Chapter 2
The Rebel
“When he shows up acting like he doesn’t care — but can’t stop looking at you”
RHYS
My brother ruins my life approximately once a year.
When we were seven, he convinced me to eat an entire jar of paste because he’d read somewhere that it was made from horse bones and he wanted to see if I’d start neighing.
I didn’t neigh, but I did spend three days in bed with what our mother diplomatically called “digestive issues” and what was actually the worst stomach cramps of my young existence.
When we were fifteen, he told Amanda Loring that I’d written a poem about her eyes — which I had, in the privacy of my own journal, like a normal person processing normal teenage emotions.
And I spent the rest of sophomore year being called “Shakespeare” by the lacrosse team in a tone that suggested they did not mean it as a compliment.
When we were twenty-three, he signed me up for a marathon without my knowledge or consent, showed up at my apartment at 5 a.m. on race day, and physically dragged me to the starting line where I proceeded to run 26.
2 miles in borrowed shoes that gave me blisters the size of quarters.
This year, he signed me up for a reality dating show.
I was going to kill him. Right after I figured out why I couldn’t stop thinking about the woman who’d stood in front of me three hours ago and told me to play by her rules.
The jacket came off first, hurled toward the chair in the corner of my assigned bedroom with more force than strictly necessary.
It missed. Landed on the floor in a sad little heap of expensive fabric and poor life choices.
The bow tie was already gone — yanked loose backstage before I’d even reached my pedestal, because wearing a silk noose while being paraded like livestock was one performance too many.
I’d undone the top button with it, a small pre-show rebellion the stylists hadn’t appreciated.
Now the second button followed, then the third, each one a continued act of defiance against the absurdity of the evening — the cameras, the kneeling, the ten other men who’d dropped to their knees like their spines had turned to liquid the moment she’d asked.
The room they’d given me was a crime against architecture.
Cream walls that clashed with gold accents in a way that suggested the designer had learned about color theory from a casino brochure.
A four-poster bed that looked like it belonged in a period drama about repressed aristocrats having affairs with their servants, its proportions slightly off — the posts too thick for the frame, the canopy too low for the ceiling height.
Amateur work. Expensive amateur work, somehow worse.
A crystal chandelier hung overhead — a particularly aggressive threat, and someone had placed rose petals — actual rose petals, as if we were in a hotel commercial for lonely hearts — across the silk duvet in a pattern that might have been romantic if it wasn’t so deeply, fundamentally absurd.
From a design standpoint, the chandelier was mounted incorrectly.
From an aesthetic standpoint, everything in this room was mounted incorrectly.
I was thirty years old. I had a graduate degree in architecture and a career I’d spent a decade building from nothing.
I designed buildings that would outlast everyone who walked through them.
And I was standing in a reality TV mansion, surrounded by rose petals, thinking about a woman I’d spoken to for ninety seconds.
“You get mean when you’re scared, Rhys.”
Declan’s voice echoed in my skull, uninvited and unwelcome, the same way it had been echoing since I’d arrived at this circus eight hours ago with my dignity intact and my exit strategy already mapped.
He’d delivered those words on the phone three weeks ago, right before I’d told him carefully where he could put his “birthday present” and which orifice would accommodate it best.
“Let’s see what happens when you can’t run away.”
I hadn’t fled. That was the problem. The smart move would have been to walk out the instant I realized what he’d done, turn around and get back to my apartment and my drafting table and my life that made perfect, logical, controllable sense.
Instead, I’d stayed. Signed the contracts.
Put on the ridiculous formal wear they’d provided.
Stood on a pedestal like I was merchandise at an auction while cameras documented every second of my systematic humiliation.
And when I’d walked in — when I’d first seen her there, everything had gotten worse.
My valise sat unopened on the bench at the foot of the bed, packed with three days’ worth of clothes because that was how long I’d planned to last before getting myself eliminated.
The zipper glinted in the chandelier light, a small metallic reminder that I could still leave.
Right now. Walk downstairs, find whoever was in charge, and request an immediate extraction from this experimental study in human degradation.
