Chapter 1
Lana
Lana Fleming had lost count of the number of times she’d died.
The first was a novelty. She’d died staring into the distance, her body unnaturally twisted. By the seventh, her eyes stung and watered, her hip dug into the dirt, and grit coated the sunscreen on her limbs, where they weren’t covered by her blood-soaked tunic. After the eighth, she’d adjusted to a more sustainable pose, with eyes firmly closed. Even so, by the seventeenth take—or was it the twentieth?—she felt like an overcooked human slug.
Lana didn’t have time to die. She had more important things to do. Actual life or death things.
She opened one eye just enough to check the cameras weren’t panning her way. They weren’t. All lenses, human and mechanical, were focused on the foreground, as Achilles and Hector fought hand-to-hand, leaping over the dead soldiers and citizens of Troy. She hadn’t made the cut to be one of the corpses in the midground. In fact, after a week on set, she might not have made it into a single frame.
She wasn’t even sure how her death fit the show’s narrative, with the filming all out of order. Was this the epic season finaleor some early scuffle? Although, having binged the previous season before showing up for her first day as an extra, she’d concluded thatGods and Mortalswas less about themes and character arcs, and more about Achilles’ abs, the body count, and hot sex. When her sister Vivien had landed her big break as a production assistant a year ago, she’d breathlessly described it as “Game of Thronesbut with Greek gods.”
With her time on set running out, Lana’s ill-fated life as a Trojan woman and all seventeen of her deaths felt like they were for nothing. True, she’d learned a lot in the last week. Just not the one thing she’d come here to find out: Why had her sister vanished, and where was she?
Lana had learned, for instance, that she was an excellent background actor. Anextraextra. As in, she was average and unremarkable and never did anything to draw attention to herself. The rules were made for her. “Stay quiet.” Her default setting. “Stay out of everyone’s way.” She’d never in her life gotten in anyone’s way, if she could help it. “Follow instructions.”Hold my amphora.
Lana had also learned the art of dying. First rule? Don’t think of it asdyingbut as trying desperately to cling to life. There was a process. First came the fight to live, despite your mortal injury. Second, a moment of realization that you were doomed. Third, a last attempt to reach out—a word, a gesture, a look. Finally, you released your last breath and went limp.
So far so dead. But then death brought its own complications. As in real life, you spent more time dead than alive, so it had to be sustainable—relaxed, not rigor mortis. Hot tip there? Die with your mouth open so you can take stealthy shallow breaths.
As the director called “cut” on take eighteen, Lana sat up and stretched, adjusting her chiton and tightening the leather belt. Her updo was trailing so many tendrils it was more downthan up, but the makeup and hair team had stopped coming by, which the other extras took to mean they were no longer in shot. Extraneous extras, extra grumpy on a Friday afternoon before a holiday weekend.
Up on the limestone steps surrounding the acropolis, crew swooped in to restore the Achilles actor, Griffin Hart, to his pre-fight state. The makeup team seemed concerned about a bruise developing on his waist, where Hector’s stunt double had mistakenly landed a hit. Or perhaps deliberately, given Griffin Hart’s reputation—Mr.Hart, as he insisted on being called. Even the director was simply “Sofia.”
While the regular actor who played Hector was only swapping in with the stunt double for close shots and dialogue, Griffin Hart had no stunt double. He’d been going for hours without relief, as if making a point. Or punishing himself.
“What an asshole,” the extra beside her muttered lustily. Lana followed the woman’s heavy-lidded gaze to Griffin Hart’s abs, currently being spritzed with a sheen of glycerin. An assistant handed him cologne, which he sprayed under his arms, and the image could be slapped straight on a Calvin Klein billboard on Sunset Boulevard.
Lana hadn’t readThe Iliadsince school, but she was pretty sure Homer had at least given Achilles a breastplate, rather than trusting his abs and a few scraps of leather to fend off Hector’s spear and sword. But never let the facts get in the way of a magnificent six-pack—and if that wasn’t the first rule of Hollywood, it should be.
