The Price of Your Clout

Right in the middle of our wedding live stream, just as we were about to exchange rings, the giant LED screen went pitch black. Seconds later, a grainy, hidden-camera video appeared before all six hundred guests. In the video, I was wearing a mask, walking into a luxury hotel. Three minutes later, a tall, broad-shouldered man caught up with me, wrapping his arms around me from behind. I turned around, a radiant smile on my face, embracing him tightly. The scene cut. At 1:00 AM, the two of us finally walked out of that hotel room together. The timestamp in the corner showed the night before Carter and I signed our marriage license. There were six hundred high-society guests sitting in the grand ballroom. And on the TikTok live stream, over a million viewers were watching in real time. The comment section froze for a single second, and then exploded into a vicious frenzy. 【The bride is cheating?!】 【Carter got cuckolded on his own wedding day?!】 【No freaking way! Getting married tomorrow, but creeping in a hotel room the night before?】 【And this guy spends every day teaching millions of people how to keep a relationship honest! His own wife is a cheating snake!】 Everyone was screaming that I was an adulteress. None of them knew that the man in the video was my biological brother. "Chloe." It was the first time Carter had ever called me by my full first name without warmth. His face was pure stone. "Is that you in the video?" I bit my lower lip hard, trembling. "Cut the live stream. Turn it off first... please, Carter." He didn't move an inch. He touched his earpiece, listening to something being fed to him from behind the scenes. The last trace of warmth in his eyes completely vanished. "Why should I turn it off?" I looked at him pleadingly. "Carter, this is our wedding! My dad is sitting right down there!" Carter's voice turned icy. "Precisely because this is our wedding, we need to make things crystal clear right here, right now." "I've spent seven years as a relationship guru. I've built my brand telling millions of followers that love cannot survive on lies." "Today, I won't run from the truth just because the person standing across from me is my bride." Five years ago, Carter was just a nobody streaming out of a tiny studio apartment to barely seven hundred followers. He sat in front of a cheap webcam, talking about heartbreak. No production team. No lighting. Even his microphone had a buzzing glitch. Now, he was one of the internet's biggest lifestyle and relationship influencers, commanding six-figure checks for a single sponsored mention. Everyone told me how lucky I was. A quiet scriptwriter, marrying Carter Evans at the peak of his fame and wealth. The chat was flying by at a nauseating speed. I gripped my bouquet so tight the hidden thorns pierced my palm. "Carter, when the ceremony is over, I will explain everything to you in private—" Carter cut me off ruthlessly. "I want you to explain it right now. Is that you in the footage, yes or no?" I looked into his eyes and whispered, "Yes." The ballroom erupted into chaos. Carter's eyes instantly turned bloodshot. "Who is that man?" "I can tell you, but privately." "You can't say his name in front of everyone?" "No!" "Chloe..." Carter's voice quivered with suppressed fury. "You won't even tell me who he is, and you expect me to believe you're innocent?" Suddenly, a loud crash echoed through the hall. My father had stood up so abruptly that his heavy chair tipped backward, slamming onto the polished marble floor. "Carter!" My dad was sixty-five. He had put on a custom suit for the very first time in his life just to walk me down the aisle. From the moment he led me into the chapel, tears hadn't stopped shining in his eyes. Now, he was clutching the edge of the dining table, his face dangerously pale. "Cut the damn broadcast," my dad wheezed, his voice shaking. "Whatever needs to be said, we talk about it as a family behind closed doors!" Carter didn't budge. Instead, his manager, Amanda, stepped out from behind the soundboard. She was impeccably dressed in a sharp white power suit, her production badge swinging against her chest. "I'm terribly sorry, Mr. Vance," Amanda said in a practiced, professional tone. "This wedding stream is tied to an exclusive platform contract. If we terminate the feed without authorization, the breach-of-contract penalty runs into seven figures." "Besides, the narrative has already blown up online. Turning the cameras off now won't fix anything." My dad's lips trembled with pure rage. "Does money matter more than my daughter?!" Amanda gave a tiny, condescending smile. "Carter needs the truth precisely because he cares about Chloe. As her father, I'm sure you wouldn't want your daughter sneaking around on her husband either, would you?" "Shut your mouth!" Dad slammed his hand onto the table. In the very next second, his entire body swayed violently. I dropped my bouquet and sprinted down the altar steps. "Dad!"Dad clutched his chest, his knees buckling as he collapsed to the floor. "Call 911! Get an ambulance!" I dropped to my knees beside him, my fingers shaking so hard I couldn't even unlock my phone. The guests were in an uproar. Carter finally stepped down from the stage. He crouched down beside us, reaching a hand out toward my father. I shoved him back with all my strength. "Don't touch him!" His hand hung awkwardly in midair, his expression tight and defensive. "I already had someone call the paramedics." Yet, across the room, the camera operators kept filming. On the massive screens, the stream was still broadcasting my father lying helpless on the floor. I snapped. "Shut off the stream!" "Amanda is handling the damage control—" "I told you to shut it off RIGHT NOW!" I screamed, tears burning my eyes. "Carter, that is my