Page 130 of The Hollywood Switch-up

Erika’s gaze found Martin. He stood frozen in the middle of the room, chest heaving, knuckles bloody, eyes darting from the crowd at the door to the phone on the floor to the viewer count that wouldn’t stop climbing, and she watched it happen—watched him understand what she’d done, watched thirty years of power collapse into a man standing in a rotting bar with blood on his hands and the whole world as witness.

Good, she thought, and the word tasted like blood and triumph. Choke on it, you piece of shit.

The ringing in her ears crescendoed. Darkness crept in from the edges—velvet, almost gentle. But through it she could see the doorway, and the shapes in it, and one of them was Stefan—shoulders heaving, hands in fists, and she couldn’t see his face but she knew it the way she knew her own name—and the thought surfaced slow and quiet through the copper taste and the dark pulling at the edges:

He came. After everything. After the door and the silence and the things I said. He came.

Someone was shouting her name. Stefan, maybe. Or Lily. The sound came from far away, muffled by the dark that kept pulling closer, and she thought about Annie on the plane and Stefan in the doorway and the red light still pulsing and all the people she loved who were going to have to carry what happened in this room, and she was sorry for that, she was sorry for so many things, but she wasn’t sorry for the phone and she wasn’t sorry for the scream and she wasn’t sorry for any of it because she’d done the one thing Martin never expected.

She’d refused to disappear.

The dark closed over her, velvet-soft, and this time she let it.

Victory.

STEFAN

The bottle was empty beside him and the sun was in his eyes and for one confused second Stefan didn’t know where he was—porch railing against his spine, damp wood under his hands, the taste of tequila gone sour in his mouth—and then he saw her villa across the grounds, windows dark, curtains drawn, same as when he’d closed his eyes, and the dread hit before the thought did.

Morning. He’d fallen asleep. It was morning and he’d fallen asleep.

He grabbed his phone and stared at the screen. An hour. He’d missed her by an hour.

Mierda.

He was moving before the thought finished—stumbling down the porch steps, bare feet hitting dew-damp grass, breaking into a run—and nearly collided with Lily on the path.

She was running too. Face pale, still in yesterday’s clothes, mascara smudged under her eyes.

“She’s not in her villa.” Lily was gasping, hands on her knees. “I went to check on her and she’s just—her bed’s made, her bag’s still there, and she’s just gone.” She held up her phone, hand shaking. “Your text—Erika is in danger, Martin—Stefan, what does that mean?”

“Martin.” He was already scanning the grounds. “Isabelle came to me last night—he knows about the switch, the studio’s behind him, she’s—Lily, she’s a loose end and I tried to warn her and she wouldn’t open the door⁠—”

“One of the interns just told me Lena was at Erika’s villa before dawn. Call sheets for a private rehearsal.” Lily’s voice was shaking. “There is no private rehearsal scheduled. Nothing on the board. Nothing.”

They stared at each other.

“Where would he take her?” Stefan was already scanning the grounds—the trailers, the empty set stretching toward the water. “Not the soundstage. Somewhere with no crew, no cameras.”

“I don’t know. He could be anywhere on this island, there are a dozen locations we haven’t⁠—”

Lily’s phone lit up in her hand. Not buzzing, screaming. Notification after notification, the screen scrolling faster than either of them could read.

She looked at it and the color left her face.

“Stefan.”

She turned the phone toward him.

GlamGram. Anneliese’s account. A livestream. The image was tilted, chaotic, a phone on the floor filming sideways. Cracked tiles. Rotting wood. And audio that hit him: Martin’s voice, and then Erika’s scream—ragged, desperate, unmistakable.

The viewer count was climbing. Thirty thousand. Forty. Fifty.

“The south beach.” The words came out of his mouth before he’d finished thinking about them—the rotting wood on the screen, the cracked tiles, the salt-grimed windows. “The abandoned bar. Martin was scouting it last week.”

“Go.” Lily grabbed his arm hard enough to bruise. “I’m calling security and Isabelle. Go.”

Stefan ran, and he heard Lily behind him on the phone—“Security, now, the south beach bar, Martin has Erika”—and then her phone rang and she caught up and shoved it into his hand without stopping, and Anneliese was on the other end with jet turbines screaming behind her: “Bradley’s pilot has us twenty minutes out and I am watching my sister get⁠—”