Chapter 1
The offices of the rival network smell like burnt coffee and ambition. On the wall, a silent reel loops highlights from the show I’ve been sent to ruin—slow-mo champagne showers, a villa so white it glares, beautiful people laughing as if joy has a brand deal.
My handler slides a form across the table. “Sign with your show name,” she says. “Leah Hart.” She taps the line twice with a nail that could double as a weapon. “Remember it like it’s your mother’s.”
I sign the alias with a hand that looks steady on camera. She sets a delicate silver heart on a thin chain in my palm. “Tap twice to record,” she says. “Tap and hold to send. If you get spooked, stop talking rather than improvise. We can fix silence. We can’t fix stupid.”
“What do you want first?” I ask.
“Everything,” she says, smiling without warmth. “The rigging, the off-contract hookups, the producer meddling, the fights they bury. We don’t need you to be a villain. Just be interesting.”
“What about attachments?”
Her smile thins. “No attachments. The show is the mark; everyone in it is a tool. You’re not a contestant, Leah—you’re a camera with a pulse.”
I loop the necklace. The pendant lies against my skin like a tiny, listening tongue.
The van ride to the villa is crowded with nerves and deodorant. A PA with a headset and a soothing voice tells us to hydrate. Someone rehearses the phrase “open to love” like it’s a foreign language. I watch my alias reflected in the window and practice looking like a person choosing happiness.
The villa gates groan open on cue. Inside is all light and angles—glass balustrades, white stone, a pool so blue it feels like a lie. Cameras roll on silent wheels. The ocean flashes its teeth beyond the wall.
“Mic check?” a sound tech says, his hands gentle but impersonal as he clips the pack at my waist. Another PA pats my shoulder the way people touch expensive vases—reverent, rehearsed. We’re shepherded onto a horseshoe of couches. The host’s smile is already trending.
“Welcome, lovers!” he beams. “Let’s meet our hearts.”
We take turns introducing ourselves to the cameras and each other. A fitness entrepreneur who vibrates at a higher frequency than most people. A girl with a laugh like glass beads. A musician whose sleeves died for his sins.
And then he walks in ten minutes late, laughing with a camera op like they’re old friends. He has summer in his hair and trouble in the set of his mouth.
“Milo!” the host crows, as if he were expecting applause and got it.
Milo takes the last sliver of couch, sinking into it like gravity owes him money. He doesn’t perform the room. He absorbs it. When the nearest camera leans in, he gives it the nod you give a neighbor you don’t plan to know. When a glass shatters behind the bar, he flinches first and laughs last.
[Confessional — Leah]
They cast me to be the calculating one, the girl who can set a house on fire and blame the wiring. He’s not the kind of person I can use. He’s the kind I notice when I stop performing—and I didn’t come here to stop.
A producer kneels just out of frame, eyes bright with kindness he wears like a credential. “Leah, what brings you to the villa?”
The line is ready. “Bad timing,” I say softly. “Good hope.”
“Gorgeous,” he says. “Hold that.”
We disperse for the first-night mixer, a choreography of “spontaneous” moments. Adrian—cheekbones, cologne, camera awareness—slides in next to me at the bar. “We should give the editors something,” he murmurs, offering me a smile he’s practiced for years.
“What do you suggest?” I ask.
“Slow dance by the pool. Vulnerability. A line about second chances.”
“Your specialty,” I say.
“Everyone needs a lane,” he says, and I file him under useful.
The necklace warms, a whisper against my skin. I drift toward the patio where the light is softer, the lenses hungrier. We sway. I talk about love like I believe it’s a door you can just open if you’re brave. The boom dips. The producer’s eyes go wet. An intern tries not to nod along.
And then, by the bar, I see it: Milo slicing limes like he’s solving a problem. The shyest girl in the cast hovers, unsure. He sets a glass in front of her without fanfare. When she thanks him, he shrugs like kindness doesn’t need timestamps. The nearest camera misses it, busy chasing a louder laugh. I lift a hand and tap the necklace twice.
[Confessional — Leah]
There are two kinds of people in this ecosystem—those who need to be seen and those who are bad at being seen. Milo is the second kind. Dangerous in a way that isn’t sexy for television and is fatal for me.
“Leah?” A producer beckons near the hydrangeas. “Fire pit in five? With Adrian?”
“Of course,” I say. My smile is bilingual.
We sit by flames that flatter everyone. The producer crouches again, soft voice, sharp pen. “Tell us why love scares you.”
“Choice,” I say, angling toward the lens. “We sell it like a menu. But love is more like weather. You get what comes. You survive it if you can.”
