The scent of death was a cocktail of rusted iron soaked in bleach, choked under the cloying, artificial sweetness of cheap detergent.
It clung to the air in the medical wing of the Los Angeles Women's Penitentiary. It settled into the hairline fractures of the ceiling, crawled through the rusted ventilation ducts, and hitched a ride on every agonizing breath Riva Lane drew into her lungs.
Riva curled into herself on the cold, unyielding iron frame.
Her threadbare prison uniform—a coarse, abrasive fabric that bit into her skin—was no shield against the chill seeping from the marrow of her bones.
The silk gowns of her past felt like a fever dream now. Here, her skeletal spine pressed against a mattress as thin as a sheet of paper. With every inhalation, a jagged, wet rattle echoed in her chest—the rhythmic wheeze of a machine shaking itself into scrap metal.
Pneumonia. Or worse. Tuberculosis?
In this cage, a diagnosis was a luxury she didn't possess. This wing was a high-efficiency meat grinder, fueled by budget cuts and systemic neglect.
There were only under-dosed, bargain-bin antibiotics, the icy stares of prison doctors, and the impatient sighs of nurses—all silent proclamations that her life, in this cell, weighed less than a handful of dust.
They used to call her hair "Liquid Gold." The same mane that once ignited the flashbulbs of every red carpet now hung like scorched hay, matted with grease against her sunken, sweat-slicked temples.
Her eyes—the ones The Hollywood Reporter once claimed "held the tides of the entire Pacific"—were now hollowed out, buried in bruised, skull-like sockets. The blue had been leached away, bleached by despair into a lifeless, slate gray.
Thirty. This was supposed to be the peak—the age for building empires, for legacies, for children.
It was the age where she should have stood at the summit of the Hollywood power ladder. Instead, she was in this living coffin, a discarded rag waiting for life to drain out through a sieve of pain and humiliation.
In the next cot, a new girl had been sobbing into her pillow all night.
When she first arrived, her cries were like sirens—sharp, piercing, panicked. Now, her voice was shredded, reduced to a rhythmic gasp and the dull, hollow thud of a fist striking concrete.
Riva's hand twitched, wanting to reach out for the wall, but her fingers were too weak, falling back onto the cold iron.
Days ago, she would have pressed a pillow over her ears to drown it out.
Tonight, she relied on that sound. It was the only proof that she wasn't the only living soul left in this graveyard.
Fragments of memory clawed through her mind—not as a coherent narrative, but as jagged, poisoned slivers of glass, flaying her nerves with every heartbeat.
It happened six months into her sentence, during a "privileged" hour in the common room.
The air smelled of industrial bleach and stale sweat; overhead, the fluorescent lights hummed like trapped, dying insects.
A guard, bored and casually cruel, thumbed the remote and—with a jagged grin—flipped the channel to the entertainment news.
The screen flashed, bright and sudden as a fresh wound.
On-screen, Marcus Gray and Bella Lawrence stood hand-in-hand beneath the crystal chandeliers of a high-end charity gala.
Cameras popped in staccato bursts, a rhythmic firing squad of flashes.
Marcus looked untouched by gravity—radiant, polished, the kind of man who could make even a microphone seem honored to catch his voice. He leaned into a thicket of reporters, his charisma spilling through the pixels like heat.
"People often ask where the inspiration for Neon Shadows came from," Marcus said, his voice as smooth as aged bourbon.
"It was born from a deep reflection during my college days—a study on a pathetic human phenomenon. I wanted to explore how people with a total lack of true talent become hysterical, using extreme emotions—faking injury, faking madness, faking deep affection—just to grab attention and mask their own utter incompetence."
Riva's blood went cold.
Those were her words.
Not the words she'd crafted for an audience, but her soul.
The words that had been torn out of her as she sat by her mother's deathbed, when fear tasted like copper in her mouth and grief had left her hollow. She had whispered them to Marcus in the sanctuary of the dark, believing she was safe.
A reporter pressed forward. "I've heard rumors that Miss Lane contributed many of the original concepts?"
Marcus offered a thin, dismissive smile.
