All Chapters of Breaking The Spotlight: Chapter 151 - Chapter 160

Adrian’s insomnia had never been an accident. It was an advantage he cultivated like muscle, late nights, bright screens, a small army of numbers and patterns that bent toward the truth if you stared at them long enough, but sleep had been particularly thin the week after Luna’s collapse. Each breath felt measured; each silence in the penthouse like a held gun.He was in the study before dawn, the city outside a bruised smear against the windows, when the anomaly blinked across his monitor. It was small, at first glance nothing more than a line in a stack of server logs, but to him it looked like the first hairline crack in plate glass.A midnight admin token had been used to pull a file set from the media server: early mixes, studio notes, a private folder labeled archive-private that contained nothing for public consumption. The token had come from a workstation assigned to someone in his corporate IT department. Someone with clearance and the kind of access intimate enough to move

The arena pulsed with light, a living organism of electricity and sound. Every seat was filled, every camera lens trained, every heartbeat synchronized to the rhythm of anticipation. The Mercier Foundation Gala had drawn the glitterati of the world, a perfect storm of industry power players, media empires, and social influencers, but none of that mattered to Luna. None of it mattered except the stage, the music, and the raw, jagged nerve of her own survival that she would channel tonight.Backstage smelled of perfumed chaos, hairspray, and the faint tang of adrenaline. Technicians flitted through corridors like ghosts, whispering instructions, adjusting lights, reconfiguring mics. Luna stood in her dressing room, toes curling in the new heels that pinched just enough to remind her she was alive. Her reflection stared back at her from the ornate mirror: pale under the harsh makeup lights, eyes bright, lips pressed together in concentration. The bandage on her hand peeked from the sleev

The penthouse had never been so quiet. Luna sat cross-legged at the edge of the bed, the leather-bound journal balanced on her knees. The lamplight cast her handwriting in gold, sentences bleeding across the page like confessions she hadn’t spoken aloud in years. Her pen scratched, hesitated, then moved again, as if stopping meant she would lose herself completely to the storm outside these walls.She had promised herself she wouldn’t return to journaling, that habit belonged to the girl who had been silenced, the girl who wrote in secret to remind herself she still existed, but tonight, after the headlines, after watching Adrian orchestrate the ruin of an empire like a man carving through flesh, she needed it. She needed to hear her own voice, even if it was only ink on paper.Her words circled the same truth: I love him. I fear him. I need him. He terrifies me. He saves me. He consumes me.The pen stilled. She pressed the tip to the page until it nearly tore, because the problem was

They said the first cut never hurt, that the second, third, and fourth did the real damage. Luna had learned otherwise. The first cut had split her open and the rest had been attempts to finish what had started.She woke to the sound of her phone buzzing like a persistent insect on the nightstand. For a moment she thought it was a dream, the press, the leaks, the note, and then inertia gave way to dread. She reached across the tangle of sheets and thumbed the screen awake.Her manager. A dozen unread texts. A voicemail flagged urgent. She listened to one, then another: studio calls, radio bookings, producers asking for statements, and then a text that made the blood in her veins go cold: Therapy notes leaked. Full transcript circulating. Call me now.The apartment blurred. The city below moved on in its indifferent, glittering orbit while a small, private panic rose in her chest. Therapy notes. Private things. Things she had said to someone in a room she trusted to help her hold the b

They called it a gala, but the room felt like the kind of battlefield that preferred silk to armor. Crystal chandeliers spilled light like a constellation fallen into a hotel ballroom; photographers orbited the entrance with practiced hunger; waiters in tuxedos floated by with trays of tiny, gleaming canapés. It smelled of citrus and danger and old money pretending new money was merely fashionably late.Adrian and Luna arrived together, deliberate and practiced in their public ease. He in a black suit that cut him lik a vow; she in a gown that allowed her to be seen and not consumed, soft fabric that moved like a mood, not a weapon. Cameras found them at once, the flashes punctuating the crowd like heartbeat stabs, but tonight the noise felt different: not the brazen vultures of tabloid hour, but a current of something new, she’d finally spoken, the air shifted.They crossed the room and found a table close to the stage where the gala’s benefit performers would appear. On the way, a w