23. Winners Circle
Winner's Circle
Romi
The presenter cracked the seal on the envelope and held for maximum drama, like there might be something radioactive inside. The crowd drew its breath as a group; waiting for the money shot.
Lights blazing hot enough to melt foundation.
Typical, they packed you in like livestock and called it exclusive.
My hands were folded in my lap—steady, controlled, not even a pinky tremor to give away the fact that my heart was sprinting like a high school freshman on an energy drink.
There wasn't any point in pretending I didn't care. I did. I always cared.
He held the card up, turned it, and read:
"And the award for Best Female Rap Artist goes to…Stacks Monroe!"
The air split open. Applause hit first, then the standing ovation, then the shriek of Stacks's crew in the mezzanine.
Stacks launched up from her seat like she'd been shot out of a cannon, hugged her manager and the stranger next to her, and hit the aisle with a walk that'd make a runway model pack it up and go home.
My name still rang in my ears, even as the reality settled.
I'd won this category three years running.
I'd never lost, not once. The script called for me to jump up, fake the surprise, hug whoever was nearest, and accept a weighty chunk of engraved Lucite with a speech programmed in my brain.
Instead, I was just…sitting there. I'd rehearsed this part, too—the "gracious defeat," the "clap and smile with dignity"—but it was a little like trying to ride a bike backward.
My mouth did the right thing. My hands did the right thing.
Not sarcastic, not slow, but not fan behavior either.
The cameras cut to me, as I knew they would, and I gave them the look: a glimmer of pride, a flash of teeth, eyes wide with "isn't this wonderful" sincerity.
I'd practiced it in the mirror so many times, I could've performed it under anesthesia.
But I felt it, real. Maybe for the first time.
Stacks had earned it. Not just the award, but the way the room went up for her.
I'd watched her come up, watched her grind, watched her eat shit in public a hundred times and keep moving.
She was one of the few who'd never played cute about being my competition, but she didn't try to be my friend, either. I respected that.
Still, my stomach folded on itself like a deck chair.
Stacks hit the stage, and the world swallowed her up: the applause, the stage lights, the hot slap of the moment. She peered out at the auditorium, scanned for her people, then straight down the barrel of the camera. She didn't even glance at me. Smart girl.
She did the usual thank-yous: the "this means so much to me," the shout out to her dead grandmother and her city and Seventh Circle.
Then she went off-script. "Shout out to the Queen, Romi Dulce, for raising the bar so high the rest of us needed a jetpack to catch up.
This is for every girl who ever got called 'too much' by someone who couldn't handle it. "
There was a moment where everyone turned—eyes on me, waiting to see if I would nod, or sneer, or brush it off. I gave them the nod. Tonight was for Stacks.
The remainder of the show played out in a static haze. Presenters cycled through, other categories blurred into each other, and the host's jokes landed with the weight of a wet tortilla. Applause faded to nothing. Typical. They worship, then forget. That's the game.
I looked around the auditorium, looking for something to anchor me.
That's when I spotted her: Cam, four rows away, tucked into a seat at the end of her block, hands folded together so tight her knuckles had gone white.
The lights bounced off her dress, and for once she didn't look like the wild card in a kid's birthday deck. She looked a little stunned. Hollow.
She didn't clap right away when Stacks won.
She waited, just a second, like her brain couldn't quite process the outcome.
When she did, it was with the flat, even claps of a person who'd expected their name, too.
Wanted it even more than me, she made that clear.
For all her talk, all her "I don't need anyone's approval" bullshit, I saw her wilt.
The way her shoulders slumped, even as she kept her chin up.
I knew that posture—had worn it myself, after a dozen little losses the world never peeped.
She didn't look back at me, but I kept watching her.
Studied the set of her jaw, the way she pressed her lips together, holding something in.
I wondered what it was. For a weird, slow-motion second, I felt bad for her.
Like, truly bad. Not the "ha ha, get fucked, you tried" pity, but the real deal, the stuff that makes you want to hug someone and never let the world see.
