Chapter Three
CHAPTER THREE
Val
“ W hy’d you choose the scenic route when you know there’s no way we can make it to the haunted house on time?” Ava, my roommate and best friend, asks from the passenger seat as I drive us along the narrow coastal highway.
I figure she’s logged into every traffic app available. From her sleek blonde ponytail to the organized planners in her lap, she triple checks everything before making decisions. Her obsession with detail makes my scattered thoughts look like a kid’s finger painting on steroids.
I wave toward the view. “Other than the sunshine, rolling waves, and beautiful bluffs?”
She slides a look my way, lowering her voice despite the loud debate going on in the backseat between our other two friends—Rosemarie and Meg—about the best and worst movie adaptations of video games. “You know this trip’s important for more than just celebrating our graduation,” Ava says.
After losing the internship she’d looked forward to, she has pinned her hopes on digging up dirt about the company that owns the haunted house we’re visiting. I won’t get in the way of her budding investigative journalist career.
“Don’t worry,” I tell her. “Any company calling itself the Underworld can’t be reputable.” Using my best villain voice, I add, “You’ll uncover whatever nefarious business they’re up to.”
She waves away my silliness with a smile. “Still, why not take the freeway?”
If this was part of my family’s freak show with the cameras rolling or the press watching, I would make up a flippant excuse. But if I can ever act like the real me , it’s with the three women in my car right now. “Everywhere in the city, I see my family staring back at me from the sides of buses or plastered on buildings near campus. Except our reality show look isn’t the real us at all. It’s makeup spackled on three layers deep, shapewear to suck us in where they want us to be skinny and padding where the wardrobe people are told to plump us up a bit.”
“You don’t need to change,” she insists.
“It’s Hollywood. Everyone has to change. My family wants nothing more than for me to change.” I don’t add how I dream of someone loving me exactly as I am—not wanting me to take up less space, talk less, be less. “I just need a break from the show.”
“Which has what to do with avoiding the freeway?” she prompts, clearly not dropping the subject. Ava’s complete focus is the polar opposite to my lack of it.
I fight a sigh. “Billboards. I can’t stand?—”
Ava touches my arm. “It’s all right. The tour company will just have to let us in whenever we arrive.”
“Because I’m always late?” I ask. “Or because I’m famous?”
“Because I don’t take no for an answer.”
I snicker. Being the daughter of the fiercest entertainment lawyer in town means Ava brings her own version of terrifying—one the operators of any haunted house attraction won’t see coming. “You’ll scare all the ghosts away.”
“Or you might.” Thankfully, she doesn’t bring up the freeway again.
Instead, she goes back to her colorful planners and meticulous notes. I’ll defend her obsession with notebooks, gel pens, and stickers every bit as much as she overlooks my tendency to misplace things and clean stuff I might’ve forgotten I already cleaned.
Rosemarie calls from the backseat, “You both have to check out the cover of Meg’s latest read.”
Meg, an avid romance reader, reluctantly passes her paperback to Ava. A handsome model poses in a designer suit on the cover. A streak of green smears the title, probably paint from Meg’s latest tabletop game design.
“Any good?” Ava asks.
“Yeah.” Meg’s never been the most talkative of the four of us, and too many people pick on her for her favorite hobbies.
“So good,” Rosemarie answers. “She let me listen to some of the audiobook. Whew.” She fans herself. “Wish I’d had that to get me through my commutes to the hospital.”
“Love conquers all,” Meg says softly. “Of course, excellent smut helps.”
I laugh with my friends, and the stress of the reality show melts away.
When we pull up to the house, the light of the sun sinking behind it paints the edges of its towers in gold while casting the rest in shadow. My heart speeds up, and my skin prickles with the sort of fear that would have me covering my eyes if this was a movie.
In fact, a location scout couldn’t have picked a creepier place to set a horror flick. Guarded by an iron gate that opened for us with a low creak, the house sits high on a cliff that juts out over the ocean. Fog curls through the trees along the driveway. I remind myself it’s all part of the haunted house experience. No one would pay the kind of money the Underworld will charge if the place didn’t give off real deal vibes.
Nonna would be throwing some serious horns right now, chanting in Italian and prodding us to get back into the car and stay far from here. The crash of waves and the crunch of gravel beneath our feet seem too loud in the silence.
This is gonna be epic.
I keep thinking that right up to the moment a devilishly hot man who’s better looking than anyone I’ve ever met—and I’ve met far too many A-list stars—answers the door. His look’s all big screen and Hollywood dreams, which means he’s an actor.
Reality sets in like a stone in my stomach.
This isn’t a haunted house tour.
It’s a freakin’ trap.
No guy this gorgeous would work in a haunted house attraction. Which means I’ve unknowingly brought my friends to something worse than any rattling chains or scary stunts a horror attraction could dream up—a taping of my family’s reality TV show.
Mom’s insistence on us bringing a camera crew screams in my mind. I should’ve guessed she had already arranged something sneaky.
“Welcome to the Underworld,” the pretty boy actor says in a rich voice fit for narrating the filthiest fantasies in one of Meg’s novels. Posh vowels and boarding-school clipped consonants roll off his tongue. I want to punch him in his perfect mouth, but it’s not his fault I was dumb enough to believe I would get a vacation from the Bonetti family circus.
He sweeps his hand toward the inside of the house, and seriously, in motion, he might as well be a model strolling off a fashion designer’s runway. His clothes must be specially tailored to his tall, broad-shouldered hotness, and I don’t want to guess how long it took him to get those tousled locks to fall so carelessly over his forehead and dark brows. Most guys would’ve been stuck in hair and makeup for hours to achieve anything close to his effortless style, and I want to hate him for it.
But it’s not his fault. I can’t blame him for wanting to guest star on my family’s show if it’s his shot at fame. That doesn’t mean I’ll make the fake tour he has signed up to give any easier on him.
I push past him through the open door and slip into the character I play for a show that’s anything but reality.
Let’s get this over with.