51. Erika
ERIKA
Erika woke in the dark villa with the tequila still on the nightstand and the sheets still smelling like nothing because she’d shoved his pillow off the bed hours ago. Gray light through the curtains. The alarm on her phone buzzed against the wood.
She splashed water on her face, pulled on the nearest set of clothes, and walked past the mirror without stopping.
A knock at the door. Sharp, efficient, no warmth in it.
She crossed the villa and opened the door and noticed, without understanding, a rust-colored smear on the white paint near the handle.
Lena stood on the porch, clipboard in hand, scarlet pixie cut styled despite the hour. But the usual sunshine was gone from her face—replaced by something tight and careful, like someone following a script she hadn’t written.
“Ms. Morgan. Call time moved up. You’re on set in ten.”
Ms. Morgan. Lena had always been professional, but there had been a warmth to it—a shared look over a steaming coffee cup, a quiet roll of the eyes at a director’s tantrum, a way of saying Ms. Morgan that sounded like an invitation. Now, it sounded like an indictment.
“No coffee today?”
“Ten minutes.” Lena’s voice was precise.
She turned to leave, and for a second an apology crossed her face that she couldn’t say out loud. She thrust a stack of pink pages into Erika’s hand without meeting her eyes.
Erika shoved them in her bag without reading them. One last scene. Then she was done with this island and everyone on it.
She followed Lena down the path, the dawn light thin and gray across the deserted set.
No crew, no chattering PAs—just empty tents draped over metal frames and equipment shrouded in tarps.
The silence was wrong. Sets were never silent—there was always someone shouting, always a generator humming, always the low-grade chaos of fifty people building something.
This silence had been cleared on purpose.
Inside the makeup trailer, Lily’s station sat empty. Erika stared at the bare counter for a beat too long before turning away.
Lena unzipped the costume bag herself, laid it out without a word, and waited with her back turned while Erika changed. Then she steered her toward the exit.
The air smelled like salt and rust. Her heel caught in the shifting sand, so she kicked off her boots and kept walking. The beach stretched ahead—groomed lawns dissolving into a wild shore, no cables, no lights, no cameras. Just Lena’s clipboard and the sound of waves.
Lena stopped at the entrance to the beach bar and stepped aside without a word.
Paint peeling. Windows opaque with salt and grime. The whole structure listing toward the sand. A canvas flap covered what used to be the entrance, lifting and falling with the wind.
She pushed through it, and the smell hit her—sour beer and damp rot baked into the walls. A single spotlight cut a pale circle on the floor, and beyond it, something shifted in the dark.
The canvas fell shut behind her.
Erika spun, fingers scrambling against damp canvas. Sealed. Footsteps. Deliberate. Unhurried. Coming toward her through the dark.
Stefan was a world away, fifty yards down a path she’d refused to cross last night.
Lily was asleep. Annie was on a plane over the Atlantic.
And Erika was in a rotting bar in the dark with no one coming because she’d made sure of that—she’d closed every door, deleted every text, pushed away every hand that reached for her—and now she was here.
“Erika.” Calm. Measured. The same voice he’d used in every meeting, every note session, every corridor conversation where he’d made her feel like she was the one being unreasonable. “So good of you to join me.”
Just him.
“Where is everyone?” Her hand found her pocket—her phone was there, she could feel the edge of it against her hip—but he was already stepping into the spotlight’s circle and she couldn’t reach for it without him seeing.
“I thought we were overdue for a conversation.” He stood in the pale light with his hands clasped in front of him, and her adrenaline spiked because she’d seen that posture a hundred times and it had always meant listen carefully, this is for your own good.
“You’ve had a difficult few days. The press.
The podcast. Your sister’s situation.” He ticked each one off like items on a call sheet. “I wanted to check in.”
“Check in.” Her own voice came out flat. “In an abandoned bar. At dawn. With no crew.”
He stilled—barely, a half-second—and then his expression smoothed and the moment passed so fast she might have imagined it.
“I’ve always preferred working without an audience. You know that.” He took a step closer. “I gave you every opportunity to handle this gracefully, Erika. The conversations. The notes. The adjustments to your role. I was trying to protect you.”
