The first thing you lose in prison isn't your freedom; it's the warmth.
The cold of Riverside isn't the chill of the air, but the coldness of the iron surrounding you, the coldness of the eyes watching you, and the coldness of the void left by the world when it suddenly decides it no longer needs you.
I was Natalie Ryan, the "Young Sorceress of Wall Street." At thirty-three, I was managing a multi-billion dollar hedge fund. I lived on the fiftieth floor of a building overlooking Central Park, where the entire city seemed to be under my control, just a series of numbers waiting to be rearranged. I wasn't obsessed with money as much as I was obsessed with the absolute power that controlling those numbers gave you. I never lost, and I never allowed any man, young or old, to tell me what I should or shouldn't do.
That moment was my weakness. My hubris.
The crash wasn't my fault; it was the fault of those who thought they could play with other people's money without paying the price. When the energy crisis hit the market, it wasn't just my fund that was at risk, but my old partner's—an elderly white man who wore expensive suits and believed women were only useful for decorating offices. He was about to destroy the entire fund to cover up his personal losses.
I had two choices: either stand by and watch everything I had built crumble because of his greed and stupidity, or make a move.
I moved.
I used my knowledge of the energy company's inner circle and executed a clean, tight insider trading operation that saved my fund in the short term and forced the partner to leave quietly. It wasn't about the extra cash; it was about saving the empire I had built.
But the leak happened.
When the federal investigations arrived, they weren't looking for the partner. They were looking for a simple story to sell to the public, an easily digestible narrative. And they found me: The woman whose ambition had gone too far, whose lust for power led her to break the law. Natalie Ryan became the perfect scapegoat. They never mentioned the partner or any of the men who later benefited from my stabilization of the situation. Instead, they stripped me of everything.
Seven years. Seven years in this cold place where I have to wear a uniform and eat food unfit for animals.
In the beginning, I screamed into my pillow every night. I couldn't comprehend how the system I helped build could destroy me so easily. But as time passed, the screaming stopped and turned into a single, quiet voice inside my head: Planning.
Prison didn't break me; it gave me time. Time to study every legal file used against me, time to study the vulnerabilities in the prison's security system, and most importantly, time to study people.
I entered prison as a hedge fund manager. I will leave it as an engineer of revenge who knows exactly how to move money, and who now knows that the dumbest place a person can hide is the safe corner they think they've built for themselves.
And in that cheap arts and crafts workshop, which has become my favorite spot in Riverside, I met the first piece of my new puzzle...