The courtroom is silent, but not the silence of emptiness. It is the silence of held breath, of a thousand tongues pressed against the roofs of a thousand mouths, waiting. I stand where the plaintiff should stand, though my feet leave no impression on the marble. The air tastes of ozone and old paper, the twin perfumes of law and decay. Somewhere beyond the high, arched windows, the city of Kerylos hums its endless song of engines and ambition. But in here, time is a wound that refuses to clot.
I am the ghost of Leda Kostova, and this is my deposition.
You will not see me on the witness stand, because I am not there. I am here, in the cracks between the words, in the pauses where the jury’s eyes drift to the ceiling and wonder if the light has always flickered like that. I am the cold draft that passes through the room when the judge turns a page. I died three months ago, or maybe three years. The calendar dissolves when you are dead. The only unit of measurement that remains is accusation.
Let me begin with the night of August 20th, the night that would become Salazar v. Neely, the night that would become my tombstone and my resurrection. I will tell it to you as I told it to the cameras, and then I will tell it to you again. The first version is a lie. The second is a deeper lie. The truth, if it exists at all, lives somewhere in the friction between them.
I had been invited to Viktor Drakos’s apartment in the Arsenali district, a converted textile factory where the ghosts of looms still clattered in the walls. Viktor was, at that time, the most celebrated auteur in the Republic of Valtoria, a man whose name appeared in festival programs like a benediction. His films were studies in power and submission, light and shadow, the beautiful violence of desire. Critics called him a genius. His actors called him something else, but only in whispers, and only to each other.
I was not an actor. I was a writer, or trying to be. I had published a slim volume of essays on feminist cinema—a term that made Viktor smile the way a cat smiles at a cornered bird. He had read my book, he said. He wanted to discuss a collaboration. The flattery was a warm bath after a long winter of rejection. I brought a bottle of wine. I brought a notebook. I brought, without knowing it, the raw material of my own destruction.
The apartment was all exposed brick and stainless steel, a cathedral of minimalist wealth. In the corner, an editing suite glowed blue and green, the screensaver a slow-motion explosion of flower petals. We talked about light. He quoted a passage from my book back to me, and I felt the peculiar vertigo of being seen. That was his talent, Viktor’s. Not making films. Making mirrors.
The first hour was intoxicating. The second hour was confusing. The third hour is the one I have told a hundred times, and each time the telling reshapes it, the way water reshapes a stone.
In the official narrative—the one filed with the Valtorian Civil Court, the one that trended under the hashtag #JusticeForLeda, the one that made me a secular saint of the Iron Lilies movement—Viktor Drakos sexually assaulted me on his leather sofa while the editing suite flickered indifferent witness. I said no. He did not listen. I froze. He continued. The word “alleged” was a technicality, a courtesy the law extends to the accused before the cameras devour him.
This version is true. It is also incomplete.
Here is what I omitted: I did not freeze. Not entirely. Part of me floated above the scene, a director’s eye, framing the shot. His hands on my wrists. The rough grain of the leather against my back. The way the blue light from the editing suite cast his face in chiaroscuro, half saint, half skull. I remember thinking, with a clarity that sickens me even now: This will make a good story. Even as my body was pinned, my mind was already writing the press release.
When it was over, he offered me a glass of water. He was gentle. That was the worst part. If he had been brutal, if he had left bruises I could photograph and display, the narrative would have been clean. Instead, he asked me if I was okay. He said he had misunderstood my signals. He said he was sorry. He said it the way a director says “cut”—with the expectation that reality would now reset.
I walked home through the Arsenali district at two in the morning, my silk blouse the color of a bruise, my body carrying a confusion that would take months to curdle into certainty. The streets were empty except for the trams, which passed with a sound like the drawing of a blade. I remember thinking: This is how women disappear. Not into alleys. Into ambiguity.
The next morning, I called Cassandra Voss.
