Rain on the Other Side: After the Rival Returned (Glass)

Vera Song arrived at a botanical lab full of sleeping orchids with a key she should not have owned and a bruise-colored folder tucked under her coat.

Everyone in the building knew her as a gallery owner with a reputation for ruining liars. That was useful. It made them underestimate what she did when no one was asking her to be reasonable.

Mina Cross was already there, the researcher who disappeared from one life into another. She stood beside the emergency lights with rain on her cuffs and a look that said she had counted every exit twice.

Between them lay the reason neither woman could leave: a live broadcast is about to turn one woman into bait. The official solution was simple. Smile, sign, disappear.

Vera Song did not smile. Mina Cross noticed, and that was the first dangerous thing.

“You should not be here,” Vera Song said.

“I know,” Mina Cross answered. “That is why I came before they locked the real door.”

The sentence landed too softly for the size of the risk. It made the room smaller. It made the old hostility between them feel less like hatred and more like a language neither had agreed to translate.

For readers who came for possessive love, this was the exact shape of the trap: soft jealousy turning into a dangerous promise.