She waited until the hallway settled—until the voices drifted and no footsteps lingered outside the heavy door—then forced herself upright and moved with a jagged, frantic speed.
In the master bath, she wrenched the faucet open.
Cold water slammed against the porcelain with a clean, percussive roar.
She cupped it in her palms and threw it against her face, again and again, until the psychological fog finally splintered.
She lifted her head. Water tracked down her cheeks in thin, crystalline paths, catching the light like shards of glass.
The mirror threw back a young, flawless version of her own face. The sight should have been a reprieve. Instead, her stomach twisted with a familiar, knife-edged spasm—not sickness, but muscle memory.
Her palms flattened against the cold marble counter. For a second, her peripheral vision went dark. The sound in her ears was no longer the rush of a luxury faucet.
It was the prison showers—months into her sentence—dirty, freezing spray hammering against cracked concrete, the air thick with the suffocating stench of mildew and industrial bleach.
Women laughing with a predatory edge. A guard barking orders, the sound like a whip crack. In that room, it wasn't just your body that was exposed; it was every scrap of dignity you still imagined you owned.
She didn't want to touch that filthy past again.
Riva's arms wrapped around her chest on instinct. Her fingers hit smooth, expensive silk… but her brain insisted it was prison fabric, abrasive and paper-thin.
A voice surfaced from the dark—female, amused, and practiced in the specific cruelty of the yard.
"The label's still on you, Lane. Don't forget what you are."
Riva jerked the faucet wider and shoved her face directly under the freezing stream. She stayed there until her lungs burned and the urge to scream dissolved into a raw gasp for air.
Enough.
She stood up, water pouring off her chin. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, forcing the tremor out of her jaw. She made herself a statue.
You're back, she told herself.
Three years back. Before the bleach set. Before they scrubbed your identity until you were nothing but a headline.
Her hands shook, but she clamped them onto the edge of the counter and held on until the tremor subsided. The flashbacks weren't going anywhere. They were leeches in her nervous system, waiting for a soft moment to feed.
Fine.
Let them remind you.
Memories came in flashes—misfiled footage—cutting back to USC, years earlier, when the Southern California sun bleached the hallways into a hard, clean white.
Riva had been moving fast, a screenplay pressed to her chest, the paper still warm from her hands.
She rounded a corner and "accidentally" clipped a guy carrying a teetering stack of directing books. The pile collapsed. Spines hit linoleum. Pages slid out and fanned across the floor.
He dropped to one knee, gathering the mess with practiced urgency. When he looked up, his eyes were impossibly green, bright enough to read as sincerity. His apology landed perfectly—soft, breathless, just humble enough to feel real.
"You're Riva Lane?" he said, like the name mattered to him. "I saw Summer Echoes. You were… haunting." He smiled, boyish and open. "Marcus Gray. Directing."
Back then, she called it fate. A meet-cute. One of those clean beginnings you tell yourself is proof the world is kind.
Now she could see the edit.
It wasn't an accident. It was an opening scene—blocked, timed, and performed for one audience: her.
Everything that later became Prism Pictures—the first concepts, the rough drafts, the introductions that unlocked rooms—came out of Riva in late nights and quiet mornings.
Marcus didn't steal it in one dramatic heist. He washed it, a little at a time, until it looked like it had always belonged to him. "Our dream," he called it. Credit shifted in small, polite increments. By the time anyone noticed, the building wore his name.
Back then, they lived in a damp apartment where the window never sealed and the walls sweated in winter. They split instant ramen and laughed like hunger was temporary. Outside, Los Angeles pulsed neon and made ambition look like romance.
"One day," he'd tell her, fingers threaded through hers, voice low with conviction, "we carve our names into this city. I'll direct. You'll lead. We won't just step into other people's dreams—we build ours."
She mistook the hunger for love because she needed to.
She wasn't blind to the greed. She just kept relabeling it—ambition, drive, the price of escape. When doubt surfaced, she pushed it down and told herself the picture mattered more than the cracks.
Until the Lawrence gala.
The restroom was a shrine to money: gold-leaf mirrors, air thick with perfume, lighting designed to soften every lie. Bella Lawrence stood at the sink, touching up her lipstick with bored precision.
She didn't look at Riva at first. She examined her own reflection, as if Riva were a smudge in the background.
"Oh, Riva." Bella drew the name out slowly, sweet enough to pass as polite. "Marcus mentioned you helped him through his… difficult years." A small pause. "That 'debt' seems to weigh on him."
Then she turned, her gaze sliding over Riva like an appraisal.
"He told me that every time he kisses you," Bella said, voice bright with casual disgust, "he can still smell cheap takeout." Another beat. "And sweat. You, darling, are proof of who he used to be. The unpolished, embarrassing version."
The faucet leaked.
Drip. Drip.
Riva stood still, her throat tightening until the air felt thin. Every sane impulse told her to walk out.
Even slapping Bella would've been cleaner than needing an answer.
But Riva had staked too much—her work, her name, a private history she'd treated like a marriage license. She couldn't let it rot in silence. She needed to hear Marcus deny it.
So she confronted him.
He pulled her in the way he always did after a fight—chin on her shoulder, arms closing like a solution. His green eyes went wounded in exactly the right way, stage-lit and believable.
"Baby," he murmured, warm and flawless. "How could you believe her?" His hands tightened, steadying her like she was the problem to be managed. "Someone like Bella has wanted me from the beginning. Of course she wants you gone." He tilted back just enough to catch her eyes. "You know you're everything to me. Without you, there is no me."
It was sincere enough to feel real. Smooth enough to wash doubt away.
And in that moment, shame rose in her—hot, obedient, immediate. Shame for doubting him. Shame for being jealous. Shame for needing proof.
But now—
She blotted her face dry and lifted her head. The eyes in the mirror were still cold, still crystalline, but deep beneath the sediment of hate, something sharper surged to the surface. It was fury—a raw, burning contempt for her own weakness, for the way her body had flawed and flinched without her permission.
"Then let the fear—let the disgust—be the fuel," she whispered to her reflection.
Her breath fogged the glass, a small, vanishing ghost. "Every time the knife twists, remember the price he's going to pay."