He whispers “Wow,” like he found a gold coin. Adrian squeezes my hand. The flames perform sincerity.
Across the patio, Milo’s head lifts. For a breath our eyes snag, and the sound drops out of the scene. His expression isn’t flirty. It’s curious. Like he’s found a seam in the page.
I look away first.
A PA appears at my elbow with a checklist smile. “Leah, could we grab you in confessional?”
The room is a glass cube pretending to be private. Lights make my pupils bloom. The lens sits close enough to read my pulse. The producer settles on his stool as if we’re about to pray.
“What do you want to find here?” he asks.
“Something that doesn’t break when you stop filming,” I say.
He exhales like I took the words out of his mouth and made them marketable. We do three minutes of answers that will test well and one sentence I mean more than I should. When I step back into the hallway, my phone buzzes in the hidden pocket of my dress.
HANDLER: First night reads soft. We need teeth. Stir something we can’t buy in post.
I thumb a reply—I have an angle. A quiet one.—then delete it before send. The necklace feels heavier, as if it heard me.
Back outside, a scavenger challenge unfolds with confetti and pretending not to know marks taped on floors. We break into pairs. I get Adrian again—statistically improbable, narratively inevitable. Milo lands with Jessa, who weaponizes her dimples with professional pride.
We run. We laugh. We pick up objects the story has laid out like breadcrumbs. One clue sends us to the pantry to find “the oldest thing that still tells the truth.” It’s a jar of pickles with a hand-written date. The pantry is the only cool, unmic’d room on the ground floor. The door thuds shut behind us, and for a second the villa’s hum cuts out.
I breathe like air has weight again.
Footsteps. The door eases open. Milo slips in, scanning shelves like a forager.
“Looking for truth?” I ask, fingers loose on the jar.
“Thought it might be in the olives,” he says. His voice is lower in here, less for show.
He glances up to the top corner where a camera would be if the world were consistent. His gaze drops to the heart at my throat. “Never take that off?” he asks lightly.
“It was my grandmother’s,” I lie without blinking. “Feels wrong.”
“Right,” he says, and I can’t tell if he believes me.
He reaches for cups; our shoulders nearly touch. Basil and salt. He steps back first, polite enough to make me want to be honest for a fraction of a second. I don’t take the bait.
“Dangerous?” he says, echoing a word I haven’t said out loud yet tonight, like he found it in the air near me.
“What?”
“Out there,” he nods toward the villa. “Danger is loud.” A beat. “You’re not loud.”
“Maybe I’m quiet danger,” I say. “Economy of scale.”
He laughs, a surprised sound that looks good on his mouth. “Fair warning appreciated.”
A knuckle raps the door. “Guys? Need those pickles!” We spill back into the noise. Jessa clocks us exiting together and files it under Content with a smile that could open locks.
The challenge ends in staged cheers. The crew resets the furniture to factory settings. Sunset paints everyone prettier than they deserve. I catch three more small things no one else sees—Milo returning a dropped mic pack to a PA without milking it; a shy girl practicing a line in the mirror, hating herself; a producer feeding a contestant a question like a sugar cube.
By the time the villa yawns into night again, I’m buzzing with footage and a low hunger I didn’t bring with me. Back in my room, I take the necklace off and lay it on the nightstand. The chain leaves a faint red crescent across my throat like proof.
My burner vibrates in the lining of my suitcase.
HANDLER: We don’t need poetry. We need proof. Go where they don’t want you. Start with producer traffic. Doors marked STAFF ONLY still open if you smile.
Another buzz, same unknown number as before.
UNKNOWN: If you get overwhelmed, the pantry’s quiet. Don’t make it a habit. They notice patterns.
I type: Who is this? The dots blink, then vanish. A new message from my handler lands like a gavel.
HANDLER: You’re not special. You’re a lens. Plant the first bug tomorrow. We’ll send coordinates.
I put the phone face-down and the necklace on top of it like a paperweight for bad decisions. Somewhere below my window, the ocean keeps breathing, patient as a judge.
[Confessional — Leah]
Rule one: the mission is the only reason you exist. Rule two: don’t get attached. Tonight I broke nothing except my own certainty. I saw the one person here who isn’t selling himself and I liked it more than I should. Tomorrow I’ll plant the bug. Tonight I admit the smallest truth: not everything I’m recording is for them.
The lamp hums. The villa murmurs secrets to itself. I press two fingers to the red crescent on my throat until the pulse steadies.
In the morning, I’ll start tugging at the seams. Whether they belong to the show, my employers, or me—that’s the part that makes sleep a losing bet.
