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“Hey,” I said. “If you’re calling because I didn’t come back last night, I’m totally okay. Is everything all right with Miso?”
“Fine. She’s up to her usual escape antics, no news there,” she said.
I breathed a sigh of relief, and kept walking.
“But there is news. The show is on hold,” she said. “Maybe permanently. We don’t have any details yet, but everyone is freaking out.”
The show was on hold?
“Why? That doesn’t make sense. Is it about what I did to Waylen? Is the studio in trouble for filming an eye gouging live?”
“That is a fabulous theory I wish I could weigh in on, but I don’t know anything more than you do. And even if that is the case, that’s on the studio for filming live when they very well know—”
Layana kept talking, but I couldn’t hear her.
Ringing filled my ears as lights flashed in my eyes, camera crews shoving each other to get closest to me. Microphones were held up to my face.
I was blinded, deafened, stunned.
“Morgan Montrose!” someone called.
“Morgan, over here!”
A crush of people surrounded me. I couldn’t see where I was going, and I had no idea what this was about. I tried to press forward in the sea of chaos.
“Morgan, you’re accused of kidnapping the head of Carrington Media. What do you say to that?”
I couldn’t breathe. I was lost in a sea of strangers. “I didn’t—”
“Morgan, over here! People are saying that you engineered the collapse of the Lacuna network because you were kicked offWhat the What?How do you respond to these claims?”
Bodies pressed against me from every side, pushing, prodding, grabbing.
It felt like a vise was crushing my throat. Tears pricked in my eyes. “I would never—”
“Morgan, how does it feel to be the most hated person in America?”
“Did you or did you not blackmail Oscar Carrington?”
“You were cast as a villain on camera while manipulating a powerful man in private.”
I reached the door and fumbled to use Oscar’s keycard to get inside. The coffees and muffins fell to the ground, lost and trampled by the pressing masses.
Inside, I raced up the stairs, grateful that the reporters didn’t seem to be following. I wasn’t going to slow and take a chance that I was wrong.
I swiped the card at Oscar’s apartment, slammed the door behind me, and collapsed against it. My chest was heaving, my brain was buzzing, and I was barely holding it together.
I couldn’t make sense of what the reporters had said to me.
“—schedule a meeting with the Resplendent Theatre’s Jane Callahan,” said a gray-haired woman who stood with Oscar at the edge of the kitchen. She held a tablet in her hands and scanned the screen as she spoke. “They’ve been forced to cancel two productions to date. Requests have also come in from—”
Oscar’s gaze found me, flipping from an immediate brightness to deep concern. “Morgan. Are you all right?”
I shook my head as he approached.
I was not all right. I had to think.
What the What?couldn’t film. Apparently the whole network had collapsed, a network owned by Carrington Media—as inOscar Carrington.And now I was hearing he was connected to Resplendent, too?