Cassandra was the executive director of the Iron Lilies, an advocacy collective that had begun as a small consciousness-raising group in the university district and had since metastasized into a political force. Their offices occupied a converted schoolhouse in the Lykaios neighborhood, the walls covered in murals of women with raised fists and eyes like searchlights. Cassandra herself was a woman carved from quartz—sharp, translucent, unbreakable. She wore her hair in a severe silver bob and her suits in shades of gray that matched the filing cabinets lining her office.
I told her what happened. I told her the clean version. The version without my complicity, my silence, my terrible narrative instinct. She listened without interrupting, her hands folded on her desk like two sleeping doves. When I finished, she said: “You have been given a weapon. The question is whether you are willing to wield it.”
I was. God help me, I was.
The civil suit was filed within the week. The defendant was listed as Viktor Drakos, but the true target was the system that had protected him—the critics who had celebrated his gaze, the studios that had funded his vision, the culture that had mistaken his predation for passion. I was the plaintiff, but I was also the director. The courtroom was my set. The testimony was my script.
And the public—ah, the public. They were my extras, my chorus, my audience. And I played them like a symphony.
The first leak was my diary. I gave it to Maren Kallis, a journalist with The Kerylos Observer who had been my lover years before. Maren had a face like a hungry fox and a byline that could end careers. She published excerpts on the front page, my handwriting reproduced in facsimile, the shaky loops and blots of ink suggesting a trauma too deep for words. In reality, I had written those passages weeks after the fact, carefully calibrating the tremor in my pen. The public called it brave. I called it stagecraft.
The second leak was a witness. Anya Petrova, a former production assistant on one of Viktor’s films, came forward to say that he had made “inappropriate comments” about consent and power. What she did not say—what I had coached her not to say—was that the comments had been made during a rehearsal for a scene about sexual violence, and that Viktor had been speaking in character. Context was a casualty I was willing to accept.
The third leak was myself. I gave a press conference on the steps of the Valtorian High Court, flanked by Iron Lilies in their signature white roses. I wore no makeup. I wore a high-collared dress that covered everything, so that the imagination would fill in what the fabric concealed. My voice trembled at the precise moments I had practiced in the mirror. A single tear slid down my cheek at the exact second the cameras peaked. The image went viral before I had finished speaking. #JusticeForLeda trended for eleven days.
The revenge was a warmth that spread through my chest like whiskey. I watched Viktor’s production company dissolve. I watched his upcoming film, a meditation on the myth of Leda and the Swan, get pulled from the festival circuit. I watched strangers scream “monster” at him in restaurants, in airports, in the street outside his apartment. He fled to a villa in the hills above Orsinia, and the journalists followed him there, drones hovering over his garden like mechanical vultures. I had not merely accused him. I had erased him. And I felt, in those early months, something close to ecstasy.
But ecstasy is a drug with diminishing returns.
The public, you see, is a hungry god. It demands not just sacrifice, but consistency. It demands that the victim remain a victim, frozen in the amber of her trauma, forever bruised, forever trembling, forever grateful for the sympathy she has received. The moment she begins to heal, the moment she laughs at a joke or takes a lover or writes a story that is not about her pain, the god grows restless. It begins to suspect it has been cheated.
I noticed it first in the comments. “She seems to be doing well,” someone wrote beneath a photograph of me leaving a café. The subtext was clear: How dare she? “I hope she’s not forgetting what he did,” wrote another. The subtext: We own her now.
The letters began to arrive. Some were supportive, filled with lavender ink and quotations from poets. Others were unsettling. One, written on paper the color of dried blood, said: “You are our saint. Saints must suffer.” Another, in a child’s handwriting, said: “My mommy says you are the bravest woman in the world. She cries when she reads about you. Please don’t let her stop crying.”
They did not want my justice. They wanted my pain. My pain was their nourishment, their moral clarity, their nightly entertainment. I had become a television show, and the ratings demanded that I never get better.
