Tomorrow’s page. Simple layout, clean design, corporate efficiency I appreciated even while hating what it represented.
DAY 2 Challenge: The Attention Test Format: Group challenge, individual eliminations Premise: Contestants will be evaluated on their ability to notice, remember, and respond to details about the Queen.
Details about the Queen.
I closed my eyes and she was there — a physical presence conjured by my treacherous brain. The curve of her jaw. The freckle on her collarbone. The way she’d tilted her head when I’d said “We’ll see,” like she was already three moves ahead and enjoying the view. She was walking toward me, heels clicking on marble, that champagne dress catching the light. I could smellthe vanilla-and-citrus of her, feel the electricity in the space between us when she’d stopped near enough to touch.
I snapped back to the room. The chandelier glittered overhead, mocking me with its improperly mounted crystals.
The production team wanted us to pay attention? They wanted to test our ability to notice details about Sloane Mitchell?
A cold smile spread across my face. The first real expression I’d allowed myself since arriving at this aesthetic disaster.
Fine.
I’ll watch her. I’ll watch her until I’ve catalogued every tell, every weakness, every hairline fracture in that carefully constructed confidence. I’ll learn her patterns, her habits, the micro-expressions she doesn’t know she’s making. I’ll pay attention so closely that she’ll feel my eyes on her physically.
And then—
The thought stopped there. Refused to complete itself.
And then what, exactly? What was the endgame here? Study the enemy until I could predict her every move, and then… what? Use that knowledge to escape? To win? To make her look at me again with that flash of unguarded honesty, how she had when I’d refused to kneel?
I had no answer.
I lay down on the absurdly decorated bed, rose petals crinkling under my weight, and stared at the canopy while the question hung in the darkness.
And then what?
In my dreams, she walked toward me and I had no answer then either.
But I stayed.
CHAPTER 3
First Impressions
“When he says nothing — but you feel like he heard everything”
SLOANE
I had one rule: don’t develop feelings for any of them.
By day two, I was already making a list of reasons to break it.
The morning had started promisingly enough — I’d woken up at 6 a.m. without an alarm, which I was choosing to attribute to adjustment rather than the forty-five minutes of pre-dawn insomnia I’d spent replaying how he’d said “We’ll see” — that low rumble that sounded like whiskey and bad decisions. The production team had scheduled “Connection Sessions” for today — their euphemism for speed dates with a camera crew. Five minutes per contestant, ten contestants total, fifty minutes of my life I would never get back while men tried to convince me they were capable of basic human decency. The schedule had been slipped under my door on cream cardstock with embossed gold lettering, as if fancy stationery could disguise that this was essentially Hinge with better lighting and a craft services table.
I’d read through the list of names twice, telling myself I was memorizing them for professional reasons and not because I was looking for one name in particular. Rhys was scheduled last. Because of course he was.
Tessa found me in the Queen’s Suite forty minutes before filming, dressed in the navy wrap dress wardrobe had selected and spiraling — the catering (cucumber sandwiches forbreakfast, as if we were at a funeral for joy), the exact shade of lipstick I was wearing (was “Ambitious Rose” trying too hard? Definitely trying too hard). I’d also changed earrings twice and was considering a third swap, a behavior that in any true crime podcast would later be described as “the first sign that the balance was off.”
“You’re doing the thing.” Tessa settled onto the velvet settee with her tablet, perpetually amused, as if she’d seen far worse disasters. “The thing where you obsess over irrelevant details because you’re actually nervous about a different thing.”
“I’m not nervous.” I touched my lipstick in the mirror, then immediately regretted drawing attention to it. “I’m strategically concerned about color theory.”
“Mmm.” Tessa’s mmm could convey disbelief, amusement, and judgment in a single syllable — a feat most people needed a full discourse to accomplish. “So it has nothing to do with the architect who refused to kneel last night and then stared at you like you were a physics problem he was trying to solve?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
