Chapter 5 Alarm

[How does the WTA even let someone like this compete? The organizers need to take a serious look at their selection process.]

Cecilia read the comment, the corner of her mouth curling into something cold.

That was fast.

She moved to the window. The street below was dim, but the skyline beyond blazed with light — towers of glass and neon cutting hard against the dark.

Her phone buzzed again.

An email from the tournament organizers.

[Dear Ms. Windsor, the tournament committee has completed its review and confirmed that you meet all eligibility requirements. Your official entry confirmation has been processed. We look forward to seeing you on the court.]

At the exact same moment, Ivy posted to her social media.

A tearful selfie. Caption: [Some dreams were never meant to be mine…]

The comments filled in almost instantly. One caught Cecilia's eye:

[Heard Cecilia is actually the Windsors' biological daughter. Apparently she pushed out the girl they raised from childhood just to steal her tournament spot. Honestly? Probably explains why the family never acknowledged her publicly.]

Cecilia stared at it.

Then she smiled.

Alright. If that was the game they wanted to play, she was more than happy to oblige.

She picked up her phone and dialed the non-emergency police line. Then she sat down at her desk, opened her laptop, and pulled up the WTA's historical match data alongside her competitor profiles.

The screen cast a pale glow across her face as her fingers moved steadily over the keys.

The officers arrived quickly. The building's security was lax — the kind of place where the front door buzzer had been broken for months — but once she'd filed the report, response time wasn't the issue.

Cecilia handed over her phone when they knocked. "I'd like to report coordinated online defamation. The evidence is already compiled."

Thirty minutes of digging, and it showed: dozens of accounts, all posting near-identical language within the same narrow window, the timestamps so tightly clustered it was almost artless. Even the typos matched.

Anyone with a passing familiarity with how social media manipulation worked could see it for what it was.

The lead officer scrolled through, his expression tightening. "Ms. Windsor, do you have any idea who might be behind this?"

"I don't." Cecilia kept her voice neutral. "But the accounts are still active. Is there any way to trace the payment records?"

"We can follow the money." He nodded. "It'll take some time."

"That's fine." She leaned against the doorframe. "I'm not going anywhere."

She spent the next two hours waiting. Her agent called three times.

The news was consistent and bleak: not just the endorsements, but the campus outreach campaigns she'd had lined up — gone. The sponsors had been polite about it. Regrettably, given the current climate. We hope you understand. The subtext was clear enough: nobody wanted to be caught in the crossfire.

"Send me every communication thread," Cecilia told her agent. "Every email, every message. All of it."

By early evening, the officer called back.

"We traced it. A company called Starlight Media was contracted for the campaign. The payment source was obscured, but we followed the financial trail —"

"One of Ethan's holding companies," Cecilia said.

A beat of silence. "You knew?"

"I guessed." She kept her tone even. "Is there enough for charges?"

"Online defamation at this scale — we're looking at civil penalties for certain. Criminal charges depend on reach." He paused. "Those posts have crossed ten thousand shares. It's worth pursuing."

"Then let's pursue it. I'll provide whatever documentation you need."

Before he hung up, he dropped his voice slightly. "Ms. Windsor — one more thing. If the family's got resources, this probably isn't the only angle they're working. Watch yourself."

"Appreciated."

She set the phone down. Outside, the last of the daylight had gone. She turned back to her laptop and pulled up Ivy's post again.

The comments section had fractured into two warring camps — half convinced Cecilia was a calculating villain, half turning their suspicion on the Windsor family. But something was shifting. A new comment had climbed to the top, and the replies beneath it were changing the temperature of the room.

[Hold on — I just checked the WTA official site. Ivy's entry IS confirmed. So what exactly is she crying about?]

[Wait, that can't be right. I thought Cecilia blocked her from competing?]

[The official site doesn't lie. Go look for yourselves.]

Cecilia tapped her fingers lightly on the desk.

She'd expected this. When they couldn't take her spot, the Windsors had simply found another way to get Ivy into the draw. Of course they had.

Which meant the timing was right.

She opened her own profile. Fifty thousand followers — mostly people who'd found her through match coverage, the kind of audience that actually knew what a tiebreak was. She took a breath and started typing.

[A few things, for the record.

One: I have never targeted or harassed any player, on or off the court. The clip circulating online is a deliberate edit. The full, uncut footage has been submitted to law enforcement.

Two: My tournament entry was confirmed by WTA officials through standard channels. It was never transferable.

Three: I have filed a police report regarding the coordinated disinformation campaign targeting my reputation. Updates will follow as the process moves forward.]

She hit post and put the phone face-down.

Then she went to the kitchen and made herself a bowl of pasta.

She'd barely drained it when the notifications started. She flipped the phone over and watched the comments roll in — Ivy's fans, curious onlookers, people who'd been ready to write her off an hour ago. The pile-on was loud, but underneath it, the current was running the other way.

]So the Windsor family fabricated a smear campaign against their own biological daughter to clear the way for the girl they adopted?]

[That's genuinely dark.]

[And Ivy's still out there posting sad selfies?]

Cecilia didn't read further. She washed her bowl, dried her hands, and opened the official tournament app.

A banner notification filled the screen, bold and red-bordered:

IMPORTANT: Major Format Changes for This Year's WTA Tournament

She read it through once. Then again.

The familiar round-robin-to-bracket format had been scrapped entirely. In its place: live-streamed matches, randomized head-to-head draws, single elimination from the opening round. Lose once, and you were done.

The more striking change was the production element. Camera crews would follow each player throughout the competition — not just during matches, but during warm-ups, between sessions, in the moments with coaches and training staff that usually stayed private.

Every calculation made in the margins, every adjustment, every tell — all of it on camera.

Cecilia closed the app and crossed to the old ball machine she'd bought off a secondhand sporting goods site for three hundred dollars. The motor was aging and ran a little rough, but it still did the job.

She picked up her racket.

Slow balls first, working through her footwork. Then faster. The rhythm built — the low hum of the machine, the clean thud of each strike — steady and mechanical, the way she liked it when she was thinking.

The new format wasn't a disadvantage. Not for her.

She'd spent years learning to perform under pressure. What she hadn't had was an audience that could see past the narrative being written for them.

A live camera changed that math entirely.

After thirty minutes, she stopped to towel off. A message from her agent was waiting:

WTA confirmed your training slot — Court 3 at the Olympic Sports Center tomorrow morning. The fee's been pulled from your account.

[Got it.]

She set the phone aside and kept going.

The Olympic Sports Center was the best training facility in the city. Court time there ran steep — close to two hundred dollars an hour — and her savings weren't deep. But there were places worth cutting corners, and this wasn't one of them.

She trained until nine, showered, and spent the next few hours on her laptop pulling up archive footage from past tournaments — specifically the unseeded players who'd made deep runs. The ones nobody had seen coming.

It was past one in the morning when she finally closed the laptop.