Chapter One
SHE COULD HAVE GONE HER WHOLE GOD-GIVEN life without hearing the sound of metal meeting skull. Of bone giving way. Of dead weight hitting the rug.
Millie goes down hard, the mace falling from her hand as she collapses to the floor.
Priscilla—whose real name is of course not Priscilla but Ava, though she’s been thinking of herself as Priscilla all weekend, to make the image stick—watches, frozen with horror, as Cate lifts the massive block, and brings it down a second time with a horrible, heavy crunch, even though Ava can clearly see that Millie isn’t getting back up.
She opens her mouth, unsure what will come out, a string of curses or the mouthful of pasta she stole while Kenzo was taking Jaxon his tray, or a bloodcurdling scream, but what she manages is, “Cate, I think that’s enough.”
The girl stops and straightens, cheeks flushed, clearly winded from the effort.
She looks from the weapon in her hands to the body and then to Ava, and the question, the sheer what-the-fuck of it, must be written on her face, because Cate says, “She was coming at you with a mace. I saw her. She was going to . . . I mean . . .” She looks back down, as if noticing for the first time that blood has splashed against her cardigan.
Stained her hands. A few flecks have even reached her face, dotting her pale skin like freckles. “I thought she was going to . . .”
She trails off, as if losing steam, and here’s the thing. If Cate had hit Millie only one time, Ava might have believed it was a desperate, primal act, or a poorly considered attempt at heroism.
But Cate hit her again.
And now that she’s stopped, Ava notices two things.
The first is that the object she used to bludgeon Millie Mitchell is in fact a book. Not just a book, but the book. The one made entirely of gold. The one she honestly did not believe existed, because even for Arthur Fletch, it seemed a bit much.
The second thing she notices is that Cate Newhouse does not look upset.
Annoyed. A little jumpy. But not like a girl who’s just committed murder for the first time. Too late, Ava realizes why.
Because it’s not the first time.
She feels the smallest spike of vindication, because from the moment she met Cate, something’s rubbed her the wrong way.
No, if she’s being honest, she hasn’t liked Cate since well before they met, when Eleanor insisted on adding her newest author’s name to the list of contenders, insisting that she was special—a word agents too often used when what they meant was green.
See, she thinks as Cate pushes her dark hair out of her face, leaving a smudge of blood along one cheek, this is why you listen to your gut.
But the validation doesn’t erase the fact that she’s now here, in a room, with a body on the floor, and the killer blocking the door.
“Kenzo!” Ava calls out, her heart sinking as the name echoes and trails off without answer, her suspicion soon confirmed by the amused look on Cate’s face as she cocks her head, pretends to listen, too, then smiles.
“I don’t think he’s coming.”
Panic twists through Ava then, coiling around her ribs, her heart, but she forces herself to breathe evenly, to do what she’s been doing since she first arrived, faking a calm she doesn’t feel. She forces her attention to the golden book in Cate’s hands, even as she tries to think of what to do.
“I can’t believe you found it,” she says.
“I know, right?” muses Cate. “I honestly didn’t know it would be so heavy.” She shifts it in her arms. “I barely got it out of the floor.”
“Floor?” asks Ava’s mouth, while her mind begins sorting through possible plans that all start with getting out of the room. Alive. Her gaze lands on Millie’s mace.
“In the foyer,” explains Cate, nudging the discarded weapon out of reach with her foot.
Shit. “I looked everywhere. I was starting to think of calling it quits when Millie”—she glances down at the girl on the floor, and grimaces a little at the sight—“turned the light on, the one over the dollhouse, and I saw it.” She shifts the tome in her arms again.
“It’s really quite clever. You see, the light goes through the stained-glass window on the landing, the one with Petrarch holding the book, and hits the foyer floor.
X marks the spot!” She studies the prize balanced on her hip, scrunching up her nose.
“It’s actually pretty gaudy. Honestly, the things rich people spend money on. Oh well . . .”
Cate takes a step toward her.
“What are you doing?” Ava asks, edging back before remembering the desk behind her.
She shifts sideways instead, trying to keep at least an arm’s length between their bodies.
She’s bigger than Cate, but she’s also wearing kitten heels (Ava curses herself for deciding that Priscilla Renée Fox would wear cute shoes instead of sneakers) while Cate is young and fast. And worse than that, she’s clearly not afraid of getting her hands dirty.
“Tying up loose threads,” says Cate.