No one would stop me. They probably wanted me gone.
I’d seen the production assistant’s face when I’d refused to kneel — her whole expression lighting up, delighted, as if she’d just discovered next week’s dramatic highlight reel.
I was the villain now. The arrogant architect who thought he was too good to bow.
They’d spin my departure as confirmation that I couldn’t handle a strong woman, that I’d run away from a challenge, that I was the man this show existed to expose.
Fine. Let them spin whatever narrative they wanted.
I didn’t care about public perception or viral clips or the forty million viewers who watched this nonsense.
I cared about getting back to my real life, the one where I drew straight lines and built solid foundations and never had to think about how Sloane’s voice sounded when she said “We’ll see. ”
We’ll see.
A threat wrapped in silk, delivered with a smile that broadcast she knew exactly what she was doing.
My hand reached for the zipper.
And stopped.
I was halfway down the corridor, moving toward the exit I’d memorized during the mansion tour, when I heard the commotion.
“Come on. Come ON.” Frantic, pitched higher than it should have been, accompanied by the sound of someone repeatedly slamming a fist against what I assumed was a door. “This is ridiculous. This is so— why won’t you just— WORK.”
The smart thing would have been to keep walking.
The logical thing, the thing that aligned with my carefully maintained policy of minimal engagement with other human beings, would have been to round the corner and pretend I’d heard nothing.
Someone else’s problems were not my problems. Someone else’s malfunctioning door was not my concern.
I was here to get eliminated as quickly and painlessly as possible, not to make friends with my fellow contestants.
But the sound was familiar. Too familiar. The golden retriever in human form who’d nearly face-planted on the carpet during the ceremony.
Mason Rivera was standing outside one of the bedroom doors, his tuxedo jacket discarded somewhere, his shirt untucked and wrinkled, his key card clutched in his fist like a weapon he didn’t know how to use.
Sweat beaded at his temples. His free hand was currently engaged in what appeared to be an attempt to physically force the electronic lock into submission through sheer desperation and repeated violent contact.
“It worked before,” he was saying to the door, or possibly to God, or possibly to the universe at large. “It worked like two hours ago. I put my stuff in. I came back. It was fine. And now you’re just— you’re just doing this to me? Tonight? After everything?”
I stopped walking.
The hallway was empty except for the two of us, all the other contestants presumably in their rooms, celebrating their successful genuflection or planning their next strategic move. Mason hadn’t noticed me yet. He was too busy having a breakdown at his door.
“Please,” he whispered to the lock, a new level of pathetic. “I’ll do anything. I’ll be nice to you. I’ll polish you. I’ll — I don’t know what locks want. What do locks want?”
I could keep walking. I could turn around and go back to my room and pack my bag and leave this whole disaster behind. I could let Mason sleep in the hallway, which would probably be good for his character development and would definitely not be my problem.
Instead, I heard myself say: “You’re pushing when you should be pulling.”
Mason spun around so fast he nearly dropped the key card. His face went through seven expressions in two seconds — confusion, recognition, wariness, hope, more confusion, and a tentative gratitude obviously tempered by that I’d refused to kneel earlier and was therefore probably a terrible person.
“What?”
“The door.” I closed the distance between us, plucked the key card from his fingers before he could protest, and examined it.
Sweaty. Slightly bent from his attempts to beat it into submission.
Still functional. “These locks have a light. Green means the latch is released. But the door swings out, not in. You keep pushing.” I wiped the card on my shirt, slid it smoothly through the reader, waited for the green light, and pulled.
The door swung open without resistance. “You were fighting the mechanism.”
Mason stared at the open doorway like I’d just performed a minor miracle. “How did you— I tried that like fifty times—”
“You tried variations on the wrong approach fifty times.” I handed the card back to him. “Repetition doesn’t fix faulty methodology. It just reinforces it.”
His brow furrowed. “Is that, like, a metaphor for my life?”
“I don’t know anything about your life.” I stepped back, already calculating my route back to my own room. “I just know how doors work.”