CHAPTER 2: Nova Quinn Is Dead (But Not Really)
1323 Words
The hospital room smelled like lemon cleaner and artificial hope.
Aria Vex lay still beneath too-soft sheets, feeling the heartbeat of a stranger echo through her ribs. Everything felt wrong. The air was too thin. The silence was too loud. Her body… wasn't hers.
She sat up slowly, like waking from a dream she couldn’t claw her way out of. The gown slipped down her shoulder, and she saw it—bare skin the color of champagne silk, unscarred, too perfect.
No burns. No claw marks. No bite impressions from training days.
No signs of the girl who once ruled code and wolves alike.
Her legs slid from the bed like poured syrup—long, impossibly smooth. She stood, unsteady, and padded barefoot across the tile to the mirror in the private bath.
What stared back at her wasn’t a reflection. It was a performance.
Nova Quinn.
Notorious. Wild. Paparazzi’s wet dream. Seventeen when she’d collapsed into a year-long coma. Now technically eighteen. Technically legal. Technically reborn.
Aria tilted her head.
Nova’s body was a masterpiece of scandal and symmetry. Her hair fell in soft golden waves, tumbling past delicate collarbones that framed the high arc of her chest. Her breasts—full, high, gravity-defying—stood with the kind of poise people paid surgeons for. But Aria knew the difference between fake perfection and real. This was natural. God-given. Or perhaps devil-gifted.
Her waist was absurd. Cinched like a corset was built into her bones. It gave her the shape of an hourglass caught mid-pour. Hips flared out wide beneath, lush and sculpted. Her thighs curved inward before extending into long, shapely legs designed to make rooms fall silent when she entered.
She ran a hand slowly down her side. It was all smooth. No fur, no flaws, not a single hair out of place.
This body was made to be worshipped. Or consumed.
It wasn’t hers.
And it was now her prison.
She exhaled. Not a growl. Just a breath.
“I’ve been reborn,” she murmured, “as a s*x symbol.”
The mirror flickered with biometric data. She blinked once and her HUD slid into place—her seed protocol still functioning. She activated a scan.
> HOST: NOVA QUINN
AGE: 18.0
COMPATIBILITY: UNSTABLE
FOREIGN DATA CLUSTER DETECTED
LOCKED MEMORIES: ENCRYPTED
NEURAL LOOPING BEHAVIOR RECORDED
Someone had tampered with Nova before she’d ever arrived.
Aria’s jaw tightened. The skin she wore wasn’t just beautiful.
It was bait.
---
The door burst open.
“Baby!”
A voice like a cocktail party shrieked across the room, and Aria barely braced herself before arms wrapped around her shoulders. Perfume hit her like a bomb—sweet, synthetic, designer.
“Holy sh*t, you’re awake. You’re awake. Do you even know what this means?!”
The woman pulled back, blinking rapidly behind oversized sunglasses. Her name tag dangled from a Louis Vuitton lanyard: Dani. Publicist. Chaos connoisseur.
Two men followed—one in a designer hoodie taking notes on a tablet, the other in a suit so sharp it could gut a man.
“Nova Quinn resurrects!” Dani crowed. “Trending already. Honey, you broke the Internet twice. We’ve got an exclusive livestream window if you’re able to say, like, three words and blink without drooling.”
“I’ll try,” Aria said dryly.
Dani clapped like she’d invented sarcasm. “That’s my bitch.”
The man in the suit stepped forward, eyes narrowing. “Miss Quinn, the ReVive performance is confirmed. You’re headlining in seventy-two hours. You’re a phoenix. A goddess. A walking miracle. Now please—just don’t relapse, overdose, or swear on camera. You’ll be golden.”
They were already leaving before Aria could speak. Dani blew a kiss, still talking.
“By the way, you might want to shave. Or don’t. Your call. Feminist arc, maybe?”
The door slammed.
Aria stood alone again. She looked at herself in the mirror one last time.
The body was hot.
But heat had nothing to do with power.
And Aria Vex had never settled for being someone’s showpiece.
---
An hour later, the message came.
A nurse handed her a phone: matte black, old-school, physical buttons. No data trace. Just a single note:
Downstairs. Private lounge. 7 minutes. —D
She went.
Barefoot, wrapped in Nova’s robe, her hair falling like a blonde halo around her sharp, suspicious eyes. The hospital hallway stretched too long, too quiet. The private lounge waited behind a black-glass door, half open.
He was inside.
Dominic Vale.
Even his name carried weight.
He didn’t speak when she entered. Just turned.
He wore a navy suit, pressed and perfect. His jawline could cut glass, and his eyes—cold steel beneath dark lashes—never wavered. He watched her enter like she was a test he already planned to fail.
“You’re not her,” he said.
Aria stopped. “That’s original.”
He stepped closer, slow and deliberate.
“She never looked anyone in the eye,” he murmured. “She used s*x like a mask. You don’t even flinch.”
She met his gaze without blinking. “Maybe she got smarter.”
“Or replaced.”
Silence stretched between them.
His voice lowered. “So tell me. Who are you?”
Aria smiled. The dangerous kind. “You tell me. You seem to have a theory.”
Dominic stared at her, unreadable. Then he pulled a phone from his jacket—old, encrypted.
“If you want answers,” he said, handing it to her, “call the number on this. Don’t use it unless you’re ready for real truth.”
She took it without breaking eye contact.
His voice dropped one degree lower. “There are things buried in Nova Quinn you don’t understand. Places she went. People who used her. If you keep walking forward, they will come for you.”
“I’m not afraid.”
“No,” he said. “You should be.”
Then he turned and left, leaving only silence in his wake.
Aria held the phone in her palm, and for a moment, it burned.
---
Back at the penthouse, Aria found chaos masquerading as glamor.
The walls were white. The furniture chrome. The rugs leopard print. It was the kind of place you designed when you wanted to feel rich and empty at the same time.
She walked through shattered glass in the kitchen, passed a champagne bottle with lipstick on the rim, stepped over a guitar left in a puddle of wine.
Nova’s world wasn’t just artificial. It was sabotaged.
Aria activated the tablet beside the bed.
Encrypted. Amateur-level security.
She cracked it in three minutes.
A folder labeled PRIVATE – NOT FOR PRESS blinked open. Inside: a video file.
Nova Quinn appeared on screen.
Her mascara was smudged. Her lips slightly swollen. Her voice was quiet.
“I think someone’s watching me,” she whispered. “Not fans. Not paparazzi. I mean... them. I can’t explain. I feel it inside me. There’s a chip. Something metal. I didn’t say yes. I don’t remember saying yes.”
She looked straight into the camera.
“If I disappear… it wasn’t an accident.”
The video cut.
Aria stared at the blank screen for a long time. Then she turned to the penthouse wall and brought up the security interface.
The cameras were infected.
A silent virus fed through every line of footage. Someone had been watching. Recording. For months. Even now.
She wiped the system.
Then stood still in the neon dusk glow that poured through the window.
Nova Quinn had been a flame surrounded by gasoline.
But now?
Now she burned with purpose.
And when fire comes back from the dead…
it chooses what to consume.
---
[End of Chapter 2 – Revised]
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