The next morning, Rhea woke to a flood of messages — some congratulatory, some furious. The live show had gone viral. Again. Not in the polished, market-friendly way the label preferred, but in the raw, unsanitized kind of way that made brands nervous and critics take notice.
She scrolled through the headlines:
"Rhea Burns Down the Stage — And the Industry's Expectations"
"Unfiltered. Unscripted. Unstoppable."
"Is This the Death of Pop's Perfect Princess?"
Her phone buzzed again — a call from the label's president. She let it ring.
A second call. Then a third.
Rhea stood at the window of her loft, the same view she used to think meant she'd made it. Now it just looked cold, sterile — the city that gave her fame but asked for her soul in return. She paced for a moment, then turned and walked straight to her laptop.
She opened the draft of her debut album — not the one the label had shaped, but the one she'd secretly been writing, pieced together from scraps in notebooks and voice memos. It wasn't tidy. It wasn't curated.
But it was hers.