The message read: “Ghost.of.Girlfriends.Past.DVDSCR.XviD-Flowzn. No seeds. You have 48 hours. Watch alone.”

Leo didn’t.

Inside were five plain text files, each named after a woman he’d wronged. The files were blank.

The file was exactly as promised: a DVD screener. The timecode ran along the top. A red watermark blinked PROPERTY OF MIRAMAX diagonally across the screen. The video was encoded in XviD—blocky, artifact-ridden, with the kind of compression ghosting that made dark scenes look like rain on a windshield.

At 1 hour, 47 minutes—the runtime of a standard romantic comedy—the screen went black. The timecode at the top flickered. Then a new title card appeared: