Chapter Text
Someone was following her again.
Rey Niima pulled her coat tighter against the chill, covertly checking her peripheral vision. She hadn’t seen or heard anything obvious, but the prickle of her skin and sudden lurch of her pulse was enough for her to take notice. It hadn’t been six months ago when the stalking had begun—she’d imagined herself paranoid from the increasingly intense publicity around her first blockbuster, Jakku Desert—but now she didn’t ignore a single instinct. The book The Gift of Fear had taught her that the body sometimes recognized danger before the conscious mind did.
The street was closed to vehicle traffic and filled with the gaily-lit booths of a holiday market. People laughed and chatted as they shopped, colorfully bundled up against the chill. Who had pinged her instincts?
There. A man moving against the flow of foot traffic on the other side of the street. Tall enough to stand out, though he stood slightly hunched, with a dark coat and a hood and scarf combination that made it impossible to pick out details of his appearance. No camera, so not paparazzi.
He could just be a contrarian, uncaring about the foot traffic patterns at this Christmas street market, but his pace matched hers almost exactly, though he lingered a few feet back.
“Shit,” she muttered, fear spiking. She dug in her coat pocket for her phone. Who would she call, though? 911 would think she was making trouble for no reason. She had no family to speak of. Her costar, Poe, would probably head over to help, but traffic was so bad in Coruscant it would probably take an hour from his house in the hills, and then he would treat her to another lecture.
She remembered the last one vividly. She’d been the last to leave a cocktail bar downtown after seeing friends, hoping to have a peaceful walk the five blocks to her apartment without the newly-discovered hassle of paparazzi, when she’d realized someone was lingering in the alley outside the bar. Tall, dressed in black, face obscured by a hood. Luckily, Poe had been nearby and he’d had his driver come pick her up. “You’re not a nobody anymore,” Poe had told her sternly from the other side of the town car’s backseat as his driver took a circuitous route to her apartment. The car had bulletproof glass—a fact that scared Rey even more about the unexpected price of fame. “This movie’s putting you on the A-list and that means you can’t behave the way you’re used to. No more walking alone at night, no chatting up random strangers. Holdo can get you security…”
Rey didn’t want security tailing her. She wanted to jog alone without attracting stares. She wanted to shop for her friends at a bloody holiday market without fearing for her life.
She dialed Rose instead, bringing the phone to her ear.
“Hey gorgeous,” Rose said. “What’s up?”
The diminutive makeup artist had been one of Rey’s best friends since they’d met five years ago on Rey’s first feature, a ridiculously bad rom com with the budget of a university student saving up for ramen.
“I’m at the holiday market downtown,” Rey said. She tried to keep her expression light so the man wouldn’t know she was afraid or that she had noticed him tailing her. “Lots of people here.”
Rose picked up on her tense tone immediately. “Lots of people? Including–”
“I think so.”
“Shit.” She heard Rose bustling around and the jingle of keys. “Are you safe? Is anyone with you?”
“No, but I think I’m safe for now. It’s so crowded here he can’t get away with much.”
“I can get there in… shit, forty-five minutes. Can you hang out that long?”
Rey checked her phone. “The market closes in twenty.” She stopped under an awning, letting her gaze move casually over the crowd. A barbershop quartet in Santa hats, parents piled high with presents, children with chocolate-covered faces.
And leaning against a brick wall opposite her and some ten feet staggered back, a tall man in a black coat with a deep hood.
“What does he fucking want from me?” Rey spat, low and vicious.
“Call the police,” Rose said over the phone.
“And say what, that there’s a man shopping at the holiday market who looks suspicious? What if it’s just some random guy?”
Deep down she knew it wasn’t, though. Her body was attuned to his presence now, a tuning fork vibrating at the frequency of fear.
She’d walked to the market an hour before, thinking her puffy coat, pom-pom topped hat, and the knitted scarf wrapped around the lower half of her face would prevent her from being recognized. And they had, overall. She’d felt freer than she had in ages as she’d perused ornaments and baked goods.
And then it had all come crashing down again.
“I should just stop going anywhere,” she said bitterly. “Lock myself in my apartment and never come out.”
“No, you should accept Holdo’s offer of security,” Rose said. “How far are you from home?”
“Fifteen minutes or so.”
“Can you grab a Lyft? I’m not going to get there before it clears out.”
“Yeah, I could do that. I’m incognito today, got a big old scarf wrapped over my face.” Not that it had done much good for her stalker, who never seemed to have trouble recognizing her.
“Okay, call one and then get back on the phone with me while you wait.”
“Okay.” Rey took a deep breath. “Thanks, Rose.”
She hailed the rideshare, feeling stupid about how short the trip would be. Would the driver judge her for not walking the fifteen minutes? It was cold but not snowing yet, and fifteen minutes wasn’t long at all.
She toyed with the mace on her keychain. She had a pocketknife, too, not that the small blade would do much against a larger adversary. Both had been purchased the day a bouquet of assorted flowers had shown up at the studio for her, the card simply signed YOURS in slashing black handwriting with the types of flowers listed on the back.
