5. Marc
Marc
“I truly apologise for this.”
Marc di Gregorio had found himself in many difficult situations—who could forget the horror of Velvet Jones emerging from his closet wearing nothing but leather underwear—but never before had he been shackled to a beautiful woman without a film crew present.
One minute, he’d been sitting on a folding chair in the sunshine, reading through the script with Serena; the next, armed men were running across the beach.
When a kid with a rifle told him to put his hands up, he’d laughingly complied because it had to be a joke, didn’t it?
A dumb prank. But then he’d seen the fear in Serena’s eyes as she searched for an escape route.
“Relax, they’re just messing around,” he’d tried to reassure her.
“Are you kidding? Dylan’s here, and he’s had a sense-of-humour bypass.”
“We’re dead serious,” the guy with the gun put in, but some of the gravitas was lost because the scarf across his face had slipped, and he looked about fifteen. And also vaguely familiar. One of the background performers? Even now, the kid seemed slightly starstruck.
“Didn’t you bring me coffee yesterday?”
“Uh, just walk to the beach, okay?”
They’d been shoved roughly along, bundled onto a boat crewed by more men with covered faces, then bound and blindfolded.
Gunfire echoed in the background as they bounced over the waves, racing away from the set, away from Malati, away from everything they knew.
Away from safety. The craft sped up, slowed down, circled around, and at one point, the engine turned off for a while.
What were they waiting for? Were they lost?
Voices came and went, some speaking English, some not.
An unseen hand offered a bottle of water, and he drank greedily.
That was a good sign, right? That they didn’t want him to die of thirst?
The blindfold was thin enough that Marc could discern light and dark, and the sun had already set when they arrived on another island.
Arms pulled him from the boat. Water lapped around his knees and then his ankles as he stumbled over rocks and onto sand, and after a short walk, someone had manhandled him onto a chair.
Or womanhandled? He thought he’d caught a whiff of floral perfume at one point.
Not the freesia and rose petals Serena favoured, but something sweeter.
He didn’t go around sniffing Serena, you understand—that would be damn creepy, wouldn’t it?
No, he’d been talking with Heath and Owen about the time an ex had hurled a bottle of Hugo Boss at him because she only wore Chanel.
Was a man really supposed to know a date’s perfume preferences?
Or was it the thought that counted? Turned out both men knew exactly which scents their women preferred, and Marc came to the slow realisation that he didn’t like any of the women he dated enough to care.
That was the point when he’d decided to give dating a break.
Now he was a prisoner, and the only people who might truly worry were Kitty, Huck, and the few friends he’d made over the past year.
Real friends. Friends who didn’t use you to climb the career ladder and then stab you in the back once they’d scrambled up a couple of rungs.
Taking those baby steps away from Hollywood was the best move he’d made in the past decade.
Money couldn’t buy happiness.
It was a truth he hadn’t believed until he’d learned the lesson for himself.
Yes, financial security took a weight off your mind, but he knew so many miserable millionaires, most driven by the insatiable need for more, more, more.
He’d quietly started giving his money away.
A few thousand here, a few thousand there, mainly to small charities where it would make a real difference.
Whenever he couldn’t sleep, he scrolled through JustFundIt and paid off a campaign so someone else could rest easy instead.
But he still had enough to pay a ransom.
“Look, if this is about money, tell me how much you want.”
Maybe money could buy freedom? Serena was trembling beside him, and he hated that.
Fingers picked at his blindfold, and he blinked as it was removed, although the light wasn’t too harsh.
They were in a small room with rough wooden walls, more of a shack really, the space lit by a single bare bulb hanging from the ceiling.
There wasn’t much furniture. Just the chairs they were sitting on, a table holding bottles of water and a rifle, and a video camera on a tripod.
“This isn’t about money.” The speaker snorted.
An older man, judging by the salt-and-pepper hair and the creases at the corners of his eyes.
A burgundy scarf covered the rest of his face.
Had he been to Cuba to get the “Havana Good Time” T-shirt?
Well-travelled or not, the polished British accent suggested he’d taken a significant wrong turn in life. “We want your voice.”
Huh? “You couldn’t have just emailed my agent?”
“We tried that. She ignored us. We even tried contacting you personally through more conventional channels.”