father! How much more clout do you need?!" His face drained of color. Amanda rushed over, keeping her voice low and tight. "If we pull the plug now, the platform and the press will take it as Carter admitting the cheating rumors are true." "PR recommends keeping the stream live and letting Chloe clear the air on camera." I looked at the two of them standing side by side. And somewhere deep inside my chest, something went completely cold and still. When the paramedics rushed into the ballroom, the cameras were still rolling. They loaded my father onto a stretcher, and I gathered up the heavy folds of my white gown, rushing after them. As we reached the grand exit, Carter caught up to me. "I'm coming with you." "No," I said, voice dead. "He's my father-in-law too!" "The moment you put that video on the big screen, he stopped being your anything." Outside the emergency room, I sat on a plastic waiting room chair in my wedding dress for three grueling hours. My phone vibrated nonstop with hundreds of missed calls. Breaking news notifications popped up like wildfire: 【Top Relationship Influencer Betrayed on His Wedding Day!】 【Carter Evans's Bride Caught in Secret Pre-Wedding Hotel Rendezvous with Mystery Man!】 【The Real-Life Romance Scam: Can Anyone Be Trusted?】 Out of the top ten trending topics on Twitter and TikTok, seven were about me. People had already doxxed my high school, my college, my writing portfolio, and my home address. Trolls were spamming the official social media page of the university where my father had taught for forty years, claiming a man who raised such a shameful daughter must have been a fraud of a teacher his whole life. Someone had even turned the clip of my dad collapsing into a meme, captioning it: 【Father-in-law faints on the spot after hearing his daughter got caught!】 Staring at that looping GIF on my screen, nausea tore through my stomach. My father was fighting for his life behind those double doors, and the internet was treating his death as cheap entertainment. At 11:00 PM, the surgeon finally walked out. "He suffered an acute myocardial infarction. We performed an emergency angioplasty and placed a stent." "He's out of immediate danger for now, but the next twenty-four hours in the ICU are critical." I braced myself against the cold hospital wall, my legs shaking so badly I could barely stand. The doctor glanced down at his clipboard. "Who is the direct family member? We need a signature on the consent and admission forms." "I am." Another voice cut in behind me at the exact same moment.I hadn't even heard Carter walk up. He had shed his tuxedo for a dark casual jacket. His hair was a mess, and his eyes were heavily bloodshot. Behind him stood Amanda, clutching an iPad. I completely ignored them, taking the pen from the nurse and writing my name cleanly in the family section. The doctor added, "Once the patient wakes up, he must not suffer any emotional distress. Furthermore, he has an extensive history of severe coronary heart disease. Did the family not monitor this?" My fingers tightened around the pen. "We knew." "Chloe." Carter stepped closer, his face pale. "I'm sorry... I honestly didn't know your dad was that sick." I said nothing. He stared at me, pleading. "Chloe, are you really not going to explain anything? Who the hell is that man?" "He is someone deeply, profoundly important to my life," I answered softly. Carter's eyes instantly reddened with bitter fury. "More important than me?" I looked him dead in the eye. "Yes." "Chloe!" Carter lost control, his voice cracking down the sterile hallway. "I saw him holding you with my own eyes! You went into the same hotel suite until one in the morning! How am I supposed to believe you?!" A nurse poked her head out of a room and hissed at us to keep it down. I dropped my voice to a sharp whisper. "You didn't have to blindly believe me, Carter. But you could have asked me first. You didn't. You chose to tie me to a live stream and force me into a public trial for your audience." Carter stood there, speechless. Amanda seized the moment and stepped in smoothly. "Ms. Vance, the agency needs Carter to issue a statement distancing himself from you immediately. That's the only way to protect his brand. We'll be releasing a formal press release tomorrow morning." "What kind of statement?" I asked coldly. Amanda gave a polite, icy smile. "A statement acknowledging that the footage is authentic, and announcing that the two of you are putting your marriage on an indefinite hold." I thought I was completely numb. Yet hearing those words still felt like a dull blade sawing through my chest. Putting the marriage on hold. How clean. How PR-friendly. It kept him firmly in the role of the devoted, heartbroken victim, while shielding him from the immediate blowback of a messy divorce. Truly the work of a top-tier management team. I turned my head and looked straight at Carter. "Is this what you want too?" Carter's throat bobbed. "I don't want to release it..." "But you will." "...I have a company with hundreds of employees depending on my reputation." "Then release it," I said, my voice completely devoid of emotion. I turned to walk away. Amanda stepped into my path, a subtle, smug gleam in her eyes. "Ms. Vance, I strongly advise you to clear up your relationship with that mystery man as soon as possible. After all, if your father wakes up and sees our official statement on the news, another heart attack might just finish him off, don't you think?" She spoke with quiet arrogance, entirely convinced that I had been caught red-handed. I looked at her, then glanced at Carter. Carter deliberately shifted his gaze away, not making a single move to stop her. A slow, bitter laugh slipped past my lips. "You both want to know who that man is so badly? Fine. I'll tell you."