He didn't survive by hiding. He survived by becoming the victim.
Three years ago, Rian was the most hated stranger on the internet - a cult leader exposed live, in real time, by five people who paid everything to bring him down. Then the story burned out, the way these stories always do, and the internet moved on to its next monster.
True-crime podcaster Dani Reyes hasn't. Eight weeks into what was supposed to be a simple retrospective episode, she's found something nobody reported the first time: James, Noah, Marcus, Tom, and Priya - the five who took Rian apart - have spent three years in careful, separate silence, and every single one of them flinches at the same unfinished sentence. Don't go looking there.
And underneath a small, warm online community that calls itself a refuge from "pile-on culture," Dani starts recognizing a voice. A particular fondness for conjunctions he doesn't need. A habit of describing his own suffering like it belongs to someone else. A word, always front-loaded, never used quite the way anyone else uses it.
Rian didn't disappear. He rebuilt - not an empire this time, but a following that believes it's saving him. Five new followers who've weaponized the very empathy that once exposed him, convinced they're the ones telling the truth.
As Dani gets closer to the five survivors who thought their part in this story was over, she learns their silence was never about protecting themselves. It was about protecting someone none of them have said a single word about in three years - someone with a kitchen, a dog, a dentist appointment penciled in for Thursday, and a phone that hasn't rung with this number in a very long time.
It's about to.
RIAN IS STILL A B*TCH is Book Two of the Rian Trilogy - a slow-burn thriller about mobs, martyrs, and how easily the truth gets weaponized by people who genuinely believe they're the good guys.
