Chapter 4
Lucas let out a short, sharp laugh.
“You think this will save you?”
“No,” Director Stone said. “It already did.”
He pulled a folder from under his arm and placed it on the table in front of Lucas.
Even from where I stood, I recognized the red tabs.
Contract clauses.
Insurance notices.
Breach documentation.
Lucas didn’t touch it.
So Director Stone opened it himself.
“You abandoned production with no medical emergency, no force majeure, and no approved leave. You refused performance modifications. You demanded unlawful casting interference. You insulted the lead actress, the production team, and the project during a recorded call.”
Maya’s face changed first.
Recorded.
I saw the exact moment the memory hit her—the moment I had asked for the phone, my voice calm, offering a compromise while Lucas exposed himself in his own words with the entire production office listening.
At the time, even Director Stone had thought I was still trying to salvage the situation.
I had been.
Just not in the way Lucas imagined.
“You recorded me without permission?” Lucas snapped.
Director Stone’s expression didn’t shift.
“You called into a production meeting. We documented a production meeting.”
“That’s illegal.”
“It’s unfortunate for you that our legal team disagrees.”
Maya grabbed Lucas’s sleeve.
“Say something.”
“I am,” he snapped, jerking his arm away.
Ethan had remained silent the entire time.
That was his way.
He only spoke when speech did more than fill space.
Now he looked at Lucas for the first time.
“You should sit down,” he said.
It wasn’t a threat.
It wasn’t even cold.
That somehow made it worse.
Lucas’s face flushed dark.
“Who do you think you are?”
Ethan didn’t answer.
Director Stone did.
“The male lead.”
A low, disbelieving murmur rippled through the room.
Maya looked at me then, really looked at me, as though trying to understand how I had gone from sitting quietly in the corner to standing in the center of the disaster she had confidently predicted for me.
“You knew,” she said.
“Yes.”
“All month?”
“Yes.”
Her laugh was high and thin.
“So you came tonight just to humiliate us?”
I thought about that.
About the month I had spent filming until my skin smelled permanently of stage makeup and cold night air. About the exhaustion buried so deeply in my bones that even sleep had felt like another assignment. About Lucas’s message. Maya’s message. Her smug certainty that beauty and proximity to a man would always outweigh skill.
And beneath all of it, older than the production, older than Lucas, there was another feeling.
The old high school shame of being measured against Maya in classrooms, hallways, mirrors, and always coming second in a competition I had never agreed to enter.
There were many things I could have said.
Instead, I said, “No. I came because I was invited to a reunion.”
That was when Lucas finally lost control.
He slapped the folder off the table.
Papers scattered across the lacquered wood and spilled onto the floor like a flock of white birds shot midair. Several people flinched. Maya gasped. Director Stone didn’t move.
“You think you can bury me?” Lucas shouted. “I have fans. I have traffic. I say one word and people will tear this cheap production apart.”
The producer standing beside Director Stone gave a tired smile.
“You’re about six hours late for that.”
Lucas blinked.
The publicist lifted her phone, turned the screen around, and set it in front of him.
Trending topics.
The first teaser poster.
My face in profile, a sword at my throat, Ethan’s shadow behind me, our names side by side.
Underneath it, the release date.
Under that, the trailer’s view count climbing so fast it blurred.
Lucas stared.
I knew the exact frame they had used.
We had shot it on the third night after Ethan arrived, in a freezing courtyard set washed in artificial moonlight. The metal collar of my costume had rubbed my skin raw. Ethan’s hand had hovered a breath from my throat without touching me, but the tension in the frame looked intimate enough to start wars.
Director Stone had watched that take on the monitor and gone completely silent.
Not because it was romantic.
Because it was alive.
“What is this?” Lucas said.
“The version of the show we actually made,” I said.
His gaze snapped to me.
“You planned this.”
“No,” I said quietly. “You did. You just mistook arrogance for leverage.”