And I could not escape it. Every time I tried to write something new—an essay on cinema that had nothing to do with Viktor, a short story about my childhood in the coastal town of Thalassa—the public rejected it. “Stick to what you know,” the editors said, which meant: Stick to what we know you for. I was no longer Leda Kostova, writer. I was Leda Kostova, victim. The two identities had become fused, and I could not breathe in the narrow space between them.
The pill bottle arrived in September, three months after the suit was filed. I do not remember ordering it. I do not remember a doctor’s visit. It simply appeared on my bedside table, the orange plastic glowing in the streetlight that seeped through my curtains. Thirty capsules. Thirty erasers. I told myself I was keeping them for emergencies, the way one keeps a fire extinguisher in the kitchen. But the emergencies came more and more often, and the extinguisher began to look less like a safety measure and more like an invitation.
I tried to recant. That was the moment I sealed my fate.
I called a press conference—the last one—and I stood at the podium in the Iron Lilies headquarters, the mural of raised fists behind me like a jury of the damned. I opened my mouth to say: It was more complicated than I told you. I am not the saint you think I am. I am not a symbol. I am a woman, contradictory and culpable and tired.
But the cameras were already rolling, and the narrative had already been written, and the words that came out of my mouth were not my own. They were the words the public had planted in me, months of sympathy and expectation that had taken root like ivy in a ruin. I heard myself say: “I will not be silenced.” I heard the applause. I heard the headlines being written even as I spoke. “Victim Defies Her Abuser.” “Leda Kostova Refuses to Disappear.”
I had tried to escape the cage, and they had turned my escape attempt into another bar.
That night, I went home to my apartment in the Lysander district, the one with the high ceilings and the low light, the one that had become a shrine to my own suffering. The walls were covered in letters from strangers, their sympathy a wallpaper I could not peel off. The kitchen table was buried in bouquets, the flowers rotting in their vases, releasing a sweetness that was indistinguishable from decay.
I sat on my bed. I looked at the pill bottle. I thought about the version of myself that had existed before Viktor Drakos, before the Iron Lilies, before the hashtags and the headlines and the hungry, hungry public. She was a stranger to me now, a ghost of a ghost. I wanted to find her again. I wanted to apologize to her for what I had done with her name.
And so I swallowed the pills, one by one, like a rosary. I did not write a note. What would it have said? “I was killed by the kindness of strangers.”
The last thing I heard was the sound of the city outside my window, the trams drawing their blades across the night, the distant roar of a crowd that was already mourning me without knowing I was dead.
And then I was here, in this courtroom, in this silence, in this deposition that will never end.
Let me tell you what I have learned since dying. The dead see in layers. We see the world as it is, and also as it was, and also as it will be. And what I see, when I look at the living, is a vast and terrible hunger. A hunger for stories. A hunger for saints. A hunger for victims whose suffering can be consumed like bread and wine.
I was not killed by Viktor Drakos. His hands were on my wrists, but they were not on the pill bottle. The hands that pushed me toward the darkness were the hands of a million strangers who loved me too perfectly, too purely, too hungrily. They were the hands of readers and viewers and scrollers and weepers—the faceless congregation that needed me dead to sanctify their own outrage.
And you. You, who are reading this. You, who feel that warm, swelling sorrow in your chest even now. I see you. I see the way your sympathy is already curdling into something less pure, something that needs me to stay dead so that your grief remains meaningful. You are not my savior. You are my co-conspirator.
The trial is about to begin. Not the trial of Viktor Drakos—that one is already over, the verdict rendered by a jury of public opinion. No, the trial I speak of is larger. It is the trial of the living, the trial of sympathy, the trial of a world that devours its victims and calls it love.
I will be your narrator. I will be your evidence. I will be the ghost that sits beside you in the dark and whispers the truths you do not want to hear.
Somewhere, a gavel falls. It does not fall on wood. It falls on the hollow chamber of my chest, and the echo sounds exactly like your heartbeat.
Do not be late for the next chapter. The prosecution is ready to call its first witness.
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