Laney groaned and shoved aside a silken curtain.
"Where am I?" she said aloud, voice half a croak, half a dare.
The bed was too wide. The ceiling was too high. Marble and glass caught the morning light and threw it like accusations across the room.
She sat up and the room tilted. A framed photograph on the dresser showed a woman who looked like Laney and didn't. The woman smiled with a confidence Laney had never practiced.
"Okay. Breathe," she told herself.
Her throat tasted like copper. She scanned the nightstand. A phone lay face-up, screen dark. Next to it, a heavy ring on a velvet tray glinted as if waiting.
Laney reached for the phone with hands that trembled.
"Don't drop it," she whispered. "Please don't be a dream."
The lock screen flashed when she brushed the glass. A name printed across the top made her stomach drop: L. V. *Voss*.
"No way," she said, fingers fumbling the password.
A memory slid into her head like a foreign broadcast—short clips that weren't hers but were. A funeral scene she hadn't attended. A confrontation in a penthouse. Pages of a printed story she had read last semester, the one all the campus was obsessed with: the novel where the villain ends in flames.
"This is insane," she muttered. "This is that book. I'm... in her."
Her hands found the ring before she had time to think. It was heavier than it
