CHAPTER TWO

“Hogwash! All of it! Everything Eleanor Robertson spewed about me was a lie, and she will be hearing from me, my lawyers, and the federal government soon enough, I swear it.” Walter McAvoy spoke through rushed breaths, stopping to scrub sweat off his whiskers after every other word, rustling the mic. “And if anyone believes her, shame on you! Don’t you understand what she is trying to do? She is trying to thwart history! Without me, Mr. Harry’s Trumpet would be nothing! End of the week schlock!”

Seven days. That was how long it took for Walter McAvoy, the darling director of last week, prattling pariah of this week, to lose a lifetime’s worth of work, and now, fear was setting in. You could hear the shakiness in his frazzled voice, the wounded pride seeping off every desperate word. Between the divorce, being booted off his own show, and the constant hounding of reporters, he was starting to realize that it was over—all his dreams were gone.

Eleanor cranked the radio dial to OFF and let the wind fill her ears. Walter McAvoy was done. The Samurai had gutted him, and the public had sided with her, and thus it was over. Onto a new day, a new week, a new battle, a new era, a new story. She sped down I-80, heading out of Sacramento and toward Vallejo, where her one and only friend, the editor of Eleanor’s Corner, lived. That man was Martin Atters, and Martin Atters was a lazy sonofabitch who didn’t do much. But he knew a lot, and he was always learning more, and because of that, Eleanor respected him.

Once a month, they met for brunch in a hideaway diner most people didn’t eat at because it stunk. Literally. Next door was fish place that had closed down three times in the past year alone for failed health inspections. But Martin liked it, and since these meetings were mostly for him to bitch at her about what she could be doing better, they ate there. Plus, they had a deal—two meals and you got a free milkshake. Martin Atters was the type of man to eat two meals to himself and not care about the judgmental glares.

The bell clanged as Eleanor pushed past the sticker-clad door and was immediately swallowed by the rocking riff of Sympathy for the Devil. A man with a cigar sat by the jukebox, thumping his feet and smoking away, while plates clanged onto the metal shelf in the middle of the room, loaded with greasy bacon, cheesy omelets, and buckets of white gravy. Teenagers gawked at one another, full of bad thoughts, and in the back of the room, by the toilets, Martin Atters took up a whole booth to himself. In front of him were two plates—one with chicken fried steak and potatoes, the other with corned-beef-hash and dippy eggs. Between them was a chocolate milkshake, cherry on top.

Martin had already torn into both plates, slicing his eggs open and creating a gooey mess of the hash. He was like a monster who had ripped off the roof of someone’s home and was plucking out his prey as he shoveled food into his mouth. His bushy mustache collected the yolk; his black suit collected splatters of grease. He raised his eyes to her with a smile. “Eleanor Motherfucking Robertson,” he said. “You know, I was beginning to wonder if you was ever gonna show up.” He jabbed his fork into the chicken and waggled a piece in front of her. “Chicken?”

“I’m already ate,” she said. “And blame traffic—two accidents and construction.”

Martin feigned being shot. “You already ate!”

Eleanor smirked. “More for you, big guy.”

He chuckled. “Bon-appetite.”

Eleanor rarely got to let her guard down. In a world that she was constantly punishing, every conversation, every interaction, every moment, was like a wild west duel where the winner always shot first. But with Martin, who she had known since Belridge, where they had both slaved away under Lewis Gordon, she wasn’t afraid to loosen her lips. She liked him, a rare feat he had attained when they were both still back home and he had skimmed through one of her stories and, to put it lightly, told her it was “fucking garbage.”

Martin was an honest man. Brutally honest. He believed the world spun backwards if you sugarcoated pain. He’d call a failing student an idiot or tell an ugly girl to put on some makeup. If someone called him fat, he’d say, “fuck yeah I am, fatter than the titanic, and if you state that obvious crap again, I’ll crash into you like a motherfucking iceberg!” Most importantly, he knew how to translate honesty to writing. Back when they were teens, he had taught Eleanor that people could smell bullshit through ink, and so to call him an editor made it sound too professional. Martin Atters kept Eleanor writing true, and for that, she awarded him the prestigious title of her One and Only Friend.

She trusted him too. Unlike Kenneth Colton, he wasn’t going to sell her down the toilet. He had no future. No wife, no kids, no family, no ambition, no drive. And that’s how he liked it. Working with Eleanor allowed him to be lazy, be a dick, and keep the lights on. For a man like Martin Atters, screwing her over would do nothing—he already had everything he wanted.

Eleanor shook out a Marlboro, bloomed its cherry, and took a deep hit. Somewhere across the diner, a man with a thick Baltimore accent was complaining to a girl making minimum wage that they didn’t have scrapple. He was a long way from home. “Walter McAvoy is gonezo,” she said.

Martin Atters scrubbed his face, tossed his fork onto the breakfast goop, and undid the top couple buttons of his shirt, giving himself some more room to breathe. “So I heard. Did you hear the deal that crazy bastard swung with NBC? Tomorrow, live on TV, he’s gonna star in an exorcism. Claims there’s a demon inside him that needs snuffed out.”

“Funny. His wife said the same thing. Maybe it’s true.”

“Maybe. Probably not. Got motherfucking primetime, though, so fuck it, I guess. Even Lorraine England—you know, that ghost-hunting gal?—even she’s gonna be there.”

“One last cash-grab before it all goes kaput. Can’t blame him. Too bad guys like him can’t hold onto their money. Give it two months and he’ll be in Vegas, dead-broke.”

Martin returned to his battle. His fork led an all-out assault into the potatoes, ripping another chunk free of the glob. “Who’s next?”

“I’ve got a list.”

“And you’re checking it twice?” Martin snickered. “C’mon, Ellie, you’re always ten steps ahead. Give me the scoop.”

