51. Erika #2
She wrenched her jaw sideways, tore her mouth free from his palm for one second—“You think you can get away with THIS?”—and his hand slammed back over her lips hard enough to split them.
He pulled back enough to look at her. And smiled—the same smile he’d worn on red carpets, accepting awards, shaking hands with studio heads who knew what he was and bankrolled him anyway. “I’m Martin Blackwell. Do you really think anyone will believe you over me?”
His hands moved to her neckline. The fabric tore, and cold air hit her skin.
“After today, no one in this industry will return your calls. Your sister’s career is already over. And you—” He looked at her the same way he’d looked at every scene she’d given him that wasn’t what he’d ordered. “You were never going to amount to anything anyway.”
Her phone. She could feel it against her hip, wedged between her body and the bar.
His hands were at her collar. His weight was pinning her.
But his grip on her hip had shifted when he’d reached for the fabric—just like before, his hands following his mouth, his ego pulling his body away from the job of holding her down—and there was space now. Not much. An inch, maybe less.
She stopped struggling and gave him what he wanted—the slack body, the compliance, the audience. Felt his weight settle. Felt his breathing slow. Felt the certainty in his body that this was over.
She drove her elbow into his ribs and her hand found her pocket in the same motion, fingers closing around the phone, pulling it free. He grabbed for it—she twisted sideways and it flew from her hand, skittering across the damp floorboards, screen flaring bright in the gloom.
He pinned her again before she could move. Harder this time. His hand found her mouth again and his weight crushed the air from her chest and she could feel her strength draining and she thought a floor that smells like rot and this is the last thing I’m going to see—
No. Not like this. Not him.
His grip shifted. Just slightly. Just enough.
Her eyes found the phone on the floor. Three feet away. Screen glowing in the darkness. Annie’s face in the profile picture, smiling, unaware.
Three million followers.
Martin’s power only worked in rooms where nobody was watching.
She’d spent six weeks learning what a camera did to people—how it changed them, how it held them accountable, how the performance became the record.
He’d built his whole career on controlling who saw what.
On closed sets and NDAs and settlements and silence.
He wanted to make her invisible. She was about to become unavoidable.
She went slack again. He adjusted his weight—same pattern, same certainty, and she thought you stupid man, you don’t even know you have a tell.
She lunged—not for the door, not for the barstool, for the phone—fingers closing around it, thumb finding the screen by muscle memory. GlamGram icon. Press. Swipe.
Go Live.
The icon pulsed red.
Martin didn’t notice. He was talking—he was always talking—his voice loud and clear in the empty bar, every word echoing off the rotting walls and broadcasting to everyone who’d ever clicked “follow” on Anneliese Morgan’s account.
The viewer count climbed.
He yanked her toward a sagging couch in the corner.
Springs groaned beneath her as he shoved her down, his weight settling over her.
His face hovered inches from hers—flushed, sweating, and she could see it now, the thing underneath every professional conversation and every polite note and every time he’d called it mentorship: just want.
Just hunger. Just a man who’d learned decades ago that he could take what he wanted and no one would stop him.
“Get off me!” The scream tore out of her—ragged, raw, and she didn’t care if he heard the desperation because the phone was recording and the phone didn’t need her to be brave, it just needed her to be loud.
His hand closed around her throat.
Iron fingers. Crushing pressure. The air stopped. She clawed at his arm but his grip tightened and the room went narrow and dark at the edges, black thread pulling inward, and she thought about Annie and about Stefan and about the painting she’d never finish and about her mother’s hands—
Something fierce flared in her gut—not hope, not courage, just pure animal refusal to let this be the end. She gathered every ounce of will she had left and drove her heel into his stomach.
He grunted, buckled, his fingers loosened—
Air flooded into her chest. She gasped, coughed, rolled sideways off the couch, and hit the floor on her hands and knees.
Martin staggered back. And she saw it—the first flicker of something new in his eyes. Not triumph. Confusion. He was looking at his own hands like he didn’t recognize them.
Her gaze found the phone. It lay on the floor, screen glowing, the tiny red LIVE icon pulsing. The viewer counts scrolling—5,000, 10,000, 15,000—climbing faster with every second.
She looked at him. Really looked. And for the first time, she didn’t care what he could do to her.
“The whole world is watching, Martin.”
His face went white. His eyes darted to the phone, to the scrolling comments, to the number that kept climbing, and she watched thirty years of institutional protection drain out of his face in real time.
“You—” He lunged for the phone.
She kicked it hard, sent it skittering across the floorboards toward the far wall. He dove for it, and she met him with everything she had left—fists, nails, teeth, targeting his eyes, his throat, any soft place she could reach. Her claws found skin and tore. He howled. She didn’t stop.
“You’re done!” She screamed it at the phone, at the red light, at the thousands of witnesses she couldn’t see.
And somewhere in that number—somewhere over the Atlantic with her leg in a cast and her phone in her hand—Annie was watching this.
Annie was seeing her sister on a floor in a torn dress with blood on her face, and Erika couldn’t protect her from that, couldn’t unsend it, couldn’t take it back.
I’m sorry, Annie. I’m sorry you have to see this.
She’d done it. She’d—
His fist connected with her jaw.
A wet crack, bone on bone. Her head snapped sideways. Something in her face shifted, splintered, and the floor was rushing up to meet her, and her temple hit the metal leg of an overturned table and everything went white and then it went dark.
Copper and salt flooded her mouth. Ringing—high and constant and everywhere. She clawed at the floorboards but her legs wouldn’t respond.
Get up. Get up. Get up.
She couldn’t.
Through the ringing—vibrations through the floor. Voices. Canvas tearing overhead. Morning light knifing into the darkness.
The red light on the phone pulsed. Still broadcasting.
Erika’s gaze found Martin. He stood frozen in the middle of the room, chest heaving, knuckles bloody, eyes darting from the crowd at the door to the phone on the floor to the viewer count that wouldn’t stop climbing, and she watched it happen—watched him understand what she’d done, watched thirty years of power collapse into a man standing in a rotting bar with blood on his hands and the whole world as witness.
Good, she thought, and the word tasted like blood and triumph. Choke on it, you piece of shit.
The ringing in her ears crescendoed. Darkness crept in from the edges—velvet, almost gentle.
But through it she could see the doorway, and the shapes in it, and one of them was Stefan—shoulders heaving, hands in fists, and she couldn’t see his face but she knew it the way she knew her own name—and the thought surfaced slow and quiet through the copper taste and the dark pulling at the edges:
He came. After everything. After the door and the silence and the things I said. He came.
Someone was shouting her name. Stefan, maybe.
Or Lily. The sound came from far away, muffled by the dark that kept pulling closer, and she thought about Annie on the plane and Stefan in the doorway and the red light still pulsing and all the people she loved who were going to have to carry what happened in this room, and she was sorry for that, she was sorry for so many things, but she wasn’t sorry for the phone and she wasn’t sorry for the scream and she wasn’t sorry for any of it because she’d done the one thing Martin never expected.
She’d refused to disappear.
The dark closed over her, velvet-soft, and this time she let it.
Victory.