“But you don’t need to,” chirps Ava, hating the way panic finally creeps into her voice as Cate comes toward her. “Wait,” she adds, trying and failing to retreat because there’s nowhere to go. “Listen to me, Cate.”
“There’s no point,” says the girl with a world-weary sigh, the girl barely old enough to drink, the one plucked out of Eleanor’s slush pile, the one writer there who shouldn’t be desperate enough to do something like this, because the game hasn’t had a chance to break her yet.
And yet she’s the one hoisting the golden book over her head, clearly intending to bludgeon Ava too, and there is no way on God’s green earth she is going out like that.
“Wait, wait, wait,” pleads Ava, fingers skating over the air behind her, searching for something, anything, she can use to save herself before accepting that the best weapon she has is the truth.
“I’m the editor!”
That puts a hitch in Cate’s step, but she quickly recovers. “Nice try, Priscilla.”
“It’s true,” says Ava, the words spilling out.
“And my name’s not Priscilla. It’s Ava Paulson.
I’ve been Fletch’s editor since the beginning of the Petrarch series.
Eleanor and I designed this whole weekend.
I pretended to be an author so I could see what everyone was like—and who I could actually work with. ”
“If that were true, you would have stopped the whole contest when the first body dropped.”
“No—I mean yes, in hindsight, I should have. But I was stuck here, just like the rest of you, when Rufus took off with the boat. And by the way, his real name is Holden, and he was my assistant, and I will absolutely be firing him the second I—we—get off this island.”
Cate stops, an arm’s length away from Ava. “You know,” she says, lowering the book, “that’s actually a pretty good twist.” A small smile flits across her face. “Maybe I’ll steal it.”
“Don’t you see?” says Ava. “You’re the last author standing. That means you won. And as far as I’m concerned, no one else needs to know what happened here. The deal’s yours.”
Cate bobs her head, as if considering. “I don’t really need it, though, do I?” She cradles the book. “Now that I have this.”
That takes Ava by surprise. “But that’s not all you want, is it? You want to be a writer.”
A grim smile twists the corner of Cate’s mouth.
“Why would I want that?” She shakes her head.
“This industry is broken. Publishing can pretend that it cares about discovering talent, fostering talent, but it’s just a machine, chewing people up, spitting out their work.
If this weekend has taught me anything, it’s that nobody’s happy.
Nobody wins.” She looks down at the bloodied book.
“Not without getting their hands dirty.”
Ava frowns. “I don’t believe you. You wouldn’t be here if you didn’t care about writing. You wouldn’t have worked so hard if it wasn’t your dream.”
Cate sneers.
“My mum wasted her whole life—and mine—chasing that dream. She put everything else second. Including me. She cared more about writing the next great novel than she did about taking care of her family. And do you know where it got her?” A shadow crosses Cate’s face.
“Nowhere.” Her fingers tighten on the golden book.
“Rejection after rejection. Which might have been enough to make her stop, but no, because every now and then, someone would dangle the smallest crumb of praise. Don’t give up. Try again. Maybe next time . . .”
Ava blinks, confused. “But you did the same thing. You wrote a book, too. You sent it to Eleanor.”
“I did send a book to Eleanor. But I didn’t write it.” She chuckles, a dry, humorless sound. “I fed every one of Arthur Fletch’s books into a program, told it to make something that felt and sounded fresh but familiar, and voilà.”
Ava’s head is spinning. “You . . . used AI?”
The humor drops like a sheet from Cate’s face.
“Oh, don’t act so superior,” she says. “You think my book would ever have made it out of Eleanor Vandenberg’s bottomless inbox if it hadn’t walked a path already paved?
You can pretend that publishing wants things that are new, but it doesn’t.
It just wants more of the same.” Her knuckles are white on the book.
“What do you want, Cate?”
“Me?” she muses. “I want to get out of my shitty flat. I want enough cash to buy proper food, instead of living off coffee shop scraps. And I want to show my mum how naive she was. How meaningless, to waste all that time and energy, when the fact was, no one really cared.”
Ava swallows. “I know it’s hard to believe right now,” she says. “But publishing isn’t all bad. Some of us are really trying—”
“Oh please,” sneers Cate. “You can save that speech for someone who gives a shit.” She reaches for the desk chair and grabs Ava’s—well, Priscilla’s—pink satchel, looping it across her body. Ava can see she’s losing ground. Her mind races as Cate wrestles the golden book into the bag.