Eleanor spun her zippo between her thumb and pointer. “Well, first, I’ve got a hole to plug. Kenneth Colton, apparently, thinks he can talk about me when I’m not around. So, I figured I’d pay him a visit, warn him about some errant rumors I might publish if he ever does it again.”

“But you won’t do that, ‘cuz you need him.”

“You’re right. I do.”

“And you also won’t, ‘cuz you love him.”

“You’re wrong, I don’t.” Eleanor snatched up the milkshake. It was sweating chocolate rivers down the glass rim. She popped the cherry off the top and into her mouth. “I did, once, when I was young and dumb. These days I couldn’t imagine loving someone. Seems like a chore.”

Then, there was silence. Between these two chatterboxes, that rarely happened. Martin wasn’t eating his food, just poking lazily at it. That never happened. Eleanor let the ambient sounds of the diner stew for a minute or two—patrons hurrying to the bathroom, clinking their silverware, placing their orders—then tapped the table. “Uh, Marty? Everyone okay up there? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

“That’s because I have, Ellie, and it’s ruined my appetite. All the sudden, this gravy tastes like horse piss.” Martin scrubbed his face. “You don’t like looking at your ratings. It’s fucking stupid, but I get it. Let’s you stay in your own, creative bubble, and it’s Eleanor’s Corner, not Atter’s Tattles, so I’m not going to step on your toes.”

“Get to the point, Marty.”

Martin clapped his hands together. “The point is simple. Your ratings are like a septic tank—shit all the way through.”

Eleanor chuckled. “That bad, huh?”

Martin snatched the Marlboro out of her hand. “Laugh now, but just like these fuckin’ things, this’ll kill ya, Ellie, I mean that. You ain’t never experienced a downswing like this, and it’s steady, real steady.”

Eleanor’s smile left with her cigarette. “Shit, that bad?”

“Let me put it like this—the McAvoy story? It did headlines, not numbers. People are starting to take you for granted, Ellie. Unsubscribing en masse ‘cuz they assume they’ll hear whatever you got to say from somewhere else. Know why?”

“Because those fucking vultures keep ripping out my quotables and spreading them around?” Eleanor sneered. “None of them got an original writer on their staff, so everyone takes a piece of my pie and profits off it.”

“Ehr! Wrong-o, buck-o. People are leaving because you are taking them for granted.”

“What does that mean!?”

“It means you’re printing the same shit over and over, Ellie. Your readers, they got the IQs of ants and the attention-span of ‘em too. You can only dangle so much sex, drugs, and booze in front of ‘em before they get bored, and trust me, they’re bored.”

“They’re bored.” Eleanor groaned and slumped deep into the cushions of the booth. Across the diner, someone was grumbling at the counter, complaining their steak was still pink and thus, raw. She bet the cook wanted to slap some sense into him. “Their lives are monotonous routines of work, bad-sex, binge-drinking, kids that don’t listen, and a half-night’s sleep. I give them all the glitz and glamour of a high-strung world they won’t ever be part of, and they’re bored.”

“But that’s just it. That’s the nail on the motherfucking head, Ellie—you are starting to become part of that monotonous routine. Your fans want something new. Something exciting. Something to make them go wow. Do you really think another story about another drug-addict, or cheater, or hothead is going to make them say anything but: ‘huh, what a shame’?”

Eleanor huffed. “I’m bringing bastards to justice.”

Martin Atters wasn’t the type of man to get angry, but he furrowed his brow and swished his whiskers around. “Right, and I get that. Justice, that’s what made you Eleanor Fucking Robertson, the Samurai. And to me? You’re a hero. A real fuckin’ veteran doin’ the Lord’s duty. But to them? To Mr. Joe-Blow-With-A-Wife-That-Don’t? You’re entertainment, baby, and there’s an infinite pool of that today, and you’re competing with all of it. Get stale, get canceled, just like a bad TV show.”

“But this is real life,” she said. “I can’t just fabricate whatever I want. I have to work with what I’ve got, and sometimes what I’ve got is the same old shit.”

“What you’ve got,” Atters said, leaning across the table. “Is a whole world out there, full of stories just waiting for you to find them. And what you need is a smash-hit. Something like that James Rotner piece from a few years ago.”

“Smash-hits like that only come once in a lifetime,” she said.

“Not for you they don’t,” Martin said, picking his fork back up. “Because why?”

Eleanor softly smirked. “Because I’m Eleanor Fucking Robertson.”

He swished his knife back and forth through the air. “The motherfucking Samurai.”

CHAPTER THREE

Walter McAvoy’s exorcism drew the interests of pundits, critics, celebrities, and fans. Nearly every parent in America glued their butts to their kitchen chairs and watched with eager enthusiasm, phone pressed to their ears, gossiping with the rest of the neighborhood. It was a spectacle, one that put his director skills to good use, and drew ratings that meant executives everywhere were going to call for more demons, more ghosts, more God, and for a few brief moments, after the man popped up with a smile, everyone believed him cured and cheered him like Jesus himself.

That was, until, as he left the venue, he socked a journalist in the nose for asking too many questions regarding Harry Jones—who was on his way to becoming a media darling—and promptly threatening to kill anyone who brought it up ever again. That night, his PR team quit. That night, Walter McAvoy as the world knew it truly died, and it had been a week since anyone had heard a peep out of him.

Eleanor’s Impala tumbled back and forth as her tires crunched through gravel. She was up in Oregon, leaving behind a sleepy town called Eagle Point, passing apple and orange-colored autumn trees that grew in density with each mile until eventually swallowing her. The radio spoke of other, more important things. Forest fires and Richard Nixon, the death of John Ford and the retirement of Willie Mays. They had moved on, and soon she had too—those autumn trees swallowed her whole, and when she began rumbling over wooden bridges in desperate need of repairs, her speakers crackled, popped, then faded into nothing.

