive.
"Tell me everything."
She did.
Every broken thing.
From Amara's death to the missing minutes of surveillance footage.
From Axle's fall to Tife's silence.
She even told the editor about her own guilt.
About the blood on her hands.
About what it felt like to become him.
When she finished, the woman leaned back.
"I've been in this business for twenty-seven years," she said. "This is the most terrifying story I've ever heard."
Elara nodded. "Good."
The piece dropped forty-eight hours later.
It didn't name her. But it named him.
The backlash was instant.
Television stations spun cautious coverage. Talk shows danced around the name. Politicians issued half-hearted denials.
But something had cracked.
A system had been wounded.
And Elara?
She went into hiding.
Kayra helped her secure a safe house — a modest apartment in Yaba with unreliable power and a leaky ceiling. But it was safe. For now.
Khalid messaged her once.
"Are you okay?"
She replied: "No. But I will be."
Two days later, another video surfaced.
This time, it was Amara.
A clip Elara had never seen. Her sister was sitting on the balcony of their old home, crying quietly.
"If anything happens to me… don't let them call it suicide. Don't let them say I was weak."
Elara watched it five times before she broke.
She cried — not pretty tears, not poetic ones. Ugly sobs that left her breathless.
She curled up in the corner of the safe house and whispered her sister's name until her voice gave out.
Then, silence.
Two days.
Three.
And then… chaos.
Her father was summoned to appear before a federal panel.
His business accounts were frozen.
Kayra's blog was hacked.
Elara's full name trended on Twitter — first in whispers, then in outrage, then in awe.
#ElaraBelloWasRight
But nothing felt like victory.
Victory didn't bring Halima back.
Didn't resurrect Amara.
Didn't erase the way Tife's body felt under her hands, still and warm and wrong.
Elara stood in the mirror and stared at herself.
"You did this," she whispered. "Now live with it."