CHAPTER 1
The Girl Who Learned to Burn
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The mirror didn't lie.
Emmy Kairo studied her reflection with the cold precision of a surgeon examining a body on the table. High cheekbones. Full lips. Eyes the color of burnt honey—warm enough to invite, sharp enough to cut. She tilted her chin, watching the light catch the angles of her face, and allowed herself a small, private smile.
*Beautiful*, the world would say.
*Dangerous*, she knew.
The dressing room was modest—a concrete box with flickering fluorescent lights and a vanity cluttered with borrowed makeup. The smell of mildew clung to the walls. A far cry from the luxury she'd once glimpsed through penthouse windows, but Emmy had learned long ago that starting points didn't matter. Only endings.
Tonight was an audition. Another one. A callback for a supporting role in a streaming drama that critics would forget within a season. But Emmy didn't care about the role itself. She cared about the producer's name on the call sheet.
*Dominic Hale.*
A man who had shared drinks with Magnus Voss at three industry galas. A man whose signature appeared on documents that should have been buried. A stepping stone wrapped in Armani and arrogance.
Emmy leaned closer to the mirror and painted her lips the color of crushed roses.
---
The hallway outside the audition room buzzed with desperate energy. Actresses lined the walls like mannequins in a showroom—each one polished, poised, and starving. Some whispered lines under their breath. Others stretched their necks, adjusted their hair, compared themselves to the competition with darting, insecure glances.
Emmy walked past them without looking.
She had learned to move like smoke. Present but untouchable. Warm but impossible to hold.
A production assistant with a clipboard stopped her at the door. "Name?"
"Emmy Kairo."
The assistant scanned the list, frowned, scanned again. "You're not scheduled for another twenty minutes."
"I know." Emmy smiled—soft, apologetic, perfectly calibrated. "I just wanted to thank Mr. Hale personally. He probably doesn't remember, but he gave me advice at a workshop two years ago. Changed my life."
It was a lie. She had never met Dominic Hale. But lies, Emmy had discovered, were just stories people wanted to believe.
The assistant hesitated, glanced at the door, then sighed. "Wait here. I'll check."
Two minutes later, Emmy was inside.
---
The audition room was larger than expected—an empty rehearsal space with black curtains and a single table where three figures sat like judges at a sentencing. Dominic Hale occupied the center. Mid-fifties, silver-templed, the kind of man who had been handsome once and now compensated with expensive watches and younger girlfriends.
His eyes swept over Emmy the moment she entered. Not assessing her talent. Assessing her body.
She let him look.
"Miss Kairo." His voice was silk over gravel. "I'm told you have something to say to me."
Emmy stopped at the center of the room, hands clasped in front of her like a woman at prayer. "I wanted to thank you, Mr. Hale. What you said at that workshop—about fearlessness, about surrendering to the role—it stayed with me. I wouldn't be standing here without it."
Dominic leaned back in his chair, pleased. Men like him fed on worship. They expected it. Needed it.
"Is that so?" He gestured lazily to the open floor. "Well, let's see if you've learned to surrender."
Emmy smiled.
*You have no idea.*
---
The audition itself was unremarkable. Emmy delivered her lines with enough skill to impress but not enough brilliance to threaten. She cried on cue. She laughed on cue. She made herself exactly what they wanted—a beautiful girl with potential, hungry for guidance.
By the time she finished, Dominic Hale's gaze had shifted from evaluating to something hungrier.
"Impressive," he said, though the word had nothing to do with her performance. He exchanged a glance with the woman beside him—a casting director whose expression flickered with something like disgust—before turning back to Emmy. "We'll be in touch."
Emmy bowed her head, demure. "Thank you. Truly."
She turned to leave.
"Miss Kairo."
She paused at the door, glanced over her shoulder.
Dominic smiled—a predator's smile, patient and certain. "Leave your personal number with my assistant. In case we need to discuss... adjustments to the role."
Emmy's heart didn't race. Her hands didn't tremble. She had learned to kill those reactions years ago, burying them alongside the girl she used to be.
"Of course, Mr. Hale."
---
Outside, the sun was setting over the city—a smear of orange and violet bleeding into smog. Emmy walked three blocks before ducking into a narrow alley between a laundromat and a shuttered bookstore. She leaned against the brick wall, closed her eyes, and breathed.
One breath. Two. Three.
The mask didn't slip. It never did anymore. But beneath it, something stirred. Something hot and black and patient.
She pulled out her phone and scrolled to a folder she kept hidden behind two layers of encryption. Inside were names. Dates. Photographs. Documents that had cost her more than money to obtain.
She opened a file labeled *HALE, DOMINIC* and skimmed the contents.
Three NDAs with former assistants. Payments routed through shell companies. A connection to a media conglomerate that had buried a harassment investigation in 2019. And there, at the bottom, the detail that mattered most:
*Personal friendship with Magnus Voss. Attended private gatherings at the Voss estate, 2017–2021.*
Emmy stared at the name until the letters burned into her retinas.
*Magnus Voss.*
The patriarch. The king. The man whose empire stretched across telecommunications, real estate, and half the nation's media. The man who had never faced a consequence in his life.
The man who had destroyed hers.
---
*The night Rhea died, the sky was the same color as today.*
The memory surfaced without permission—vivid, knife-sharp. Emmy shoved it down, but not before it left its mark. The weight of a phone call at 3 a.m. The silence on the other end that stretched like a scream. The official report that called it an accident, a tragic fall, a young woman who had simply... slipped.
*Slipped.*
As if Rhea had been careless. As if she hadn't been terrified for weeks before it happened. As if she hadn't whispered, in their last phone call, words that Emmy would never forget:
*"They won't let me leave, Emmy. They won't ever let me leave."*
Emmy had been nineteen then. Young. Powerless. Drowning in grief and fury with no weapon to fight back.
She wasn't nineteen anymore.
---
Her phone buzzed. A text from an unknown number.
*Mr. Hale would like to invite you to dinner tomorrow evening. A car will pick you up at 8. Please confirm.*
Emmy read the message twice. Then she typed her reply:
*I'd be honored.*
She slipped the phone into her pocket and stepped out of the alley. The city sprawled before her—glittering, indifferent, full of people who would never know her name. But they would. Soon.
Not because she wanted fame. Fame was just a key. A way into rooms that were otherwise locked. A currency that bought access to men like Dominic Hale, who knew men like Magnus Voss, who controlled empires built on blood-stained silence.
Emmy started walking.
She didn't know exactly how long it would take. Months. Years, maybe. The Voss family was protected by wealth, influence, and a legal fortress that had crushed stronger enemies than her.
But Emmy had something they didn't expect.
She had nothing left to lose.
---
The girl who had cried at Rhea's funeral was gone. The girl who had begged authorities to investigate, who had written letters to journalists, who had believed that truth and justice were anything more than fairy tales—she had died too. Slowly, quietly, in the years that followed.
What remained was something else. Something forged in silence and sharpened by patience.
Emmy Kairo had learned to smile when she wanted to scream. To seduce when she wanted to destroy. To wait, and watch, and plan, until the moment was perfect.
She had learned to burn cold.
And tonight, the first match had been struck.
****** Continues******