Soon she was square in the middle of bumfuck nowhere, away from street-lights and fossil-fuel fumes, surrounded by woodlands with hippies poking their stoned eyes out of the darkness, blowing puffs of smoke into the air as they watched her roll on past the NO TRESPASSING signs without a care, toward the chain-link fence which kept Climax, Kenneth Colton’s porn paradise, sealed off from the prying, judgmental eyes of the world. Its gate, which was patrolled by a burly man with a mustache who thought himself Teddy Roosevelt but looked more like Fatty Arbuckle, read: Is it Heaven or Hell? Your mind might say one thing, but your groin will say another!

As Eleanor crawled her Impala to a stop and rolled down her window, Mr. Fatty Roosevelt came over and leaned in through her door. His breath smelled like fresh mulch, the culprit being the hunk of congealed dip he chomped on. “Lookie what we got here! Purrty lady you are, ma’am. Real purrty. But if you’ve come to audition, well, I gotta break yer heart. Mr. Ken, he likes ‘em younger. No crow’s feet, he always says.”

“Well then, it’s a good thing I’m not here to audition, isn’t it? Let me through. I need to see Ken. I’m a friend of his.”

“Friend of Ken is a friend of mine,” Mr. Fatty Roosevelt said. “But he don’t take company without appointments. Set gets messy, ya see, and it’s a bad look to have folk slippin’ in other folk’s fluids.”

Eleanor wasn’t particularly in the mood for horseshit, and this man stunk of it. She snatched him up by the collar of his sweaty shirt and yanked him into the car. “I’m Eleanor Fucking Robertson. You know that name? I don’t need appointments.” She let go and the man stumbled back, reeling. “Go on, make your calls. When you talk to Kenneth, tell him if he turns me away, I turn this whole fucking set into a junkyard.”

Mr. Fatty Roosevelt scampered off to a shoddily erected telephone pole with a shoddily built telephone hanging off its side. A few frantic calls later, the rusted gates creaked open, and as Eleanor drove by, she gave Arbuckle a friendly wave. He kept his eyes glued to the dirt. His job was toast and he knew it.

Eleanor entered Climax, which looked less like a traditional studio and more like a trailer park. It had started as a roving caravan of GMC Chuck Wagons that hauled well-hung men and large-chested women from state to state, running whenever the law told them a little penetration caught on cam was enough to send ‘em straight to the slammer, and settled here only once Kenneth Colton’s misfits started raking in enough dough that nobody really cared what they were doing so long as some checks landed on the right desks.

As the shag-carpeted campers multiplied, so did the hippies. No longer were they hidden reefer-beavers of the night. Now they sat in circles, adjusting boom microphones, replacing blown bulbs, or examining, and slicing, fresh bits of film. These mustached men and long-haired women gathered around fluorescent bongs with flowers printed on them, swaying their heads to Country Joe and the Fish or The Mamas & the Papas.

They sneered at her Impala. Their trucks, their RVs, their trailers, they were OK—they were gifting the world with life’s greatest pleasure, man, an orgasm. What the fuck was she doing? Killing the world.

Eleanor’s car spat out a chuff of charcoal exhaust as she stopped by the wet-slapping sounds of good sex. Through the bushes, she caught glimpses of skin. Muscular men with unshaven dicks writhed on top of girls with their bare breasts exposed. Cameras zoomed in as mics were lowered over them, catching every thrust and moan.

The King of this capital sat in a director’s chair with “KENNETH COLTON” embossed in golden letters on its backside. He wore gold-framed-John-Lennon glasses and clutched a glass of tea with a lemon-wedge perched on its sugar-glazed rim as he watched the fucking with deep fascination. In his lap sat a stained notepad packed with illegible scribbles. Notes. Revisions. Ideas. Many would think it overboard for something bleary-eyed drunks watched at three AM, dick-in-hand. But they didn’t call him the “Porn King” for nothing. Kenneth Colton never settled for anything less than the best. He would work, and they would work, until the film was perfect.

Because in Kenneth Colton’s mind, he was no different than Kubrick, Leone, or Kurosawa. He was an auteur with a vision—that vision just happened to be humanity at its most primitive. To him, what he did was not pornography. It was a film with sex and if people didn’t like it, they could just fuck themselves instead. He was making proper cinema and didn’t give a damn if the world was ready to acknowledge that yet.

As he leaned over to one of his audio engineers and hissed orders to him, Eleanor maneuvered her way through the trees, carefully dodging the cameras’ fields of view. Normally she would wait like this until the scene was over and everyone spread out, that way some underpaid intern didn’t snap a shot of her here and sell it to the Hollywood Tribune or worse, the Western Tribune.

But today she was pissed off, hadn’t drank her coffee, and had too much on her mind, so she didn’t really give a fuck about her own rules. She waited until the scene reached its climax, with the muscular man about to finish on the woman, then she burst into frame, stepping in front of Kenneth and putting her hand over the nearest camera lens. “Kenneth Fucking Colton!” she yelled. “Good to see you, buddy. Am I interrupting?”

Groans of frustration rose up, but Kenneth silenced them all with a snap. Then, he set his deadly eyes upon her. “You are. You know you are. But you don’t care. I’ll bet, in fact, you’re glad you’re interrupting. Because you’re pissed off.”

Eleanor couldn’t contain herself. She began to softly clap. “A miracle, everyone! The Porn King has become psychic! Well then, go on, keep it up. Tell me, what happens next?”

“Ellie, I—”

“No, no, no. Since you know everything, tell me what happens next.” Eleanor looked around. A dozen sets of eyes glared back, certain they’d be reshooting well into the night because of her. “Tell these people, who oh-so-badly wanna rip my head off, what the fuck happens next, Kenneth.”

“You bury me.”

“I do what?”

“You bury me,” he said. “Deeper than the world already has. But you won’t.”

“And why’s that, psychic?”

“Because you love me, and that gives a little bit of leeway, I think.”

Eleanor wanted to slap him because he was right. Instead, she just sighed. “Get me away from all these fucking cameras,” she said. “And don’t fucking bullshit me.”

