That night—after Riva challenged him in front of the reps—Marcus Grey slammed his apartment door so hard the glass shuddered in its frame.
It wasn't the shouting he couldn't shake. It was the quiet. Riva's eyes kept replaying—blue, cold, and done with him.
Not anger. Judgment. Like she'd already written the ending and he wasn't in it.
He needed the clean version of reality back. The one where he held the leash.
The Aston Martin tore through Bel Air, the engine a guttural scream that sliced through the manicured hedges.
Bella Lawrence's place was all glass and straight lines—the kind of modern that felt expensive on purpose. The air carried iris oil and old cognac—money, polished. It always made him feel both bigger and smaller at the same time.
He swiped the keycard she'd given him and let himself in.
"She actually thought she could talk to me like that?" Marcus stormed into the living room, grabbed the cognac from the bar, and drank straight from the bottle. Amber liquid streaked his white shirt. He didn't blink. "Who does she think she is? Without me, Riva Lane would still be begging for scraps."
He paced, his voice bouncing off the vaulted ceiling like it needed the echo to sound convincing.
"We move the assets before Mackin & White gets into the guts," he snapped. "Especially the Neon Shadows offshore stuff. There's... creative accounting in there. We scrub it. Clean. Now."
Bella rose from the Minotti sofa, her silk robe trailing after her. She didn't go toward him. She went to the conservatory and pushed the glass doors open.
"Come here," she said, her voice soft enough to make his skin tighten. "I want to show you something."
Marcus followed, still fuming.
In the greenhouse, she stopped in front of a black iris—rare, velvety, the edges bruised dark.
"You know what I've been thinking about?" Bella said, a fingertip grazing one petal. "A kind of... possession."
Marcus set his glass down with a hard, sharp click. "Bella. Say it straight."
She turned, smiling like she meant it. That was the problem.
"Some people make things," Bella said. "They have that spark. They pull brilliance out of thin air."
Her eyes held his. Calm. Hungry. "And some people don't. So they copy. They recreate. They take what they need and call it theirs."
She stepped closer, her voice almost a lullaby. "I don't hate Riva. I've never hated her."
Her smile sharpened. "I admire her. I want to be her."
Marcus frowned.
"It's not enough to beat her," Bella continued. "You replace her. You take the parts that matter—the parts people remember—and you wear them until the world forgets who they belonged to."
She drifted past him, robe whispering over marble. "Like that scene in Summer Echoes. The vanity. The peeling paint. The way she stared at herself like she was trying not to break."
Bella closed her eyes.
When she opened them, her gaze had changed—recalibrated into Riva's teenage stare, raw and stubborn. Even the tremor at the corner of her mouth was a perfect, sickening match.
"If I don't believe I can fly," Bella said, hitting every beat, every breath, "then the wind won't ever stop for me."
Perfect. Clean. Terrifying.
Marcus's throat went dry. "How the hell do you even know that?"
Bella's smile deepened, pleased with herself. She stepped over to a sleek workstation tucked among the ferns and picked up a glass paperweight. Beneath it sat an old, yellowing film-club flyer—the USC screening of Summer Echoes. Riva's name was circled in faded ink.
"I've watched it twenty-seven times," Bella said, her fingers skimming the paper like she was touching a relic.
"Every pause. Every breath. I learned the rhythm. I learned the tells." Her eyes flicked up. "Because I don't get to create her. So I study her. Then I rebuilt her. Then I take credit for the finished product."
She tore the flyer in half—slow, neat.
"I need to know what she's made of," Bella said. "So I can take it apart and put it back together as me."
A cold line of dread ran down Marcus's spine.
Bella touched his jaw, her thumb easy, like she owned the hinge.
"People think the highest theft is money," she said, her voice turning camera-soft—the tone she wore for the public. "It's not."
She leaned in, close enough that he could smell her perfume over the greenhouse heat. "It's meaning."
Bella stepped back and looked at her reflection in the conservatory glass, testing the face she'd just borrowed.
"If I don't believe I can fly…" she started again, then stopped and laughed—sweet, wrong. "Then maybe I don't deserve the sky."
She turned to Marcus.
"That's how we win," Bella said. "We don't just take her future. We rewrite her past. So ten years from now, when someone says 'Riva Lane,' they'll follow it with the label you gave her."
Her smile widened. "Fraud. Liability. Toxic. And when they look at me? They'll say the light only worked because it was in my hands."
Marcus stared at her and finally felt it—the thing he'd invited into his life.
A skin-walker in silk.
This wasn't a spoiled heiress. This was a girl with no spark of her own, trying to fill the void by swallowing somebody else's.
Bella picked up his glass and sipped from the spot his mouth had touched.
"So don't worry," she said, her fingers trailing over his throat. "Let her climb a little higher."
Outside, L.A. glittered.
Inside, Bella Lawrence was planning a killing—not of a body, but of a name.
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A note from the author:
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