The vase hit the wall at 9:47 p.m.
I knew the time because Dominic's assistant, Claire, texted me later—not directly, but through a contact Nadia had cultivated on the outside, a paralegal who owed favors and knew how to route information through channels that looked like noise. The message was brief: *Your replacement just redecorated the penthouse. With his mother's pottery collection.*
I sat on my bunk and read it twice. Then I deleted it and lay back against the thin pillow, staring at the ceiling.
I did not smile.
But something warm moved through my chest anyway.
---
Dominic had been in back-to-back board meetings for six hours when Saylor called. He sent it to voicemail. She called again. He declined. The third time, his phone buzzed during a presentation on Q3 projections, and he saw the preview of her text: *if you're not here in twenty minutes I swear to god—*
He turned the phone face down.
Across the table, Gerald Moss raised an eyebrow but said nothing.
The meeting ran until eight. When Dominic finally came through the penthouse door, Saylor was pacing the living room in a dress that cost more than most people's rent, heels clicking against the hardwood like a countdown.
"You missed it," she said. No greeting. No warmth.
Dominic set his briefcase down. Loosened his tie. "Missed what."
"The launch event. The one I told you about three times. The one where I was supposed to be photographed with you because that's how this works, Dominic. That's how people know we're—" She stopped. Her voice cracked. "You made me look like I don't matter."
Dominic looked at her. At the dress. The makeup. The performance of devastation that required an audience to be real.
"I had a board meeting," he said quietly. "You knew that."
"I don't care about your meeting!" Saylor's voice went shrill. She grabbed a ceramic vase from the side table—one of three his mother had given him years ago, pale blue glaze, older than both of them. "I care about looking like I'm not some—some accessory you keep around when it's convenient!"
She threw it.
The vase shattered against the wall six inches from Dominic's head. Shards scattered across the floor like snow.
Dominic did not flinch.
He looked at the broken porcelain. At Saylor, breathing hard, her face flushed and streaked with tears that might have been real.
And then he said it.
"Freya never required this."
The words came out flat. Factual. He had not meant to say them.
Saylor froze.
Dominic realized what he had done half a second too late. He opened his mouth. Closed it.
Saylor stared at him. Her hands were shaking.
"Get out," she whispered.
Dominic did not move.
"Get out!" she screamed.
He left. Took his briefcase. Walked to his car. Sat in the driver's seat with the engine off and the city lights bleeding through the windshield.
He did not go back inside that night.
---
Truett Willis posted the essay at 2:34 a.m. on a Tuesday.
He had been working on it for six weeks. Nineteen pages. Footnoted. Annotated with spectrograms, harmonic analysis, compositional breakdowns that showed, in painstaking detail, the structural fingerprints embedded in every track Saylor Gonzalez had ever released.
Every single one matched the patterns in Freya Mitchell's catalogue.
Not similar. Identical.
The title was simple: *"Paper Crown: A Forensic Analysis of Authorship Fraud in Contemporary Pop."*
By morning, it had 4,000 views.
By noon, 40,000.
Music theory forums picked it up. Reddit threads dissected it. A professor at Berklee College of Music tweeted a single line: *This is actual scholarship. Someone should be paying attention.*
Dominic's PR team issued a statement by 3 p.m.: *"These allegations are baseless and reflect a fundamental misunderstanding of the creative process. Ms. Gonzalez's work speaks for itself."*
Truett read the statement twice.
Then he opened a new document and began planning something larger.
---
The letter came on a Thursday night.
I was asleep when it slid under the cell door—just a whisper of paper on concrete, so quiet I almost missed it. I sat up. The corridor outside was dark. No footsteps. No voices.
I picked up the envelope. Plain. No postage. No name.
Inside: a single sheet. Typed.
Six account numbers. A series of dates. Transaction amounts that made my pulse kick once, hard, before I forced it steady.
At the bottom, handwritten in blue ink: *You didn't plagiarize anything. Neither did I.*
I read it three times. Memorized the numbers. Then I tore the paper into pieces small enough to flush.
I sat on the edge of my bunk in the dark and let the information settle.
Someone inside the label was watching. Someone who had access to the books. Someone who had seen what Dominic and Eli had buried.
I did not know who.
I did not need to.
I pulled out my notebook. Turned to a page near the back where I had been keeping a running list—dates, names, amounts, procedural codes. I added the account numbers in careful script.
Then I closed the book and lay back down.
Outside, the cellblock was quiet. Somewhere far off, a door slammed.
I closed my eyes.
And began to hum.