Kenneth led Eleanor out into the darkness, where the hippies petered out and the air was free of smoke. It was a couple minute hike over some jagged rocks and fallen trees to the bus he lived in. It looked like Ken Kesey’s Further, covered in a hippie-puke paintjob, smatterings of half-finished ideas, symbols, words, and psychedelic colors faded to time. Once, this bus had hauled its ass across western America, full of Kenneth’s closest cohorts as they brought his dream to life.

Now it was sunken into the dirt and overgrown with weeds. Fallen autumn leaves lay across its cracked hood and roots curled around its tires. The Earth was taking it back. The hippies would find something poetic about that. Eleanor couldn’t understand how a man could live in not just a bus, but a bus that shook moss from its ceiling whenever you opened the door.

The inside wasn’t pretty either—just a moth-eaten cot, a fridge which made a whiiiiirrrrrrr noise, and a table to sit at and write.

“I see you’ve added a fridge since the last time I’ve been here, how fancy.” She turned to face Kenneth. “You know, for a king, you don’t live a very luxurious—”

Kenneth cut her off with a kiss. Though she was pissed at him, she didn’t push him away, because it had been so long since the last one, and she didn’t know how long it would be until the next. It was explosive, packed with two decades of memories of other kisses and wandering hands. She wanted him, he wanted her, but both knew this kiss would die here and become nothing more, just like it always did.

Years ago, just after college, when Kenneth had bought this bus off a bum who was going to scrap it, he had asked her to come with him. To love him. They both knew she was going to say no, and she did. They were both too driven to give each other what they needed. So, ever since, they met like this, only for work, and this kiss would stay merely a kiss, nothing more. A heavy kiss. A kiss that she wouldn’t soon forget. But just a kiss.

They pulled apart and Kenneth looked like he wanted to go in for a second one. He always did. He would if she didn’t stop him. She knew that, if she gave him a chance, he’d devote himself fully to her and throw away all his goals. She couldn’t let that happen. It would destroy him.

“It’s been a year, Ellie.” He put his hand on her shoulder. “A year’s too long.”

“You’ve been in Canada.”

“Vancouver. That isn’t too far. You came up to Oregon, didn’t you? What’s five hundred miles more?”

He was trying to crack a joke, but Eleanor wasn’t in the mood. “We lead busy lives.”

He looked hurt. “Yeah. I suppose we do.”

They stared at each other. And only now did she see how old Ken truly looked.

They were both thirty-two, born ten days apart in that funny little split between February and March where it’s not quite winter, not quite spring, but an odd mesh of both. Thirty-two in reality was ninety in the land of silver-screen dreams, and Eleanor was already plucking a gray hair away a day to cling to relevancy. But Ken had lived a life of running at the wind, abusing substances and pushing himself to endless limits, and his body bore the shame of it, withered, frail, gray.

“Ken, listen…”

He pulled away from her. All it took was a quick shake of the head and he wasn’t ‘Ken’ anymore. He was Kenneth Colton, Porn King, who didn’t give a fuck about Eleanor Robertson. “I know why you’re here. I’m not fucking stupid. Walter McAvoy got your number. Nobody is ever supposed to get your number. I’m one of only three people who have it in the entire fucking world have it.”

“That doesn’t tell me why you did it.” Eleanor jammed her finger against his chest. “If that number gets spread around, my life becomes Hell. Every bozo with half a brain will call me with something moronic and—”

“Maybe you should have thought of that before you screwed me over,” Kenneth said. “Eye for an eye. You stab me, I stab you, plain and simple.”

Eleanor made it a point to never double-cross anyone she couldn’t replace and Kenneth’s wealth of sources was invaluable. “Look, Kenneth, whatever you think I did—”

Kenneth downed his sweet tea like it was a shot of whiskey. “You ran that Lori Lockwood story.”

“Lori Lockwood worked for Doreen,” she said. “You told me any chance I can to pick off Doreen’s girls, I should—”

“And what else did I say? Check with me first. Know why I said that? Because times like this.” Kenneth ran his hands down his face. He was sweating. “I had just signed her to an exclusive deal. Not a cheap one, either! Now she’s worthless to me. I can’t have my men fucking a junkie!”

Eleanor just sighed. Deep down, she knew she shouldn’t argue—Kenneth was right. She had broken their code and being dishonest to people like him was never a smart idea. “All right. No use in bickering over it like schoolchildren. I’m sorry, okay? I messed up, and then I messed up even more by storming down here in a huff. Rough week for me.”

“Rough week for me too, Eleanor,” he said. “You cost me a lot of money.”

“That sounds like you want a favor from me.”

“It’s a small ask.”

“Then ask.”

“I’ve got this new girl,” Kenneth said. “Goes by Louie Amore, fuck if that’s her real name, I got no clue. She’s cute, Eleanor. Not drop your pants cute, drop your jaw cute. When you put a camera in front of her, she steals the show. I don’t even gotta give her a script—the things she comes up with on the fly, they’re genius.”

“You found a pornstar who can actually act? Congrats.”

“Goddamn right she can! Better than any of those blowhards in the theaters. I think she could go mainstream, Eleanor. I really do.”

“You’re kidding.”

He wasn’t. She knew he wasn’t. Kenneth never joked about anything when it came to his craft. That meant he was stupid, or going senile, or both. Hollywood had made it clear that his world and their world didn’t mix—that was why he was out here in who-the-hell-knows-where Oregon.

“Oh, Kenneth…”

“Listen, I’m not asking you to sell her, I’m just asking you to throw her name in the faces of a couple prudish bigwigs who’d scream ‘help!’ if I came within ten feet of ‘em. You don’t even gotta tell them what she does! Just says she’s young and, uh, you met her and, uh, her manager, uh, Herman Munson—”

“—Herman Munson.”