“Fans do stuff like this all the time,” an actor had told her, but deep down Rey had known something was wrong, especially once she’d Googled what the unusual assortment of blossoms meant in the language of flowers.
Alyssum - immortal love
Heliotrope - devotion
Yellow iris - passion
Red orchid - fire, romance, desire
Begonia - beware
Beware, beware, beware. It chimed like a bell in her head as she breathed deeply, trying to suppress the panic. She’d been stupid to go out walking alone, no matter how crowded the streets or how invisible she’d felt.
She dialed Rose once the app’s tracker said the car was on the way. “My ride will be here in five.”
“Good. Now are you finally going to listen to Poe and Holdo about getting a bodyguard?”
“Maybe.” She chafed at the idea of being followed around everywhere and it seemed like a ridiculous indulgence for a relatively new actress, but she was tired of living like this. Even if her stalker hadn’t done anything but lurk and send her flowers—after the office, some had appeared on her car a few times when she’d been out running errands—he could easily escalate into actual violence.
Fire, romance, desire. Beware.
The car pulled up, and she checked the license plate before getting in. She’d inputted the address of the building adjacent to hers, just as an extra precaution.
“Too cold back there?” the driver asked, giving her a concerned glance in the rear view mirror. “I can turn the heat up.”
She still had her hat on and her scarf covering the lower half of her face. Not wanting to be recognized if this guy was a sci-fi buff, she shook her head and gave a thumbs-up.
“All right,” he said, pulling into traffic. “Just let me know if you change your mind.”
The heat was already high enough to make her start sweating, but it was a short trip and she’d survive. She peered out the window as they drove off, looking for a sign of the man in black. Nothing.
Maybe she really was being paranoid. Just because someone was tall and wore black clothing with a hood didn’t mean they were a villain. She’d been obscuring her face, too, as had a decent number of people. The icy winds of winter were whipping through the city and snow was on the way—it would be more unusual not to be bundled up.
Traffic was moving slowly, as it always did. Rey drummed her fingers against her leg impatiently. When a motorcycle whipped past, threading between cars, she sighed with jealousy. Must be nice to have a ride that wasn’t bound by the same rules the rest of them had to follow.
Maybe she’d get a motorcycle in the spring. Something small and sporty she could take out on her own, flying freely down the highway behind the anonymity of a helmet.
People said fame was a double-edged sword, but she hadn’t understood that fully until she was standing on this side of it. The money and creative fulfillment of getting to pick and choose what movies she acted in were amazing, of course, and she loved the red carpets and loaner designer dresses and invitations to events she’d only dreamed of as a child. But there was a dark side to it all, the worst of which was the curtailing of her freedom now that she finally had the finances to be free.
She’d expected paparazzi, but not the way they sometimes hid behind bushes and jumped out at a person or how terrifying it felt to be abruptly surrounded by camera flashes when she’d thought she’d been flying under the radar. She’d been prepared for rabid fans, since Jakku Wars was a massive sci-fi franchise that carried the weight of decades of expectations, but not the level of vitriol, adoration, and outright threats that had come her way.
Deleting her social media profiles had been a healthy first step. Investing in wigs, sunglasses, and hats to disguise herself when going to the grocery store had been another. She wasn’t Poe’s level of famous yet, with a mansion and a private helicopter pad and over a decade of the industry’s most plum roles, as well as one of the most recognizable faces in the world, but crossing the gap between “indie darling” and “big screen star” had been a larger leap than she’d anticipated.
All this stress, and her first blockbuster feature hadn’t even come out yet. Probably ninety-nine percent of the people she passed on the street had no idea who she was or found her vaguely familiar at best (the one percent had an outsized impact), but that would change if the movie was a hit. Which it would be. Jakku Desert was the first in a planned trilogy after a long Jakku Wars hiatus, and its fans were the most intense she’d ever seen.
Maybe a bodyguard was a good idea. At least until her stalker lost interest.
The car pulled up at the curb outside the adjacent apartment building. Rey thanked the driver and got out, then waited for him to drive off before she walked to her actual building.
It was a nice building but not nice enough to have a doorman, though a residential key card was required for entry. Should she move to a more secure place? But no, that was too much. She loved her apartment with its wall of windows overlooking the city. Entering the warm lobby with its sparkling mini chandeliers made a weight fall off her shoulders, and as the door locked behind her, she took a deep breath and sighed out the stress.
She was safe. Along with the entrance, the elevators operated by key card. The garage below the building did, too.
And speaking of the garage, she’d forgotten a pile of scripts in the front seat, all sent to her by studios interested in having her star in their latest projects. So instead of going up, she badged into the elevator and headed down to grab them.
The garage was gray and cold from the air seeping through the grated entrance gate. She hurried to her tan sedan—a deliberately boring car to avoid attracting attention—unlocked it, and grabbed the scripts from the front seat.
Then she froze.
On the hood of the car was a single flower, pink with a yellow center. A plain piece of white cardstock sat beneath it.
Rey picked the paper up with trembling fingers, looking around to make sure no one was nearby. The garage was empty now, but someone had clearly been here. He had been here.
Plumeria, the card read in black, bold handwriting. For new beginnings.