Page 129 of The Hollywood Switch-up

He wanted to make her invisible. She was about to become unavoidable.

She went slack again. He adjusted his weight—same pattern, same certainty, and she thought you stupid man, you don’t even know you have a tell. She lunged—not for the door, not for the barstool, for the phone—fingers closing around it, thumb finding the screen by muscle memory. GlamGram icon. Press. Swipe.

Go Live.

The icon pulsed red.

Martin didn’t notice. He was talking—he was always talking—his voice loud and clear in the empty bar, every word echoing off the rotting walls and broadcasting to everyone who’d ever clicked “follow” on Anneliese Morgan’s account.

The viewer count climbed.

He yanked her toward a sagging couch in the corner. Springs groaned beneath her as he shoved her down, his weight settling over her. His face hovered inches from hers—flushed, sweating, and she could see it now, the thing underneath every professional conversation and every polite note and every time he’d called it mentorship: just want. Just hunger. Just a man who’d learned decades ago that he could take what he wanted and no one would stop him.

“Get off me!” The scream tore out of her—ragged, raw, and she didn’t care if he heard the desperation because the phone was recording and the phone didn’t need her to be brave, it just needed her to be loud.

His hand closed around her throat.

Iron fingers. Crushing pressure. The air stopped. She clawed at his arm but his grip tightened and the room went narrow and dark at the edges, black thread pulling inward, and she thought about Annie and about Stefan and about the painting she’d never finish and about her mother’s hands⁠—

Something fierce flared in her gut—not hope, not courage, just pure animal refusal to let this be the end. She gathered every ounce of will she had left and drove her heel into his stomach.

He grunted, buckled, his fingers loosened⁠—

Air flooded into her chest. She gasped, coughed, rolled sideways off the couch, and hit the floor on her hands and knees.

Martin staggered back. And she saw it—the first flicker of something new in his eyes. Not triumph. Confusion. He was looking at his own hands like he didn’t recognize them.

Her gaze found the phone. It lay on the floor, screen glowing, the tiny red LIVE icon pulsing. The viewer counts scrolling—5,000, 10,000, 15,000—climbing faster with every second.

She looked at him. Really looked. And for the first time, she didn’t care what he could do to her.

“The whole world is watching, Martin.”

His face went white. His eyes darted to the phone, to the scrolling comments, to the number that kept climbing, and she watched thirty years of institutional protection drain out of his face in real time.

“You—” He lunged for the phone.

She kicked it hard, sent it skittering across the floorboards toward the far wall. He dove for it, and she met him with everything she had left—fists, nails, teeth, targeting his eyes, his throat, any soft place she could reach. Her claws found skin and tore. He howled. She didn’t stop.

“You’re done!” She screamed it at the phone, at the red light, at the thousands of witnesses she couldn’t see.

And somewhere in that number—somewhere over the Atlantic with her leg in a cast and her phone in her hand—Annie was watching this. Annie was seeing her sister on a floor in a torn dress with blood on her face, and Erika couldn’t protect her from that, couldn’t unsend it, couldn’t take it back. I’m sorry, Annie. I’m sorry you have to see this.

She’d done it. She’d⁠—

His fist connected with her jaw.

A wet crack, bone on bone. Her head snapped sideways. Something in her face shifted, splintered, and the floor was rushing up to meet her, and her temple hit the metal leg of an overturned table and everything went white and then it went dark.

Copper and salt flooded her mouth. Ringing—high and constant and everywhere. She clawed at the floorboards but her legs wouldn’t respond.

Get up. Get up. Get up.

She couldn’t.

Through the ringing—vibrations through the floor. Voices. Canvas tearing overhead. Morning light knifing into the darkness.

The red light on the phone pulsed. Still broadcasting.