“Yeah! Herman Munson. You met ‘em at some small theater house. You were stopping through, decided to catch a show, and found a diamond in the rough. If they don’t pluck her, someone else will, because her destiny isn’t singing to sleepy drunkards in bars nobody’s ever heard of. It’s primetime. Prime-fucking-time.”

He took her hand. “Just get her in front of them and I’ll do the rest. This isn’t Kenneth asking for penance on a favor you owe, it’s Ken asking for your help. If she shoots off into superstardom, I reap the reward. Bigger budgets, better movies!”

Eleanor stared into Kenneth’s eyes and saw that same spark that was there ten years ago. That youthful ‘I can do anything’ vigor. And all over again, she fell in love with it.

“You know I’m not going to say no.”

“But I wasn’t going to pretend you were going to say yes.”

He chuckled. She gave him a light slap on the chest. They stared deeply into each other’s eyes. Moments like this, the little moments where talking together felt normal, not rushed and secretive, made her wonder if she would’ve been happier if things had gone the other way. She would’ve had less money, sure. Certainly less notoriety. But with Ken, maybe…

That though must’ve been shared between both of them. Because earlier she had stopped his heart from fluttering, and now it was time for him to pull her back down to Earth. “You wanna see her in action? This film I’m working on, it’s about a war between Fairies and humans, and in this next scene the foolish humans are going to attack the Fairies’ home. But Louie Amore and her gals are going to fight back by fucking them into submission.”

“Sounds hot.”

“It will be. Come on.”

One thing was certain, Louie Amore made all the other girls look like they hadn’t ever had sex in their lives. As she walked among the other Fairies and serviced the human knights, she looked like a goddess touching down from the heavens to gift the mortals with their most salacious pleasures.

Eleanor had been on many of Kenneth’s sets. Had watched him work many different scenes with many different actors and actresses. Most required constant guidance to bring out their true potential. But Louie Amore? She commandeered the scene for herself. Her presence demanded attention and rewarded it. Even her costars seemed to care less about what they were being paid to do and more about Louie’s approval. He was right. The girl was good. Eleanor had seen enough rising stars to know she would get famous and fast.

She made a mental note to keep an eye on any rumors floating around her.

Just in case, of course.

Eleanor sipped her limewater and tried not to focus on the fucking. Instead, she listened carefully to Kenneth. They were exposed to the world once again, so they were all business. She was here to listen to him speak and paying him good money to do so, same as she did every month. Between puffs of his pipe, he did what he was best at—he fed her dirt on the brightest young stars who had found themselves in his trappings, feasting upon the whores, the reefer, and the possibilities he offered them.

Throw a couple vices toward someone, they’re quick to loosen their lips and say things they won’t regret because they won’t remember it. To anyone else, he charged based on the veracity of the rumor. For Eleanor, they were all a flat thousand a pop, and that wasn’t a lover’s discount. That was a bury any legislator who gets a stick up their ass about me discount.

His rumors were good. Most of the time they were true. If they weren’t, they held at least an ounce of truth somewhere in them. The hardest part was keeping track of them all. When he started huffing reefer, he started rambling, and he didn’t repeat himself for anything less than another thousand. That was an issue for Eleanor, because she never wrote anything down until the day it was to be published—bad practice, leaving proof of the dirt you have on someone just laying around.

“That new racecar driver, Alton James? He’s cheating on his wife. Not with one girl, either. I hear he’s been with his entire pit-crew—women and men.” Another puff, more wet-slapping sounds. The girls were going wild, now. “Ooooh, and that journalist, Raven Turner? The one you really don’t like who works for the Hollywood Reporter? He plagiarizes from other countries. Got a whole team of translators transcribing Russian, Japanese, hell, even Portuguese papers, nabbing every little detail he can.” Another puff. A shriek. An orgasm. Kenneth’s eyebrows raised. “You know Wendle Graves? The televangelist? Sweetie, he has some serious problems. Kleptomania and pornography addiction, tsk tsk. I should know. He robbed me blind like he robs all those Christians.”

Lights, camera, action. The film crew was bustling into another scene. The hippies were wiping off the girls. New men, fresh, stiff hogs, were rushing in, stripping their pants off. Everyone was giggling. Seeing everyone so casually exposing their genitals was like looking at a foreign species.

“You came here in such a fury, Eleanor, and then we splashed-out that firestorm. Now you’ve got an armada of gorgeous, horny people in front of you, and your belly is fully of delectable rumors. Yet you look disappointed.”

“It’s just all the same as it ever was,” she said.

“Isn’t that how life goes? Same old shit, different day.”

“I need something new, Kenneth. This is all good, but it’s all old.”

“I take it business is going south for you too, eh?” Kenneth took a long puff off his pipe. “Guess when people can barely pay for gas, they don’t give a rat’s ass about folk supporting folk like us.”

The next scene was well underway. The wet-slapping sounds were back, the moans louder than ever. Louie Amore was with two men at once, and three of the four cameras were pointed directly at her.

Ken cleared his throat. “But from what I’ve heard, Eleanor, you’ve already got something special.”

She raised a brow. “What does that mean?”

“It’s just that I’ve heard a thing or two about you.”

“Go on.”

“Oh, well, I don’t really know if I should say. They’re rather nasty things.”

Eleanor didn’t mistake his coyness for kindness. He wasn’t trying to spare her from some slurry of hate. No, he was pushing her buttons, trying to get her to cough up more money. They wouldn’t ever be together, so they had to keep up the veneer that they weren’t, and hadn’t ever been, in love. Their relationship was purely business, and in the business world, nothing mattered more than cold-hard-cash.

“How much?”

A loud moan. Distracted eyes, but only for a second. “Five thousand for most. Normally one thousand for you. But for me to tell you this, I’m sticking my neck out for you, say let’s say two. We’ll call it…a bonus for Ms. Louie. For giving you a show. She’ll be quite pleased.”

As if throwing her names to the bigwigs wasn’t bonus enough.