Protect. She almost laughed. The word sounded exactly like it had in his office when he’d shown her the photo and told her he was keeping it safe.
“You were trying to control me.”
“I was trying to manage a situation that you created.” His voice was still calm but something underneath it was thinning, like a wire about to snap.
“You walked onto my set under a false name. You butchered scenes I spent years developing. And when I tried—generously, I think—to guide you through it, you pushed me away.” He paused. “No one pushes me away, Erika.”
There it was. The sentence that had nothing professional left in it. The one she should have heard coming since the first day he leaned too close and called it mentorship.
“I’m leaving.” She stepped sideways toward the canvas flap. “This rehearsal is over.”
He moved faster than she expected. Before she could twist away, he’d herded her backward against a prop table, splinters biting into her spine.
His cologne—the same one from every meeting, every set visit, every time he’d made invasion feel like an accident—and underneath it now the sour tang of his sweat.
“You’re not exactly who I originally had in mind.” His voice dropped and the professional veneer cracked. “But you’ll do.”
Her spine went rigid. “Get your fucking hands off me.”
She shoved—hands flat against his chest, everything she had—and his body didn’t move.
His eyes went flat and dark, the same as in his office when she’d told him no, the same emptiness she’d mistaken for patience, and she understood now that it had never been patience, it had been calculation, and the calculation was finished.
“Did you really think you could walk onto my set and walk away clean?”
There it is, she thought, almost hysterically. Even now, he can’t resist a bad review.
His hand shot up, fingers clamping around her jaw, twisting her face toward his. Pain spread across her cheeks.
“You should have taken the exit when I offered it.” His mouth was close enough that she could see the pores in his skin, the broken capillaries along his nose, and she thought I am going to remember every detail of this face.
“Now you’re going to learn what every woman who’s walked onto my set has learned eventually. ”
No.
Six weeks of walking onto sets where she didn’t belong. Six weeks of finding the gap—the half-second where no one was looking, the angle no one else saw.
His grip. His weight. The table edge against her spine. Her phone pressed into her hip.
There.
She wrenched sideways and drove her heel into his shin with every ounce of force she had. A jarring crack.
Martin staggered, a strangled grunt tearing out of him. His grip slackened—just a fraction, just a heartbeat—and she seized it, ripping free and lunging sideways, her hand closing around an overturned barstool. She swung it up between them, chest heaving, the splintered edge pointed at his chest.
“Stay back.” Her voice shook. Her whole body shook. But she didn’t lower the stool.
Martin straightened. Rubbed his shin. And his eyes narrowed and his jaw reset and he rolled his shoulders the same way he did on set before delivering a note he knew would hurt, the small physical tell of someone who’d just recalculated and arrived at something worse.
He lunged, his weight slamming her backward against the bar. The barstool clattered away into darkness. His hand clamped over her mouth, muffling her scream, and she tasted sweat against her lips and bit down hard and felt him flinch but not let go.
Think. Think. Think.
His other hand closed around her hip, fingers digging in hard enough to bruise. She twisted but his grip tightened. The air left her lungs in a thin hiss.
“There was always something.” His voice had dropped to something conversational, almost reflective, and that was the most terrifying thing yet—he was reminiscing.
“A look. A hesitation. Something I couldn’t name.
” His fingers dug harder. “Anneliese Morgan would never have looked at me like you did. Anneliese understood the arrangement. Anneliese knew her place.”
He shoved her harder against the bar and she felt her phone shift in her pocket—still there, pressing against the wood—and she calculated the distance between his hand on her hip and her hand and the pocket and it wasn’t enough, not yet.
“The photographs confirmed it. The other one—the artist, the nobody.” He said it like he was reading a file.
“No training. No instincts. No idea how a professional set works. And I thought: that explains everything.” His grip shifted, tightened.
“So I tried. I gave you notes. I gave you chances. I gave you more patience than you deserved.”
He was talking again—he couldn’t stop performing even now—and she felt it happen, felt his fingers ease on her hip as his voice swelled, because Martin Blackwell couldn’t make a point and maintain a grip at the same time.
His ego needed his whole body. She filed that away with every gap and angle she’d filed for six weeks.
“And you threw it in my face.” His voice went tight and thin, a wire about to snap. “You think you can get away with that?”