I blinked, tried to reset my head. I'd been the queen long enough that I'd thought nobody could ever touch the crown. Stupid. Cam had called it from day one: "Romi's legacy." She was right. Tonight, the guard had changed, and I'd be damned if I let anyone see how much it stung.
The show ran on. Stacks walked off stage with her trophy. I stayed put, hands steady, face locked. If the cameras caught me, they'd catch me gracious. If anyone was going to cry or sulk or go off-script, it wouldn't be me.
Instead, I clapped, like I had anything left to give. Like losing hadn't rearranged the whole room in my head.
After a minute, I realized it hadn't. All it changed was me.
The post-show press line was hell on earth, but I'm built for hell. I hit every step of the gauntlet, each reporter lined up like a row of vending machines, their questions preloaded and priced by the minute.
First came the "Queen Reacts" headlines—how does it feel to pass the torch, did you see this coming, is it bittersweet?
I gave them the same sound bite every time: "Nobody stays on top forever.
I'm proud of Stacks. She's been hungry since day one.
" My face stayed calm, smug, but inside, battery acid ate away at my chest.
Every click of the shutter, every "Romi, over here!" felt like a chore. I never blinked. The trick was to look unbothered when your chest went tight and stayed that way.
I spotted Stacks up ahead, surrounded by cameras and mics, the trophy smudged from handling. I tried to slip past behind her, keep moving, but then I heard it.
"Romi!"
Stacks's voice cut through the noise. I froze, realized too late I was in frame, cameras swiveling toward me. Stacks broke away from the reporter mid-sentence and pulled me into a hug before I could escape. Real. Warm. I went stiff for half a second, then forced myself to lean into it.
"Congratulations," I said, loud enough for the cameras. I meant it, even if it tasted bitter as lemons.
Stacks beamed at me, squeezed my shoulder. "Means the world coming from you."
I smiled, nodded to the reporter hovering with her mic. "She earned it." Then I extracted myself, smooth and gracious, and walked off before anyone could ask me how it really felt. Because the world loved little more than to see a Black woman humbled. I was over this shit.
After the last interview, I ducked a few more photo ops and snuck out through the back.
Back at the hotel, the service elevators were big enough to smuggle in a football team and all their bad decisions, and I slid into one before the people with phones caught up.
Z had already dipped back to the suite, so by the time I got there, the living room was a command post of glam people, stylists, and one exhausted assistant adjusting a ring light.
Zaniyah sat on the couch, thumbs flying over her phone screen, and barely glanced up as someone handed her a bottle of water. She popped the cap, passed it to me, and fixed me with that eyebrow.
"Ready to talk next moves, or am I wasting my breath?"
I dropped onto the armrest next to her. "Barely."
She pulled up the Notes app. "Okay, so look. You're trending. Half of it's love, but the other half's vultures—'is Romi finally finished,' blah blah. I can hit the blogs now or wait till morning, but we need a plan. You want to go proactive, or let them tire themselves out first?"
I shrugged, sipping the drink. "Whatever, Z. Dealer's choice."
She frowned. "If you don't care, I'll spin it myself. But the afterparty's gonna be a circus, so if you want to salvage the narrative, you need to post a selfie with Stacks and bounce. Honestly, you could drop a story just to make the trolls work harder."
I stared at a crease in my dress and wished she'd stop. "You got it handled. Just tell me what to wear."
She sighed, reading me. "You know, talking about it actually works for some people, Ro. Try it. For once."
I rolled my eyes. "Not my style. Get me out of this dress."
She snapped for the glam team. "Fine. Gold dress. No funeral vibes. Sharp, clean. I'll text your talking points if you feel like being a team player."
The stylists descended, fussing and fixing, while Zaniyah kept half-talking to herself about PR angles and fake beefs. I let her words blend into the background, my mind stuck replaying Cam's face in the crowd—all those feelings I wouldn't touch, not now.
By the time the gold dress was zipped and my hair was set, Zaniyah still hadn't let up. "You sure you're okay?" she asked, softer now.
I gave her my best blank stare. "I'm fine. Just tired. Can we go?"
She studied me for a long beat. "Whatever you say, sis. Let's get you back in the game."
She opened the door, and I followed, pushing everything else down.