Two grand could save her entire career. Two grand could get flushed down the toilet. But money was just money, you either have it or you don’t, but you can always get it back. Reputation, though? Reputation was everything and once it was gone, it was gone for good. She had seen too many times what happened if you risked it even once.

Eleanor nodded and waved him along. She didn’t have to get him the money now, he knew she was good for it. Come Monday, Martin would make sure it was in his account.

“I heard D’Angelo Darce is looking for you,” he said. “Something about spilling some state secrets.”

Eleanor spit out her limewater, ruining her second take of the day because it splattered all over a camera lens. Kenneth yelled cut, the hippies grumbled, the girls groaned, the men went soft. Everyone rushed around the set, getting ready to do the same thing they had just done, but somehow pretend it was new and refreshing. But her eyes stayed firmly on Kenneth. “That’s preposterous.”

“Preposterously true.”

“I haven’t done anything illegal.”

“Maybe so, maybe not. That isn’t for me to judge. But tangoing with the Red Legion? Sweetie, they got enemies in places so high we can’t even fucking see them. They’re bad news.” He paused a moment, collecting his thoughts. “No, actually, bad news is when you type while a little bit too tipsy. Those guys? They are fucking cataclysmic news. What did you expect?”

Truthfully? Many bad things. A bullet in the brain or a poisoned cocktail at best. Cinderblocks tied to her feet and an ocean’s embrace, or maybe even being stuck in a cold cell in some country nobody has ever heard of, at worst. But being hounded by the government? What a fucking nightmare. People didn’t scare her. The law did. You couldn’t trust justice when one side had the power to make you disappear forever—or worse.

Kenneth leaned close to her, slipping briefly out of character, lowering his voice to a worried whisper. “I mean, The Red Legion…they’re terrorists, Ellie. They’ve bombed buildings, torched cars, killed people for chrissakes. I even hear they’re about to…”

He cut himself off, remembering who he was and the value in his rumors.

She could almost chuckle at the absurdity of it all. “Don’t believe everything you hear,” she said. “Else these rumors you spread around won’t feel so certain anymore.”

“Ellie.”

“Kenneth,” she said, course-correcting them once again. “You talk about them like they are ghosts.”

Kenneth leaned back in his chair. It creaked. The wind blew the leaves ominously against one another. “To a person like you, they might as well be. Even speaking to them, story or no story, is inviting demons like D’Angelo Darce to come hunting.”

D’Angelo Fucking Darce.

The Spider.

While she chopped people down, ending their careers with one cutting piece of journalism, he tangled them up in a web of their own incriminating evidence before tossing them into gen-pop. D’Angelo Darce was a name most wouldn’t even utter—hell, Kenneth only did because he wasn’t in the man’s sights—because he worked for the FBI, the CIA, the whoever-the-fuck, and was everywhere. If he wanted to take someone down, he did.

In a way, he and Eleanor Robertson were one-in-the-same.

The thought that he knew her name was terrifying. The idea he was hunting her?

Eleanor played cool. Laughed it off with a wave. “It’s no big thing,” she said.

“Really? Because normally, after every clue I tell you, you take a drink. A small one, but enough to kick the thought into the back of your mind. You didn’t, there. You’re thinking about it. Ruminating on it.”

“Fuck you,” Eleanor said. “I’m ruminating on the fact that it is bullshit. Whatever source gave you that scoop? Blast ‘em to the moon.”

Gasps arose from all over as the writhing men finished their duties and Louie Amore, the star of the show, let out a moan so sensual it sent shivers down Eleanor’s spine. The camera zoomed in on her face, catching every snippet of her thrilling orgasm. Then, quickly, the huffs and puffs of laborious love turned into the shuffling feet, the giggling of a job well-done. The set-crew was rushing in, helping strap Louie Amore to a tree. They were moving onto the next scene. Those humans? They had taken her prisoner but she hadn’t given up on seducing them, not yet.

“That girl truly is something,” she said.

“You’re changing the subject.” Kenneth smacked his palm against the back of his pipe, emptying the ashy weed into a tray already full of ash.

“No, you’re just a broken record. I know what I know, now let’s move on.”

Eleanor bit her lip, then immediately regretted it. Kenneth picked up on even the tiniest mannerism and knew how to decipher their meanings in a matter of seconds. It was part of what made him such a talented director. “Listen, Ellie…” he said. “I heard it’s because of some trouble you got into in Berea, and—”

“—I don’t know what you’re talking about.” She stood up. “And call me Eleanor, Mr. Colton, not Ellie.”

She made to walk away, to slip into the bushes and disappear, but Kenneth caught her wrist. When she looked back, she saw a man whose heart was being torn to shreds. A man who was certain he was never going to see her again. “They say the Red Legion has been wiped out,” he said. “Is that why D’Angelo Darce is looking for you?”

Eleanor stared at Kenneth for a long time. She knew that, if she poured her heart out to him, he would drop everything to help her.

But if she talked about what happened that night…if she breathed even one word of it into existence…it was over. Darce and his goons were circling overhead like buzzards, waiting for any reason to swoop down and devour her. She couldn’t give them one.

What happened in Berea…needed to disappear.

If it did, maybe Darce would too.

“Have a good night, Kenneth,” she said. “And tell Louie Amore to stay by the phone day-and-night. I suspect she’ll be getting a call very soon.”

That night, Eleanor couldn’t keep her head on straight. Her thoughts had overdosed on emotion and ran rampant through her brain, throwing things around and bumping into each other. This happened often. The curse of being a writer, she guessed. But normally, after a glass of Woodford, everything started moving in slow-motion, making it easy to reign them in. It wasn’t healthy, but what coping mechanism was? The hippies had their LSD. The office-worker had their cigarettes. The CEOs had their gambling. She had her liquor.