“More conventional channels?”
“We messaged you on BuzzHub.”
“I don’t run my own social media accounts.”
A woman spoke up from the corner of the room, an American this time. The source of the perfume?
“You post inane ramblings every day. Hashtag thoughts-from-Marcs-world. The missing apostrophe really bugs me, you know?”
“I understand that, I truly do. My publicist makes those posts, but apparently, you can’t put apostrophes in hashtags.”
She’d come up with the idea after he informed her he’d be taking a step back from social media. Something about keeping his profile trending, and he’d gone along with it because it was easier than arguing and nearly everything online was a lie anyway.
“They literally have photos of you in them.”
“Only my feet.” Just feet and the view beyond them, that was the hook. “Except they’re not actually my feet. She hires a foot double.”
“A foot double?” The scarf around the woman’s face twitched as she crinkled her nose, and she pushed stray blonde hairs out of her eyes. “That’s crazy.”
“Welcome to Hollywood.”
Havana cleared his throat. “Can we get back on track here?”
“Sure.” Whatever “on track” meant. Marc was just grateful nobody had picked up the gun. “You want me to record a voiceover?”
“More of an infomercial. The island of Malati is home to the endangered Malatian tarsier— Tarsius malata —as well as a colony of pig-tailed lemurs and a plethora of other wildlife. They’ve coexisted with humans for centuries, and now some wealthy American wants to bulldoze half the island and build a luxury resort there.
A development of that nature would be catastrophic to local wildlife, not just on land but in the water too.
Invasive construction, jet skis and powerboats, pollutants from sunscreen…
We’re destroying our planet, and we don’t have another one.
And you…you’re only contributing to the issue by publicising the place. ”
“So you want me to…publicise it more?”
“I want you to tell the world about mankind’s destruction,” Havana snapped. “And filming has to stop. Do you realise how much damage was caused to Maya Bay when The Beach was set there?”
No, but Marc was sure the man would tell him. “Enlighten me.”
“They levelled the beach, removed the scrub bushes holding the terrain together with their root systems, and killed off native plants. And that’s before thousands of tourists began arriving to recreate scenes from the movie for social media. The place will never be the same again.”
“We didn’t level anything.” And the production company had done a hell of a lot less damage than all the bullets flying around. “We have a permit to shoot there, which is more than you did.”
“What do you expect people to do when every peaceful protest falls on deaf ears? Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
“Didn’t Albert Einstein say that?”
The girl narrowed her eyes. “No, it was Rita Mae Brown. Is it really too difficult to give a woman credit?”
“I swear someone gave me a mug with that quote, and it credited Albert Einstein.”
“And because it was on a mug, it must be true, right?”
“You expect me to google every tiny thing?”
“If you did, maybe you’d realise the problems you’re causing for Malati.”
Havana held up a hand. “Let’s focus on the bigger picture here—we’re going to need the passwords for your social media accounts.”
“Why?”
“Isn’t it obvious? We’ve been warning the world about environmental damage for a decade, and do you know how many followers we have? Thirty-seven thousand.”
“Actually, it’s more like thirty-eight thousand,” the blonde said. “37,642 as of this morning, and you always round up, don’t you?”
“Let’s not worry about the math today.” Havana rolled his eyes, and Marc couldn’t blame him. Mid-kidnapping, and she was quibbling over a few hundred followers? “We can’t compete with a Hollywood superstar.”
Megastar, according to Imagine magazine. Unfortunately.
“If you have our passwords, you won’t need us anymore, will you?”
“We will. We’ll need you to talk to your fans.”
Ah, the infomercial. Marc’s mind went into overdrive.
If they wanted him to make a speech or record a video, could he drop a hint about their location?
Okay, so he didn’t quite know where they were currently—slight drawback—but the authorities must be monitoring this kind of thing, right?
Maybe they’d be able to trace the upload?
Or not.
The cops hadn’t exactly covered themselves in glory when Marc had a stalker issue several years ago.
In the end, he’d driven the woman to hospital himself and paid for three months of rehab.
But Serena’s brother would be watching, and Serena’s brother was a private investigator.
Heath was smart. He’d pick up on any clues.
“Talk to my fans, about what?” Marc asked.