The headache came first—an inside job. A dull, relentless thud in her temples, like someone working a hammer against bone and taking their time.
Then the sound hit, loud and jagged. Bass that climbed into her ribs.
The bright chatter of people who performed even when they laughed. Crystal kissing crystal in small, sharp toasts.
The air tasted expensive—sandalwood perfume, heavy cigar smoke, gin clean enough to pretend it wasn't poison—pressed into her senses, hot and too close.
Too much light. It stabbed.
Riva's eyes snapped open.
Above her, a massive crystal chandelier hung like a frozen detonation, breaking the glare into hard, jagged specks of color. Beneath her, a handwoven rug lay thick and silent—softness engineered to swallow any sign of discomfort, designed to make a scream feel like a secret.
The penthouse.
It resolved in a blur of glass and sharp, predatory angles. Beyond the floor-to-ceiling windows, downtown Los Angeles burned in the dark. Towers glowed like neon monoliths. Traffic stitched the streets as if the city's wealth and appetite had been spilled here, then scrubbed shiny and called beautiful.
She looked down at herself. Her breath caught—no rust, no blood, no sickness on her tongue. Just air that felt… bleached.
A deep sapphire silk dress skimmed her body, slick as water.
Her skin was tight, offensively healthy—no needle marks from prison clinics, no bruises from iron edges. Her fingers were steady. Her nails were neat, tinted that faint, natural pink that only shows up on women who have time and money to keep small things perfect.
This wasn't a fever dream. This wasn't a dying brain making pretty pictures.
This was home.
Or the version of home she'd been sold.
The penthouse she and Marcus Gray had bought the moment Neon Shadows detonated and made them Hollywood's newest royalty.
A place where everything was curated, everything bleached bright enough to look innocent.
The sanctuary where she'd once packed away her fantasies about love and safety and called them real.
She pushed up from the sofa, clumsy with a clawing urgency.
Her legs didn't remember the weakness, but her mind did, recoiling from the terrifying plushness of the carpet.
Half-running, half-stumbling, she crossed the room and pressed her palms to the window, needing the cold to tell the truth.
The glass met her skin—smooth, indifferent—and she held on like a lifeline, waiting for the phantom sensation of prison concrete to fade from beneath her fingernails.
Her reflection stared back.
A ghost, wearing the skin of a woman she used to be.
Gold hair, sleek and heavy. Makeup set like a flawless mask. A face that still belonged to daylight. And her eyes—the blue was back. No gray film, no hollowed-out ruin. Just a clean, vicious brightness, like a sky after a storm scrubs the world raw.
Riva snapped her head toward the wall. The digital calendar glowed there, calm as a verdict, the date lit in crisp, clinical white.
Three years ago. The year the fuse was lit.
Twenty-seven. She was twenty-seven.
To the world, this was the summit.
Neon Shadows remained a box-office juggernaut, and Prism Pictures' valuation climbed as if it had forgotten gravity. In the industry's eyes, they were the gilded standard—Hollywood's favorite origin story, an enviable power couple with synchronized smiles and a future that looked airbrushed in every frame.
Inside the penthouse, the shine was already coming off.
Marcus's hunger for control had begun to manifest in small, daily lacerations.
The lies flowed with less friction. The silence after their fights grew thicker, a heavy dampness that sat in the lungs.
Riva was exhausted—tired enough to fantasize about the exit, but not yet brave enough to walk through it under the white-hot glare of the spotlight. Board meetings. Shared history. The voyeuristic stare of the public. It all functioned like lead, pinning her to the floorboards.
So they lived in a split-screen: devotion for the cameras, a cold war behind the deadbolt.
A clean version for the masses. A sharper truth behind the glass.
It was perfect architecture for ruin—the exact setup Marcus would later weaponize, laundering sentiment into headlines until the world believed the story he sold.
A sound scraped out of her throat—almost a laugh, dry and thin as paper.
Not warmth. Just disbelief finding air. She understood what had happened to her. Or she reached for the only word that didn't taste like madness.
She was back.
Three years back—before the narrative snapped, before scandal bleached the stains into permanence, before lies hardened into history.
In prison, her only light had come from the library's leftovers: yellowed Wall Street Journal pages, battered issues of The Hollywood Reporter, business biographies cracked open and re-cracked until the spines gave up. She read them like scripture. She dissected every decision that made Marcus untouchable, traced each legal gap he slipped through, and memorized securities law until the language lived in her sleep.
Back then, that knowledge was anesthesia.
Now, it was a blade.
Her heart slammed against her ribs—hard, fast, animal. A rush of vertigo hit her, bright with possibility, and then the one thing that had never dulled: hate.
Clean. Steady. Sharpened in the dark. The room tilted. She braced herself against the window, palms flat to the cold glass, knuckles whitening as she forced her body to stay upright.
Fate had handed her a second run.
This time, she wouldn't bleed out politely while the world watched. She wouldn't smile for the cameras while someone else edited her life into a cautionary tale.
She had crawled out of hell with scars under her skin.
Whatever softness she once had died on a prison infirmary bed.