It started small.
Rihanna stopped going out after classes.Stopped returning Zoya's texts.Stopped listening to the songs she and Aarav once loved.
Instead, she began rereading that one romance novel she'd hidden under her mattress. The one with the mafia prince who burned cities for the girl who ran from him. The one where the love was dark, obsessive, wrong—and yet… it felt realer than anything she'd ever known.
She read it three times that week. And then she found another. And another.
Her nights stretched into 3 a.m., her screen glowing against her tired eyes, her heart racing at fictional gunshots and possessive confessions.
"You're mine. In every life. Even if you hate me.""I'd burn the world before I ever let you go.""Pain means you're alive. And I want to feel every piece of you."
She wasn't horrified. She was fascinated.
Because this kind of love didn't disappear.This kind of man didn't forget you in another city.
She began sketching faceless men in suits with blood on their knuckles and soft eyes just for one girl. She wrote down lines from books on sticky notes and pasted them above her bed.
And every time she closed a book, she whispered:
"I want that."
Not the soft love.Not the sweet, forgettable romance.
She wanted intensity.She wanted devotion twisted into madness.She wanted to be wanted like she was air and destruction at once.
She didn't realize… that desire was the first thread in a web already spinning toward her.
Journal Entry: October 12th:
"I think I'm changing.I don't believe in happy endings anymore.I believe in obsession. In the kind of love that makes people lose their minds.I want to be someone's downfall. Or maybe I already am.The real world doesn't love girls like me.But in books?In books, I ruin kings."
A Conversation with Zoya:
Zoya finally cornered her during their shared lunch break.
"You look like a ghost," she whispered, eyes wide with concern. "Rihanna, are you even eating?"
Rihanna blinked slowly, like the world was buffering in front of her. "I'm fine. I'm just… tired."
"You're obsessed with these books. You haven't come out in weeks. This isn't normal."
Rihanna gave a small, hollow laugh. "Normal is overrated, Zo. So is reality."
"That's not—" Zoya bit her lip. "These men in those stories... they're toxic. Violent. Controlling."
"They don't leave," Rihanna snapped, more venom than she meant.
Zoya froze.
"They don't leave," Rihanna repeated, softer. "They don't fall for someone else and forget you exist. They fight. Even if it's twisted, they fight."
Zoya looked at her best friend—truly looked—and realized something terrifying.
The real heartbreak hadn't just hurt Rihanna.It had rewritten her.
The Escape Begins:
By the end of the year, Rihanna had made up her mind.
She applied to universities far away—anywhere that wasn't here. She needed escape. Distance. Reinvention. She needed to leave the version of herself that loved boys like Aarav.
The one who waited, who hoped, who bled quietly.
"I just want to start over," she told her mother one evening, their dinner untouched between them.
Her mother only nodded. She saw it in her daughter's eyes. Something had snapped—and whatever glued her back together wouldn't be soft.
That night, Rihanna packed away every sketch she had of her past. Burned her journal. Left only one thing on her desk: a quote from her favorite mafia novel.
"To be loved by a monster is to become one."
And somewhere in Italy, Lorenzo Moretti was breathing the same night air.
They didn't know each other yet.But the universe was done waiting.