But tonight, not even whiskey was going to help. She knew that, yet she kept drinking, already on her third glass, and staring at her Curtis Mathes TV, which she bought because it was expensive, but rarely turned on. Tonight, for the first time in months, she had, wiping the dust off the knobs only to be greeted by buzzing emptiness—all four channels had already signed off for the night, telling viewers to return at 5AM for the early-morning news, so she was stuck looking at static that matched her thoughts.

Frazzled. Frantic. Buzzing. Blurry.

When she was with Kenneth, she had done her best to pretend she didn’t give a shit. Because she shouldn’t. She was Eleanor Robertson, the Samurai, who had enemies all over the globe and welcomed every single one of them.

But now that she was alone, her thoughts had time to simmer, and quickly they boiled, and once again her emotions were screaming at her to FEEL while her body had turned to stone. It was like she was stuck in quicksand, sinking to her death as her mind screamed but unable to do a goddamn thing about it.

And it wasn’t even because of D’Angelo Darce. Fuck D’Angelo Darce. If he wanted to come at her, let him. She’d go toe-to-toe with anyone, and what was he? Just another bozo with a blade. He had taken down many powerful people but so had she and she never ran from a challenge.

No, what kept her heart pounding, her head throbbing, the drinks flowing, the world spinning, was that night, that goddamned night.

Berea.

Gunshots. Blood. Black suits. Chopping. Screaming. Begging. Bright light. Cornfields. Stop, Fido, stop. Half a missing head…

She had to slap herself out of it.

She felt like a fool.

She was going to throw-up.

She took a couple deep breathes so she didn’t.

Just the liquor, she told herself. Mixing whiskey with worry was like making a cocktail of fire and downing it in one gulp. It burned all the way through and made you feel everything whether you wanted to or not. Eleanor Robertson had seen terrible things, things she buried deep in the back of her mind. But Berea was the worst.

Stop, Fido, stop.

“Stop,” she muttered, pushing the words out through a rush of heavy, hot air. “Stop.”

The handprint on her cheek stung worse than the next shot of liquor. Muscles all over her body were constricting, tensing-up, and all of the sudden it was like she was there, back in Berea, back in that barn, plate of rotten bolognaise stinking up the pollen-filled air as people with red buttons pinned to their chests flooded the room.

Tonight is going to be a special night, Billy Kid had told them. Tonight, the aliens are finally coming back.

Despite what the government said, the Red Legion weren’t terrorists. They were conspiracy theorists and their leader, Billy Kid, really had been abducted before, five times, or so he said, and that was why Eleanor hung around him, because he was interesting, and he became even more interesting when the politicians started trying to bury him.

If only she had known what was going to happen that night. If only any of them had known, then maybe…

Eleanor kicked back a fifth glass of whiskey with renewed purpose—getting the fuck off the couch. She was sweating like a whore in church and sticking to the leather. She peeled herself off it and threw herself forward, wobbly legs carrying her as far as the coatrack before she needed to take a break. Too much to drink, no time to think. The world was blinking on-and-off. She wouldn’t be awake too much longer and at least wanted to fall into the soft recesses of her bed, not the hardwood living room floor.

But before this night was over, she had to erase the last smudge of that night. In a drunken stride, she fought against the gravity of a sober world to reach her Herman Miller chair, which she fell into, and almost fell out of. She raised her head to the plaques, which melted together into one slushy of golden glints. She smudged the blurriness away and saw little black letters forming little black names, all sullied and sundered by her. Theo Ross, painter. Óscar Velázquez, politician. Eva Mack, actor. Ozaki Nobuo, poet. Norah Holmes, model. She remembered all of them. She was certain they remembered her.

Roman Mintor definitely did. Once, he ruled Broadway. “The Man With the Golden Voice,” they called him. When he sung, people didn’t just listen, they sobbed. So did his costars. He had a nasty history of thrashing anyone who he thought outshined him, beating them so bad they made sure it wouldn’t happen again. Now that golden voice was wasted on drunkards who never knew his name to begin with.

She took hold of his plaque and, with one good tug, yanked it off the wall, revealing an alcove cut into the wood where a bundle of crunched-up papers sat. They had been jammed into this hole in a flustered fury and forgotten about. She pulled them out slowly, trembling fingers barely able to grasp them, and saw, handwritten near illegibly across the first page…

The Trouble in Berea.

She flipped through the first few pages. The ink hadn’t been given time to settle. Instead of drying, they’d smeared into the wet blood and formed a slurry of nonsensical death. Words popped out at her, each one cutting deep as the Smiley-Faced Man had when he’d rammed his knife into Billy Kid’s gut.

Kill them all. No survivors.

Gunshots. Screams. Chopping.

Bloody barn. Bloody bolognaise.

Marvin Pointe. Sheryl Jones. Tommy Snitker.

Dead. Dead. Dead. Deaddeaddeaddead…

She pushed the papers to her chest and struggled to slow her breathing. All the sudden, her lungs were back there, in those corn-fields, sprinting for her life, struggling to churn out air quick enough to keep her going. These pages, scribbled in a frightened fury, were the only time she had broken her cardinal rule—the only time she had written anything down and kept it from the public.

Because she had been afraid. Afraid she would forget if she didn’t. That they would come and take these memories from her. That she would wake up and poof! They would all be gone. But they weren’t. They were stuck with her. Forever. Every bloody bit. This manuscript—it was nothing but a curse.

And also the story of a lifetime.

A story so outlandish it would ostracize her forever. A story so absurd that most people wouldn’t believe her and those who did would be called crazy. A story that, if it ever escaped, would ensure that D’Angelo Darce would hunt her to the ends of the known world. A story people would talk about, wonder about, discuss.

Already, those thoughts were swimming around her liquor-pool of a brain. The possibilities. But Eleanor couldn’t. She couldn’t. This manuscript didn’t guarantee her anything except a witch-hunt by Darce, one she wasn’t sure she would survive. She had to destroy it.

