In that instant, Riva understood that "ten thousand arrows to the heart" wasn't poetry. It was mechanics.
Something in her chest dropped out, like a support beam kicked loose. Her breath didn't land. The room thinned at the edges. The only steady thing was the judge's gavel—distant, controlled—marking time as if her life were just another case number.
When the iron gates shut behind her, the world outside cleaned itself of her fast.
Friends disappeared. Partners stopped returning calls. Photos vanished from feeds. And the headlines—already waiting—went to work:
THE UNGRATEFUL MADWOMAN.
In comment sections, people repeated it like a joke they hadn't written. It was easy cruelty, typed with breakfast still in their mouths. For Riva, it was bleach again—scrubbing her name into something unrecognizable until even she hesitated over it.
In the infirmary, fevered and sleepless, she signed the divorce papers.
Not because she believed in them. Because she could feel how few battles her body had left, and she needed to choose which ones to spend her last strength on.
The lawyer stood over her without warmth. He spoke in the same voice he might use to recite visiting hours.
"Mr. Gray says if you sign now, he won't use his influence to blacklist you when you're released." A pause, deliberate. "You know the Lawrence family's reach in Hollywood. Don't fight the tide."
Her hands shook so hard the pen clicked against the page. She forced her name onto the line anyway—slow, stubborn, letter by letter.
When the ink dried, her arm went heavy, as if she'd signed away more than a marriage.
The lawyer gathered the papers, then leaned in like he was doing her a favor.
"He asked me to pass along a message," he murmured. "'Riva, your talent? It was never anything but my inspiration. Without me, you're a ghost.'"
That sentence didn't just insult her. It rewrote her. It drove a blunt, rusted nail through the last piece of pride she'd kept as a creator.
So that was the truth: Marcus had never seen her as an equal—never even as a rival worth fearing. To him, she'd been a source. A place to extract from. Useful until empty.
Then came the sickness.
Infections that didn't finish, only returned. Nights bent over a sink, coughing until her ribs burned. A metallic taste that wouldn't leave, like a penny held under her tongue. Her weight slid off in a steady drop until her reflection looked like someone else's problem.
After a while she couldn't separate the body from the story. Pain was pain. Memory was pain. It all blurred into one long, bleach-white stretch of time.
She lay on her cot and stared at the ceiling. Her hands were raw from work, her nails bitten down, but even when she dug them into her palm she barely felt it.
Marcus hadn't just taken the company. That was theft. The real damage was what came after: the careful erasure.
He had taken her work, her breakdowns, her love, and fed them into a new identity—one that required her to be reduced to a warning label. He didn't just leave her behind. He made sure the world had a reason to look away.
And the hate that grew in that space was clean.
Not dramatic. Not poetic.
Useful.
She hated Marcus. She hated Bella. She hated the Lawrences—their money, their reach, the way they could wash a lie until it passed for fact. That hatred kept her awake. Kept her breathing. Kept her from disappearing the way they wanted.
But underneath it sat something worse than hate: disgust. At her own blindness. At the girl who'd handed over trust like it was nothing.
"Marcus… Bella… the Lawrences…" she whispered into the dark, voice scraped raw. "If there's a hell, I'll meet you there. And I'll make you pay."
Outside her narrow window, the prison searchlights swept the sky.
That night, the light wasn't the usual hard white. It had a red tint to it—wrong enough that even the guards noticed.
In the corridor, their voices drifted past in broken pieces.
"Blood Moon…"
"…bad omen…"
Riva pushed herself off the cot. Her knees hit the concrete. She stayed there a second, breathing through the shake in her arms, then dragged her finger through the grime on the floor.
She drew the Prism logo—slow, deliberate—line by line. Not because she believed in symbols.
Because she needed something to hold onto that was hers.
Her lips moved in a prayer that wasn't a prayer. A bargain. An ultimatum.
One chance, she thought. That's all. Give me one chance to tear it down.
When she finished, scarlet moonlight slid through the bars and spilled across the mark. The grooves caught the red like wet paint.
The air changed—pressure dropping, the room suddenly too still, as if the building itself had paused to listen.
Her vision frayed. Fever pulled her under. She clung to the edge of consciousness with one last thought—sharp enough to cut through the fog.
I will not let it end like this.
At the lip of the void, something broke.
Not a sound she heard with her ears—more like a fracture she felt in her bones. As if time, under the weight of her refusal, had cracked.
And for one impossible moment, the current shifted.
Backwards.