A production assistant appeared with bottles of water and Lana gratefully swigged. The sun had shifted, leaving her partially shaded by the citadel’s inner wall. In this jumped-up take on mythology, Troy was the Swiss Army knife of ancient cities, meticulously recreated on a ranch on California’s Central Coast. Behind the stone walls, gates and guard towers, trapdoorsplummeted to a booby-trapped maze of sea-scoured caves repurposed as dungeons and catacombs.
She returned the bottle and stretched her neck to each side, taking in the scrubby foothills of the Solana Ranges and then the shimmering Pacific Ocean—alias the Dardanelles.
At first, Lana had considered the communal obsession with Griffin Hart over the top. But then he’d leaped from a watchtower that first day, rappelling down while firing arrows to take out the guards, and she’d realized how much of a sucker she was for overt testosterone and long, muscular legs.
On screen, he was hot, no question. Ripped physique, ridiculously handsome face, caramel hair just long enough to curl, bright green eyes against a deep tan. He’d evidently been born with a cleft lip, expertly repaired but leaving a scar that gave him a hint of a scowl, which lent a fierceness to all that sharply cut perfection.
But take him into the actual world and put him next to regular people, like the crew adjusting him, and his hotness became transcendent. One glance his way, and you’d find yourself believing in auras—if an aura could be dark, velvety and smoldering. When the cameras were on him, his gaze was so intense that if you caught his eye for a split second, you felt it enter through your pores and reach into your gut and give a little twist. Lana had never had a thing for bad boys—way too much hard work and drama—but for him she’d make an exception. Hypothetically.
He might well be an asshole, but no one could claim he was phoning it in. He did and said everything as if he meant it. He could fight, he could deliver a look or a line with conviction, and boy he could kiss—as far as Lana could tell, not being the recipient. That task, in the scene filmed that morning, had fallen to Estelle Duman, the statuesque brunette playing this season’s love interest, Polyxena. Achilles would catch her around thewaist, pull her hips flush against his, and plant his lips on hers. She would draw back with a gasp, before hungrily kissing him back, clawing his biceps in a need that Lana had felt up and down her own body. There’d been a lighting glitch, so they’d filmed the scene over and over. By the time the director was satisfied, the actress was being handed ice cubes, the intimacy coordinator was fanning herself, and the average internal body temperature across Troy had cranked up several degrees.
Griffin Hart had seemed the only one unaffected, as if hardcore making out in front of hundreds of people was a regular day at the office. And, for him, it was. Lana had watched him kiss dozens of women on screen—because after bingeingGods and Mortalsthe previous weekend, she’d worked her way through all his blockbusters (research purposes only). She didn’t recall Homer giving Achilles quite so many love interests. They’d even cast a woman as his buddy Patroclus so they could get it on, which indeed they had.
And yes, Lana had watched some of those scenes several times over, occasionally freeze-framing, because if she could be kissed like that just once, she’d consider herself to have had one of life’s defining experiences. The phrase “die happy” came to mind, though she’d had quite enough of dying for one day.
Right then, in real life, not in the sex scene replaying in Lana’s brain, Griffin Hart turned his beautiful head and looked at her, luminous eyes pinning her in place. She felt the connection as if he were two feet away, not a hundred, as if he’d caught her face in his sword-callused hands and leaned in, ready to?—
“Clear the eyeline,” he snarled, his words audible across the hushed set. His eyes narrowed. A whimper caught in Lana’s throat.
“Clear the eyeline!” the first A.D. echoed, through a megaphone. “I repeat: Back to one. Come on, guys, this is the martini! Quiet, please. Hold the red.”
“Lana!” Lana felt her arm being yanked—the extra lying beside her. “Die!”
Shit. Lana had missed the next take being called. The extras were already sprawled in their death poses. She hit the ground. Shallow, subtle breathing was no longer an option.
The martini shot. The last of the day. Finally. Though at this rate she’d be escorted from the set before she put her plan into action, which would truly make it a wasted week. She’d been lucky not to be fired on Monday, when she’d waited for Griffin Hart at his trailer during a break and tried to ask him about Vivien. Before she could speak, a security guard had hauled her away, the actor glowering at her with the casual revulsion he normally reserved for on-screen villains.