He pulled Bella closer with an easy, proprietary arm. "Riva was skilled at executing the finer details," he said, his tone dripping with condescension. "But the soul… the soul requires a more profound perspective."
Bella's laugh was light, as saccharine as syrup. "Marcus has a gift," she chimed in, "for taking raw, unrefined material and refining it into gold."
Behind the screen, Riva bit down on her lip until she tasted the salt of her own blood.
They hadn't just stolen her story; they were publicly deconstructing her agony–taking apart her darkest nights like a product demo, "refining" her trauma into something sharp and profitable, then driving it back into her chest with a smile.
In the script of their perfect partnership, she realized she had already been written as a footnote: a temporary vessel for "raw material," destined for the shredder.
Inside the TV and out, laughter rose in a practiced chorus. Polite applause followed, neat and final as a death sentence.
Riva curled tighter on her narrow cot, the rusted springs pressing into her spine. Her fingernails dug into her palms—skin already cracked and raw from weeks of industrial labor and the biting chill—until the pressure should have been unbearable.
But she felt almost nothing.
The betrayal wasn't just that he'd stolen her company or the life they'd built. It was the meticulous, cold-blooded rewriting of their history.
Marcus was harvesting every ounce of her worth—her creativity, her suffering, her love—and using it as fuel for his new legend.
He was sanding her out of their shared story, pinning her up as the "mad woman," the "emotional blackmailer," the cautionary tale that made his ascent look heroic.
She was merely the discarded byproduct of his triumph.
And then there was the deepest cut—the wound that never stopped bleeding, silent and dark in the depths of her body:
The child.
Four months before the heavy iron gates had slammed shut, she'd discovered she was pregnant.
After the betrayal, the lawsuits, and the way everyone she knew had vanished like smoke, that tiny heartbeat had been the last sliver of light left in her world—an ember she'd cupped in her hands, a new beginning tethered to her by blood and stubborn hope.
She dragged herself—or what was left of her—through the wrought-iron gates of Bella's villa, hollowed out by months of ruthless litigation. Every step felt borrowed, as if her legs no longer belonged to her.
Her mouth tasted of scorched coffee and the bitterness of many sleepless nights. Her limbs were leaden with that peculiar exhaustion that transcends the physical—a moral fatigue born from being dragged through courtrooms and tabloid headlines until her own name felt like a foreign object in her mouth.
She hadn't come to plead. She hadn't come to fight.
She had come for one reason—to tell him.
A butler, his expression as flat as a death mask, led her down a corridor that smelled faintly of white lilies and expensive floor wax.
The air was cool, curated. Too clean. Too calm.
He opened the heavy doors to a glass conservatory flooded with the bruised gold of late-afternoon light.
Inside, Marcus and Bella stood shoulder to shoulder, admiring a rare iris as if the world contained nothing uglier than an imperfect petal.
Bella's hand rested on Marcus's forearm—casual, proprietary, an intimacy so effortless it made Riva's stomach pitch.
Sunlight caught the diamond on Bella's finger, fracturing into sharp, glittering shards that seemed to mock the dimness of Riva's world.
When Marcus turned and saw her, his face didn't soften. His eyes held only a flicker of irritation—and beneath that, a flash of disgust, as if she were a streak of mud tracked across a pristine white carpet.
"What are you doing here?" he snapped. "Haven't you caused enough trouble?"
Riva swallowed, the words scraping up her throat like dry sand.
When she finally spoke, her voice was thin and scorched, the sound of something burned down to ash.
"I'm pregnant."
For a heartbeat, the conservatory went unnaturally quiet.
There was only the faint, mechanical hum of the climate control and the distant, rhythmic chirp of a fountain.
Then, Bella's laugh cut through the silence—sharp, staccato, almost delighted. Her gaze raked over Riva from head to toe, the way one might inspect something unpleasant caught in a storm drain.
"Oh, Marcus." Bella tilted her head, her smile like sugar poured over rot. "It seems someone is still trying the oldest trick in the book to tie you down. How… desperate."
Marcus's expression flickered—the color draining, flushing hot, then receding again—before it settled into a look colder than anger. Something clinical. Something final.
"Get rid of it."