"What did I do?"

The message sat on his screen like a ghost.

Do you remember me?

The letters glowed faintly in the dark, harsh against the muted ambience of Rivan's apartment. For a long while, he didn't move. He just sat there, the phone resting cold and silent in his hand, the room around him dense with stillness. The only sounds were the soft hum of the air purifier and, somewhere beyond the glass, a car sliding past on the street below.

He read the message again.

Then once more.

No name. No profile photo. Just four words, stripped bare of context or politeness. They weren't curious. They weren't reaching. They assumed. Do you remember me — not if. There was no space for denial.

Rivan tapped on the message, almost expecting something to reveal itself. A tag. A thread. A mistake.

Nothing.

Private.

No linked socials. No clues.

He exhaled sharply through his nose and tossed the phone onto the couch. But even the sound of it landing felt… wrong. It didn't bounce the way it usually did. The phone landed with a dull, final thud, like it meant to stay exactly where it had fallen.

Unsettled, Rivan rose and walked to the kitchen, yanking open the fridge. The cold air slapped his skin. He grabbed one of his signature infused waters — cucumber mint — and took several gulps, as if the chill could freeze the knot forming in his chest.

It didn't help.

The words followed him. Do you remember me?

He had lived through enough digital noise to grow numb to most of it — messages from fans who treated him like a deity, from brands who measured him in clicks, and from girls whose language came in fire emojis and midnight selfies. He didn't read them anymore. Most were harmless. Repetitive. Easy to mute.

But this one wasn't noise.

This one felt… surgical.

It was the tone. The precision. The stillness behind the words.

He walked back to the couch and picked up the phone, the screen lighting up at his touch. The message was still there, unchanged, as if it had been carved into the glass itself.

He typed a reply.

Who is this?

Then paused. Deleted it. Too defensive.

He tried again.

Sorry, I think you have the wrong person.

He hit send.

And waited.

Nothing.

Minutes passed. He opened Instagram. Scrolled aimlessly. Rewatched an old podcast clip. Checked his email and reread the GrindFuel contract, a poor distraction. His eyes skimmed over the bullet points, the deliverables, the payout breakdown. None of it stuck. The silence in his phone was louder than any reply would've been.

The sender wasn't gone.

They were waiting.

And Rivan knew — patience was always dangerous.

He opened his laptop. If someone was trying to get under his skin, he needed to be sure it wasn't more than that. He logged into his secure inbox, ran a sweep of his passwords. Two-factor authentication was still on. No breach notifications. No new devices.

Just one thing caught his eye — a strange surge of traffic on his analytics dashboard. A spike from a masked IP, location hidden behind a proxy. It could've been a crawler. A marketing bot.

Or it could've been them.

He stared at the graph until it blurred.

Back on the couch, the message pulsed in the back of his mind like a headache that hadn't formed yet. He could almost hear it now — not in words, but as a sound. A slam. A whisper. A laugh. A name on the tip of memory.

High school.

It always came back to that.

There was no particular reason. Just a feeling.

A hallway.

A locker slamming shut.

A girl flinching as he walked by.

He closed his eyes.

He hadn't always been this curated. This clean.

There had been a time — not so long ago — when he'd lived for the joke that made others quiet. When he walked in rooms just to feel the silence bend around him. Power didn't come from kindness back then. It came from dominance. From knowing you could ruin someone's day with just a look, a smirk, a phrase twisted into a knife.

And maybe, just maybe, he'd gotten good at that.

Too good.

He remembered what he did. He couldn't remember the names or faces. But he remembered what he did to them — how he mangled it, turned it into rhyme and mockery. Some had braces. The ones who had long hair made it fall in front of the face like a shield so that the eyes that never met his.

Once a girl gave a presentation in history class. Her voice trembled through the whole thing. He and his friends had laughed like it was a comedy set. She had gone red. Then pale. Then invisible.

The conclusion of his interaction with the girls remained the same. Invisible.

Those images struck him. Not the names. Just the sound of them breaking.

He leaned forward, elbows on knees, phone in hand.

Still no reply.

He typed again, slower this time:

What is this about?

He stared at the message. No heartbeat spike. No panic. But there was a pressure now — low in his chest, sharp around the ribs. The kind of tension he usually trained away.

The reply came instantly.

You'll find out soon.

Rivan's jaw tightened.

No threat. No demand.

Just certainty.

His thumb hovered over the block button. It would be easy. A tap. A silence. An escape.

But something told him — maybe instinct, maybe guilt — that blocking was the trap. That ignoring this wouldn't make it go away. That pretending it didn't exist was exactly what they expected him to do.

He set the phone down on the glass table and didn't walk away.

He couldn't.

His mind had already begun to unspool the parts of himself he'd locked behind his success — the boy who laughed too loudly, pushed too hard, didn't know when to stop. The boy who had made someone else's pain into his punchline.

His whole brand was built on redemption. On control. On the illusion that you could outgrow your past if you just outworked it.

But this—This wasn't something you could sweat out.

At 2:11 AM, sleep nowhere in sight, Rivan opened a blank note on his phone. His thumbs hovered for a while.

Then he typed the words he hadn't let himself say in years.

What did I do?

And for the first time in a long time, he didn't feel powerful.

He felt... 

Hunted.