Death smelled like bleach. It was a sharp, clinical lie—a thin layer of chemical sting trying to mask the rot underneath.
It lived in the medical wing of the Los Angeles Women's Penitentiary. It hung in the air, crept into ceiling cracks, and rode every breath Riva Lane dragged into her lungs.
She curled on the iron cot, knees tight to her chest. The prison uniform was thin and scratchy, but the cold wasn't on the surface. It was deeper, in the places you can't rub warmth back into.
The mattress gave nothing. Her spine found the springs anyway.
She breathed in, and her lungs answered with a wet rattle. Again. Again. A sound that didn't belong to a thirty-year-old.
Pneumonia. Or worse.
In here, no one owed you a name for what was killing you. They gave you pills—cheap, small, late—then looked past you as if you'd already been filed away.
Her hair used to be "Liquid Gold." Now it lay flat and dull against her temples, heavy with sweat. Her eyes—once blue enough to sell a poster—had gone gray, as if someone had drained the color out and left the rest behind.
Thirty. The age when people build empires.
Instead, she lay in a place designed to wash people out of the world.
On the cot beside hers, a new girl cried into her pillow. At first it had been high and frantic. By morning it was only breath and the soft thud of a fist against concrete. Riva didn't cover her ears.
Tonight, she needed the sound. Proof she wasn't the last one left.
Her mind wandered the way it always did when her body got too weak to fight it. Not a story—just flashes. And an old reflex she couldn't kill: she caught herself counting beats, cutting silence into pieces the way she used to cut scenes. Even here, even half-fevered, her brain kept trying to find an edit point.
Six months into her sentence. One "privileged" hour in the common room. A guard with nothing in his eyes but boredom and a taste for spectacle clicked the TV to entertainment news.
On-screen, Marcus Gray and Bella Lawrence moved down a red carpet like they owned the oxygen. Their fingers were threaded together. Cameras popped. Marcus leaned into the microphone with the relaxed certainty of a man who never pays the bill.
"People keep asking what sparked Neon Shadows," he said. "It was simple. An exercise in alchemy—taking the clumsy emotional ploys of an ordinary woman and distilling them into art."
Riva went still.
Neon Shadows wasn't a ploy. It was her mother's hospital room. It was the night air that tasted like pennies. It was what she'd told Marcus when she couldn't sleep and needed someone to hold the truth without twisting it.
A reporter pressed forward. "There are rumors Ms. Lane contributed to the original vision?"
Marcus smiled like he'd been offered a compliment. He drew Bella closer with the lazy ease of possession. "Riva was… efficient with logistics," he said. "But the soul of the work? That takes a depth she simply doesn't have."
Bella didn't hesitate. "Marcus has a gift for turning rough ore into pure gold."
Riva bit the inside of her cheek until she tasted metal.
So that was the story now. Her pain was "ore." His genius was the refining.
In one sentence, she understood her role in their partnership. Not co-author. Not equal.
Material.
A resource you mine until it runs dry.
The applause on the TV rose, bright and practiced. That sound thrummed against her eardrums until it bled into something colder—the phantom echo of a gavel coming down.
The courtroom.
The lights were too white, the kind that made everything look guilty. The indictment sat on the table in front of her, crisp paper, crisp ink:
Money Laundering.
Financial Fraud.
Two short lines. Enough to erase a life.
Riva tried to talk about cash flows and contracts, about signatures that weren't hers. But the room didn't lean toward truth. It leaned toward the clean version—the one that would make sense on a headline.
Her public defender sat beside her, tie slightly crooked, eyes red around the edges. He smelled like stale coffee and exhaustion. Every time he shifted, his palm left a damp mark on his legal pad, like the paper was sweating with him.
Across the aisle, the Lawrence family's attorneys filled a full row. Expensive suits. Calm faces. The kind of silence that doesn't come from confidence—it comes from certainty.
Then they started taking her apart.
Not with shouting. With folders.
Emails. Voicemails. Texts.
Private messages from the nights she'd broken down. The words she'd thrown when she was scared and angry and still naïve enough to think she was speaking to someone who loved her. They played the clips, paused them, replayed them, stripped the context out and left only the worst edges.
On the monitors, the labels appeared—clean, bold, and final:
UNSTABLE.
CONTROLLING.
COERCIVE.
She saw the shift ripple through the room like a stain spreading in water. A juror's pen stopped moving. Her lawyer's shoulders tightened, just slightly—like his body knew the verdict before his mouth could say it. The words weren't evidence. They were a bleach cycle—whitening their hands, staining hers.
And then it hit her: even in the months she'd thought were safe, Marcus had been saving it. Sorting it. Selecting the moments that would look the ugliest under bright light.
This wasn't about money. It was about permission. Permission to call her crazy in a room that mattered.
Before trial, they offered a plea deal. Admit partial liability. Get fewer years. Her lawyer begged her to sign.
Riva looked at the paper. Looked at the monitors. Looked at the three words waiting like a brand.
And she didn't sign.
Not because she thought she would win. Because if she signed, she would be helping them wash the lie into permanence.
She pushed the pen back across the table with a hand that shook, and met her lawyer's eyes for the first time. No.
The money was already gone—routed through layers of offshore shells until it came out clean on the other side. The spreadsheets on display were tidy, professional, persuasive. Every gap pointed to her like a finger.
Outside the courthouse, the headlines were already written. Inside, the floor felt tilted, just slightly—toward the outcome everyone expected.
On the day of the verdict, Marcus didn't show.
Where he should have been, a bouquet of lilies sat on the defense table. White enough to look medical. A card lay among the stems, written in his neat, effortless script:
May you find your peace.