“Kenzo!” Ava calls out, her heart sinking as the name echoes and trails off without answer, her suspicion soon confirmed by the amused look on Cate’s face as she cocks her head, pretends to listen, too, then smiles.
“I don’t think he’s coming.”
Panic twists through Ava then, coiling around her ribs, her heart, but she forces herself to breathe evenly, to do what she’s been doing since she first arrived, faking a calm she doesn’t feel. She forces her attention to the golden book in Cate’s hands, even as she tries to think of what to do.
“I can’t believe you found it,” she says.
“I know, right?” muses Cate. “I honestly didn’t know it would be so heavy.” She shifts it in her arms. “I barely got it out of the floor.”
“Floor?” asks Ava’s mouth, while her mind begins sorting through possible plans that all start with getting out of the room. Alive. Her gaze lands on Millie’s mace.
“In the foyer,” explains Cate, nudging the discarded weapon out of reach with her foot. Shit. “I looked everywhere. I was starting to think of calling it quits whenMillie”—she glances down at the girl on the floor, and grimaces a little at the sight—“turned the light on, the one over the dollhouse, and I saw it.” She shifts the tome in her arms again. “It’s really quite clever. You see, the light goes through the stained-glass window on the landing, the one with Petrarch holding the book, and hits the foyer floor. X marks the spot!” She studies the prize balanced on her hip, scrunching up her nose. “It’s actually pretty gaudy. Honestly, the things rich people spend money on. Oh well...”
Cate takes a step toward her.
“What are you doing?” Ava asks, edging back before remembering the desk behind her. She shifts sideways instead, trying to keep at least an arm’s length between their bodies. She’s bigger than Cate, but she’s also wearing kitten heels (Ava curses herself for deciding that Priscilla Renée Fox would wear cute shoes instead of sneakers) while Cate is young and fast. And worse than that, she’s clearly not afraid of getting her hands dirty.
“Tying up loose threads,” says Cate.
“But you don’tneed to,” chirps Ava, hating the way panic finally creeps into her voice as Cate comes toward her. “Wait,” she adds, trying and failing to retreat because there’s nowhere togo. “Listen to me, Cate.”
“There’s no point,” says the girl with a world-weary sigh, the girl barely old enough to drink, the one plucked out of Eleanor’s slush pile, the one writer there who shouldn’t be desperate enough to do something like this, because the game hasn’t had a chance to break her yet.
And yet she’s the one hoisting the golden book over her head, clearly intending to bludgeon Ava too, and there is no way on God’s green earth she is going out like that.
“Wait, wait, wait,” pleads Ava, fingers skating over the air behind her, searching for something, anything, she can use to save herself before accepting that the best weapon she has is the truth.
“I’m the editor!”
That puts a hitch in Cate’s step, but she quickly recovers. “Nice try, Priscilla.”
“It’s true,” says Ava, the words spilling out. “And my name’s not Priscilla. It’s Ava Paulson. I’ve been Fletch’s editor since the beginning of the Petrarch series. Eleanor and I designed this whole weekend. I pretended to be an author so I could see what everyone was like—and who I could actually work with.”
“Ifthatwere true, you would have stopped the whole contest when the first body dropped.”
“No—I mean yes, in hindsight, I should have. But I was stuck here, just like the rest of you, whenRufustook off with the boat. And by the way, his real name is Holden, and hewasmy assistant, and I will absolutely be firing him the second I—we—get off this island.”
Cate stops, an arm’s length away from Ava. “You know,” she says, lowering the book, “that’s actually a pretty good twist.” A small smile flits across her face. “Maybe I’ll steal it.”
“Don’t you see?” says Ava. “You’re the last author standing. That means you won. And as far as I’m concerned, no one else needs to know what happened here. The deal’s yours.”
Cate bobs her head, as if considering. “I don’t really need it, though, do I?” She cradles the book. “Now that I have this.”
That takes Ava by surprise. “But that’s not all you want, is it? You want to be awriter.”
A grim smile twists the corner of Cate’s mouth. “Why would I want that?” She shakes her head. “This industry isbroken. Publishing can pretend that it cares about discovering talent,fosteringtalent, but it’s just a machine, chewing people up, spitting out their work. If this weekend has taught me anything, it’s that nobody’s happy. Nobody wins.” She looks down at the bloodied book. “Not without getting their hands dirty.”
Ava frowns. “I don’t believe you. You wouldn’t be here if you didn’t care about writing. You wouldn’t have worked so hard if it wasn’t your dream.”
Cate sneers.
“My mum wasted her whole life—and mine—chasing that dream. She put everything else second. Including me. She cared more about writing the next great novel than she did about taking care of her family. And do you know where it got her?” A shadow crosses Cate’s face. “Nowhere.” Her fingers tighten on the golden book. “Rejection after rejection. Which might have been enough to make her stop, but no, because every now and then,someonewould dangle thesmallestcrumb of praise.Don’t give up. Try again. Maybe next time...”
Ava blinks, confused. “But you did the same thing. You wrote a book, too. You sent it to Eleanor.”
“I did send a book to Eleanor. But I didn’twriteit.” She chuckles, a dry, humorless sound. “I fed every one of Arthur Fletch’s books into a program, told it to make something that felt and sounded fresh but familiar, and voilà.”
Ava’s head is spinning. “You... usedAI?”