Tonight, it was all about the party. The rest could wait.
The afterparty had a personality disorder.
It couldn't decide if it wanted to be an art installation, a nightclub, or a hostage situation.
The ballroom was gutted and rebuilt with a lattice of LED tubing and lit up archways, all of it pulsing in shades of electric blue.
House lights were off, but the stage rig had been doubled so every angle on the room was fair game for social media.
The bass didn't thump; it vibrated your bones until you tasted the rumble in your teeth.
The crowd was at double capacity, mostly the same faces from the auditorium but liquored up and running on the adrenaline of not having to pretend for TV anymore. The smell was synthetic—perfume, dry ice, Red Bull, two or three high-dollar vape pens fighting for dominance.
I navigated the first three clusters of bodies like I had a VIP pass coded into my DNA. Every person I passed tried to latch on for a quick word, a selfie, or to say they'd seen me. I gave each of them the appropriate level of attention—more if they deserved it, none if they didn't.
A minor artist from Atlanta slid in first, with a drink in each hand and voice bent just to the edge of slurring. "Queen, you got robbed tonight. Nobody else had a prayer."
I gave her a small, real smile. "It's Stacks's moment. Let her have it."
She giggled, leaned in for a photo, and was gone before the flash finished.
Next up: a crew of handlers in head to toe black, buzzing like a school of piranhas.
They wanted the debrief: who styled the orange look, where I got my shoes, what my thoughts were on Stacks's outfit.
I fielded the questions like a pro, letting them do most of the talking while I scanned the room over their heads.
Every shadow could've been Cam, and it made my pulse skip for a second.
A server tried to hand me a glass of champagne. I took it but didn't drink. The DJ was going off, and the noise level meant you had to talk directly into someone's ear or not at all. I used it as an excuse to slide past a few more people, offering quick hugs and air kisses like candy at Halloween.
She was at the bar, squeezed between two guys who looked like they'd just gotten off a production crew shift.
She wasn't talking to anyone, nursing a glass of something clear and staring at her phone.
The light from the screen caught her face and turned her eyes into black holes.
The dress was a crisp white, short, cut to do damage—hood up, hem high enough to put the ink on her thighs on full display like a fucking gallery opening.
Heels that made her legs go on for a week.
Makeup flawless. Her stylist put in work.
Something jolted in my chest. Not romantic, not even sexual—just pure, hot awareness. A warning signal.
Cam looked up.
Our eyes locked. Half a second. Long enough for me to see her face open. Waiting.
I'd filed away every way Cam had ever looked at me, put them somewhere safe. I had no idea what to do with this one. Had she been searching the room for me?
Then a hand landed on my arm. Not a grab, but gentle, like a leash made of velvet.
Cam's gaze dropped. Back to her phone. The openness disappeared, replaced by something flat. She turned her shoulder enough to shut me out.
Fuck.
I didn't have to look. The voice belonged to a junior A&R from a label I'd been ignoring for two quarters. "Romi! Quick sec?" Her smile was all teeth, her suit too tight for the party, as if she'd zipped herself inside of it and couldn't get out.
"Later," I tried to say, but she was spinning some pitch about a cross-market collab and how "nobody's doing what you're doing with the pre-release content.
" The whole spiel was a blur of buzzwords and leveraged synergies, and I let it wash over me, eyes drifting to Cam at the bar.
She hadn't moved, hadn't looked up, but her thumb scrolled the phone faster and faster, almost trying to erase herself from the room.
I wanted to scream. Or maybe just shatter the glass in my hand and let the shards do the talking.
Instead, I smiled at the A&R, gave her the crumb of conversation she wanted, and finally pulled free. When I looked back toward the bar, Cam was gone. Just an empty space where she'd been, the two production guys already filling the gap like she wasn't even there.
I stood there for a second, champagne warming in my hand, the party pressing in from all sides. Lost her. The room felt too hot, too loud, too full of people who weren't her.
Six months ago, I would've paid good money to never see Cam Wolfe's face again. Now I was scanning exits like a stalker, trying to figure out which door she could've slipped through.
Funny how that worked.