Page 128 of The Hollywood Switch-up

“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?”

She wrenched her jaw sideways, tore her mouth free from his palm for one second—“You think you can get away with THIS?”—and his hand slammed back over her lips hard enough to split them.

He pulled back enough to look at her. And smiled—the same smile he’d worn on red carpets, accepting awards, shaking hands with studio heads who knew what he was and bankrolled him anyway. “I’m Martin Blackwell. Do you really think anyone will believe you over me?”

His hands moved to her neckline. The fabric tore, and cold air hit her skin.

“After today, no one in this industry will return your calls. Your sister’s career is already over. And you—” He looked at her the same way he’d looked at every scene she’d given him that wasn’t what he’d ordered. “You were never going to amount to anything anyway.”

Her phone. She could feel it against her hip, wedged between her body and the bar. His hands were at her collar. His weight was pinning her. But his grip on her hip had shifted when he’d reached for the fabric—just like before, his hands following his mouth, his ego pulling his body away from the job of holding her down—and there was space now. Not much. An inch, maybe less.

She stopped struggling and gave him what he wanted—the slack body, the compliance, the audience. Felt his weight settle. Felt his breathing slow. Felt the certainty in his body that this was over.

She drove her elbow into his ribs and her hand found her pocket in the same motion, fingers closing around the phone, pulling it free. He grabbed for it—she twisted sideways and it flew from her hand, skittering across the damp floorboards, screen flaring bright in the gloom.

He pinned her again before she could move. Harder this time. His hand found her mouth again and his weight crushed the air from her chest and she could feel her strength draining and she thought a floor that smells like rot and this is the last thing I’m going to see⁠—

No. Not like this. Not him.

His grip shifted. Just slightly. Just enough.

Her eyes found the phone on the floor. Three feet away. Screen glowing in the darkness. Annie’s face in the profile picture, smiling, unaware.

Three million followers.

Martin’s power only worked in rooms where nobody was watching. She’d spent six weeks learning what a camera did to people—how it changed them, how it held them accountable, how the performance became the record. He’d built his whole career on controlling who saw what. On closed sets and NDAs and settlements and silence.