56
“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me — a kissing competition?”
The director shrugs but doesn’t look apologetic at all.
“We need to do something about the ratings,” he says, raising his hands in a ‘what can you do?’ kind of way.
“There are twelve women left, and so far there’s no clear favourite.
You didn’t seem moved more than usual when we lost the Cuban and the Romanian last night, and your response when you heard about Thorun was underwhelming to say the least.”
I pause and consider my reaction. What was there to say about Dana and Alondra?
Dana was a genius who would have made an excellent, cold, vampire wife and probably would have taken on the role I was offering very happily.
Alondra was a dark-eyed, dark-haired beauty with absolutely no sense of humour, descended from a rich coffee family with dubious political links.
I didn’t know either well, but I was saddened by their deaths, as I have been by all the women who’ve died on this show for me.
As for Thorun, I was more concerned than he knew.
I thought she’d be safe inside the resort since some of the upcoming trials require contestants to eliminate a competitor in order to win.
I’d honestly expected that someone would see Thorun as an easy mark on a challenge and their ticket to a win, and therefore leave her alone outside the trials.
I’d been disappointed Evelyn had been the one to try to kill her, but I hadn’t been surprised Thorun was saved.
Not at all. And I’m not staggered that she’s in the medical centre, traumatised by what had gone down.
It’s not every day you have someone feed your hair into a spa filter to drown you, have to be virtually scalped to save your life, and then watch your attacker bleed to death from a blade wound to the neck.
I might not have shown it on camera, but I was particularly concerned when I’d heard the news.
If she’d been killed today I would have had her death on my conscience because I’d concealed from her what the Life Token was and encouraged her to keep it secret.
But the fact of the matter is that the Life Token, if we use it wisely, will save her and me.
I’d been pondering the finer details of my strategy up until the attempt on her life today.
Since then I’ve had to refine my plan. The Italian, thankfully, had unwittingly helped me finalise it.
“My response was commensurate with what you already know, Mr Dott,” I growl to the ridiculous little director.
“The winner will be decided by the contestants, not by me. You know any one of them is perfectly capable of eliminating their rivals and winning my hand. Any one of them could be the one. Reading between the lines, though, I’d say your wheels are spinning in mud because Starlen’s gamble that killing off six women at once in Seville would get the viewers’ juices flowing didn’t pay off. ”
“Correct,” he sighs, his shoulders slumping, “we misread the room. We thought viewers wanted more excitement, but they wanted more romance first. Torturing them all was also a mistake. Advertisers have fallen away in droves. We didn’t anticipate that response.
The producers need to claw back ratings and, by extension, advertising revenue. ”
“And given that you lost another two last night, and Evelyn was eliminated today, you don’t want to lose any more competitors for the time being, so instead you’ve come up with this fucked-up plan.”
“Yes,” he pushes his glasses up on his nose with one finger, “we lost a swathe of lucrative US deals today. Nobody anticipated a crowd favourite would go that way. The Italian is responsible, I blame the Italian,” he mutters. “Where she goes, trouble follows.”
“Evelyn knew the risks. She tried to murder Thorun and should have known the Italian wouldn’t allow that,” I shrug. “Catriona’s reputation preceded her.”
‘And her honour. She has a friend, whether she’ll admit it or not.’
“Well, be that as it may. If it’s romance the viewers want, then that’s what we need to give them — even if, as you say, you’ll allow the competitors to decide, the fans can’t know that.”