The roar is still in my bones when the door slams behind me.
It’s a physical thing, the crowd. It sticks in my skin like glitter, thrumming along my nerves, louder than the ringing in my ears. I’m half-drunk on it, sweat cooling down my spine, throat rough from screaming the last chorus back at them.
“Two minutes, Luna. Quick reset, then the livestream backstage,” Valerie calls, already walking away as if my legs aren’t trembling, as if my lungs aren’t burning. “Don’t disappear.”
I roll my shoulders and breathe in the recycled arena air, thick with smoke machine haze and stale popcorn. The hallway behind the stage is a blur of black t-shirts and lanyards, cables snaking like vines, people moving with the wired urgency of a live show. Someone shoves a bottle of water into my hand. I take a gulp and grin at a passing lighting tech.
“Ten out of ten on the confetti storm,” I say, voice hoarse.
He beams. “You killed it out there, Luna.”
I did. I always do. That’s the deal: I give them everything, they give it back louder. That’s how I know I’m still worth something.
My dressing room is at the end of the hallway, a battered star taped crookedly to the door. I push it open with my hip, still humming the bridge of the last song under my breath.
That’s when I see it.
The bouquet is on my vanity. Blood-red roses, so perfectly arranged they look fake. They weren’t there before the show. I know because I’d sat right there while Maya drew stars on my cheekbones with glitter liner and we took stupid selfies, making faces.
For a second, all I register is the smell—too sweet, cloying, like the floral shop my mother once dragged me past on the way to the bus stop. Then I see the envelope leaning against the vase. White, my name written in thick black ink in letters that curl like they’re smiling.
Luna.
Heat drains from my face so fast I have to grab the back of the chair to steady myself. My fingers leave damp prints on the leather.
“Seriously?” I mutter, because maybe if I sound annoyed instead of scared, it’ll be true.
The room feels too small. Fluorescent lights buzz overhead, and the hum turns jagged in my ears. Someone behind me laughs out in the hallway. The normalcy of it bangs against the sudden chill crawling over my skin.
I don’t have to open it. I could call someone. I could pretend I didn’t see it.
Instead, I slide a fingernail under the flap, hands not quite steady.
The paper inside is thick, expensive. The letters are careful, like they were drawn with the tip of a knife instead of a pen.
You sounded beautiful tonight.
But you shouldn’t wear white. It makes the blood show too easily.
There’s a little smiley face at the end. Neat, round, absurd.
My lungs forget how to work.
It’s not the first message. Not the first note, not the first DM that somehow made it through the layered filters my team swears will protect me. It’s not even the creepiest—there was the one that listed every city I’d be in before the tour schedule was public, the one that described the scar on my left knee from when I fell off my bike at ten.
