The ceremony ended. The contestants dispersed — but not before I caught Mason’s raised eyebrows from across the stage and Derek’s sharp smile, the one that filed away other people’s advantages for later. They’d all kneeled, and they’d all noticed who hadn’t. The crew began breaking down the stage while I sat on my throne, crown still perched on my head, replaying the evening behind closed lids.
Julian’s algorithmic perfection. Mason’s golden retriever chaos. Derek’s unsettling intensity. And Rhys — standing there like a monument to stubbornness, refusing to bow, refusing to play, refusing to be anything other than himself.
He was going to be a problem. It settled in my bones, in how my pulse still hadn’t quite settled, in how I kept glancing toward the exit where he’d disappeared as if expecting him to reappear and pick up our conversation where we’d left off.
I should want him gone. He was arrogant and cold and impossible, the exact opposite of everything this show was supposed to represent. I should be planning his eliminationalready, crossing his name off my list, moving on to contestants who actually chose to be here.
But I couldn’t stop thinking about that split second when his mask had slipped and I’d glimpsed the real underneath — wounded, raw, a mirror of my own reflection.
My phone buzzed. A text from Tessa:Network is THRILLED. Rhys Callahan just became our season villain. You’re welcome for not cutting him.
I typed back: He’s going to be a problem.
Her response was immediate: The BEST kind of problem. Trust me.
I set down my phone and stared at the empty stage, at the pedestals where ten men had stood, at the spot where one man had refused to kneel.
Villain. That’s what they were calling him. That’s what the network wanted him to be — the arrogant outsider, the man who wouldn’t play the game, the ideal foil for a Queen who’d built her crown on the idea that men should learn to bend.
But I’d looked into his eyes when I’d told him he didn’t have to kneel. And what I’d seen there wasn’t arrogance.
It was fear.
Tomorrow, the cameras would roll. The games would begin. And Rhys would stand across from me, pretending he didn’t care, while I pretended indifference. I touched my crown one last time.
Then I went to find out what kind of Queen I was going to be.
CHAPTER 2
The Rebel
“When he shows up acting like he doesn’t care — but can’t stop looking at you”
RHYS
My brother ruins my life approximately once a year.
When we were seven, he convinced me to eat an entire jar of paste because he’d read somewhere that it was made from horse bones and he wanted to see if I’d start neighing. I didn’t neigh, but I did spend three days in bed with what our mother diplomatically called “digestive issues” and what was actually the worst stomach cramps of my young existence. When we were fifteen, he told Amanda Loring that I’d written a poem about her eyes — which I had, in the privacy of my own journal, like a normal person processing normal teenage emotions. And I spent the rest of sophomore year being called “Shakespeare” by the lacrosse team in a tone that suggested they did not mean it as a compliment. When we were twenty-three, he signed me up for a marathon without my knowledge or consent, showed up at my apartment at 5 a.m. on race day, and physically dragged me to the starting line where I proceeded to run 26.2 miles in borrowed shoes that gave me blisters the size of quarters.
This year, he signed me up for a reality dating show.
I was going to kill him. Right after I figured out why I couldn’t stop thinking about the woman who’d stood in front of me three hours ago and told me to play by her rules.
The jacket came off first, hurled toward the chair in the corner of my assigned bedroom with more force than strictly necessary. It missed. Landed on the floor in a sad little heap of expensive fabric and poor life choices. The bow tie was already gone — yanked loose backstage before I’d even reached my pedestal, because wearing a silk noose while being paraded like livestock was one performance too many. I’d undone the top button with it, a small pre-show rebellion the stylists hadn’t appreciated. Now the second button followed, then the third, each one a continued act of defiance against the absurdity of the evening — the cameras, the kneeling, the ten other men who’d dropped to their knees like their spines had turned to liquid the moment she’d asked.
The room they’d given me was a crime against architecture. Cream walls that clashed with gold accents in a way that suggested the designer had learned about color theory from a casino brochure. A four-poster bed that looked like it belonged in a period drama about repressed aristocrats having affairs with their servants, its proportions slightly off — the posts too thick for the frame, the canopy too low for the ceiling height. Amateur work. Expensive amateur work, somehow worse. A crystal chandelier hung overhead — a particularly aggressive threat, and someone had placed rose petals — actual rose petals, as if we were in a hotel commercial for lonely hearts — across the silk duvet in a pattern that might have been romantic if it wasn’t so deeply, fundamentally absurd. From a design standpoint, the chandelier was mounted incorrectly. From an aesthetic standpoint, everything in this room was mounted incorrectly.
I was thirty years old. I had a graduate degree in architecture and a career I’d spent a decade building from nothing. I designed buildings that would outlast everyone who walked through them. And I was standing in a reality TV mansion,surrounded by rose petals, thinking about a woman I’d spoken to for ninety seconds.
“You get mean when you’re scared, Rhys.”
Declan’s voice echoed in my skull, uninvited and unwelcome, the same way it had been echoing since I’d arrived at this circus eight hours ago with my dignity intact and my exit strategy already mapped. He’d delivered those words on the phone three weeks ago, right before I’d told him carefully where he could put his “birthday present” and which orifice would accommodate it best.
“Let’s see what happens when you can’t run away.”
I hadn’t fled. That was the problem. The smart move would have been to walk out the instant I realized what he’d done, turn around and get back to my apartment and my drafting table and my life that made perfect, logical, controllable sense. Instead, I’d stayed. Signed the contracts. Put on the ridiculous formal wear they’d provided. Stood on a pedestal like I was merchandise at an auction while cameras documented every second of my systematic humiliation.
And when I’d walked in — when I’d first seen her there, everything had gotten worse.
