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CHAPTER 1
The Killer
Opening night
Two hours from the toast…
The Scream Queens Showcase pulses with candlelight and counterfeit smiles as more than two dozen horror hostesses gather at the same inn to act like they don’t all hate each other.
Such a perfect backdrop. A sea of black velvet and silver claws, of women who’ve built entire careers performing death on camera while knowing absolutely nothing about the real thing.
They’re about to learn.
And there she stands at the center of it all, the queen of her borrowed throne. Holding court in that ridiculous tiara, that fuzzy cat draped around her shoulders like a living accessory, posing as royalty when she’s nothing but a thief in a velvet gown.
She’s stolen so precious much. And she should have to pay for every persona she’s stolen, every career she’s scorched, every woman she’s crushed to keep her spotlight burning. And for every lie she told to keep the whole rotten illusion standing.
And the biggest lie of all—the one she told me six months ago, written on her lawyer’s stationery, signed with an icy cruelty that only comes from a person who learned a long time ago how to kill without leaving fingerprints.
She didn’t just refuse me. She tried to erase me. She tried to make me doubt I was ever real at all.
Bile rises in the back of my throat as I watch her work the crowd. Each honey-over-gravel laugh stokes something molten inside me that’s been simmering for months. Every flash of those ice-blue contacts feels personal, as if she’s looking right through me and confirming what she already decided—that I’m nothing. A disposable Halloween costume. A footnote in somebody else’s story.
No more.
It all ends tonight.
She ends tonight.
Moody organ music drifts through the inn’s speakers, the kind that’s trying too hard to feel Gothic. Across the courtyard, the walking corset with the fake tears clutches her bejeweled cigarette holder and performs for the crowd as if any of us believe a word that comes out of her heart-shaped, lying little mouth.
And beneath a string of twinkle lights, the ancient one perches on her silver cane, dropping poisoned compliments to anyone old enough to remember when she mattered. Both of them would kill tonight if they had the spine for it.
They don’t.
I do.
The festival sprawls out across acres, where Spider Cove has transformed into something fog-drenched and flickering, jack-o’-lanterns glowing along every path, tourists wandering with cider and caramel apples and no idea that right here on the grounds of the spookiest property in Maine, a decades-long reign is about to end.
These horror hostesses are about to get the one thing none of them have ever actually delivered.
A real body.
Just a few more minutes of pretending. A few more moments of being exactly who everyone expects me to be, of wearing the mask that’s become second nature.
Then everything changes.
The queen of this castle is about to host her final episode.
And I’m going to make sure the credits roll for good.
CHAPTER 2
Bizzy
The Present…
“Red, I’m telling you—those women have it figured out.” Georgie is craning her neck toward the Scream Queens stage like she’s trying to download their entire life philosophy through sheer proximity. “Cat-skull tiaras. Velvet that looks rich and buttery enough to eat. Jobs that involve looking menacing on camera. Where was this career path when I was twenty?”