She stumbled out of her office and into her kitchen. She bulldozed through her bar stools, knocking them over, and fell into her spice rank, painting the marble-island-counter with a splash of garlic, paprika, and basil. She stopped at her gas stove, cranked the heat up to HIGH, and watched the blue flames roar into orange.

The fire crackled. The fire popped. The fire bit into itself, hungry for more.

She lowered the manuscript. Soon words would be turning to memories, proof would be turning to ash.

D’Angelo Darce would still come. Surely. But if this was gone, he would find nothing. No proof she was there, no evidence she was anything other than Eleanor Fucking Robertson, the Samurai. He might connect the dots. He might piece together that she had been with the Red Legion a long time, but she would make herself harmless. She would…

Burn this and you won’t be Eleanor Fucking Robertson, the Samurai. You’ll be Eleanor Fucking Robertson, the coward, who ran the first time the going got tough.

The paper’s corner began to curl from the immense heat engulfing it, trying to run away from its death. Yellow became black as wood-pulp turned to charcoal and smoke rose up…

Burn this and you lose the biggest story of your lifetime. Of anyone’s lifetime.

The first flames trekked across the open air, stepping softly onto the paper and spreading across its edge, turning it to cinders, sending bloody brown streaks running down it like the words were crying out for help.

Burn this and these bastards win. Burn this and they never get brought to justice.

Eleanor yanked the manuscript out of the fire’s grasp and into her chest, where she beat at into until the flames were gone. She did this in one move, too quick to think about, and afterward she stood there, looking at the pages, still flaked with embers, and wondered why, why she couldn’t destroy it…

Deep down, she knew. She was Eleanor Fucking Robertson, the Samurai. She cut down nasty people all over the world and while most thought she did it just for the cash, truth was, she liked bringing them to justice. Too often, she thought, the evil went unpunished, and while she didn’t think she was a good person, she always dreamed that, if she took enough people down, she would be.

This was her best chance.

Could she really burn that dream to ash?

She couldn’t.

“I’m totally fucked,” she muttered. “Fucked. Fucked. Fucked.”

CHAPTER THREE

Eleanor Robertson was, indeed, fucked. But she had been here before, many times, and somehow, despite all the bullshit life threw at her, she always managed to un-fuck herself. Sometimes easily, sometimes miserably—but things always came together, so long as she played her cards right.

Typically, she un-fucked herself by fucking someone. Her entire job, persona, and craft was modeled around fucking people with their own injustices so roughly that they fucked off into Nowhere-land, never to be heard from again. Most of the time it was about hitting them with a surprise assault, cutting their throat before they even realized you were coming. But rarely, when someone directly opposed and hunted you, it turned into a duel, one where every strike mattered.

And this duel with D’Angelo Darce had life or death stakes. This wasn’t a battle that, if she lost, bounced her back to the Belridge boonies, pushing crummy papers out for Lewis Gordon. When Darce defeated someone, he robbed them of everything. Their careers. Their cash. Their house. Their freedom. This wasn’t something he did for fame, either. This was a duty to his country. A duty nobody had the balls to match.

But she would, because she was Eleanor Fucking Robertson, the Samurai, and Eleanor Fucking Robertson, the Samurai, didn’t lose anything. She wasn’t afraid of the Boogeyman, or the Loch Ness Monster, or ghosts or ghouls or even God his goddamned self. Publishing the Berea piece would be a mistake. She was certain of that. But going after Darce?

If it was a fight that he wanted, he just trapped himself in a cage with the nastiest, meanest, gruffest dog there ever was. She would tear his head off, drop it in front of his masters, and bark that she was coming for them next.

But she wasn’t going to play the role of the minnow tricked by the angler fish’s dazzling glow—she had no proof D’Angelo Darce was coming for her, just the words of one man who heard the words of another man. If she acted rashly and swung first, she was certain he’d cut her down.

So, Eleanor Robertson went about her normal life. Kept her normal routine. Ate the same food, drank the same whiskey, and ignored Atters’ insistence that she needed to shake up the status quo. She waited, determined to let him make the first move. That was what she had done with the last man she had dueled, James Rotner, and what was he now? The same thing Darce would become—Just a stamp in her memoirs.

Eleanor worked vigorously, driven by the youthful fervor of competition. If people wanted to avoid her name, all she had to do was make sure they couldn’t. She wrote like she was running out of time, and maybe she was. Every day she was on the move, chasing the leads Kenneth had given her; every night she was in her office, cutting the sharpest hit-pieces of her career.

Down went Alton James, the unfaithful racecar driver. Down went Raven Turner, the plagiarizing journalist for the Hollywood Reporter. Down went Wendle Graves, the kleptomaniac televangelist. Down went Lucy O’Hearn, Malcolm Jonas, and Vonne Withers, the racist trio of singers know as the Triumphant Three. Sean Dawson, Josiah Green, Kamari Camacho, Kayla Carr, Amelia Woods—all just names, just people, careers, famous blowhards. She lined her wall with their tombstones, little golden plaques.

For a while, Eleanor felt untouchable.

Then, she finally met D’Angelo Darce.

She hadn’t intended to meet him. It just kind of happened the way these things do. She was someplace and he also happened to be at that place, though Eleanor didn’t believe much in circumstance. This someplace was a party in Beverly Crest, in a twenty-million-dollar home with too many bathrooms to count, and still not enough for the white girl’s drowning their out their emotions with French champagne.

She had been invited to the shindig by Gorman Jakobs, an imposing man who, if he had chosen baseball instead of acting, could have hit fifty dingers a year. He spoke with a long-winded southern drawl and made his bag by charming the American people into thinking he was a real rough-and-tumble cowboy. He never achieved the fame of John Wayne, but he didn’t want it. Truthfully, he was lazy about everything but his appearance, always keeping his mustache perfectly trimmed, his abs perfectly chiseled, and smoking cigars like he was a walking advertisement for them—which eventually, he was.

These days Gorman was old. Retired. Couldn’t walk so well and had a cough that shrieked like a stuck pig. Hollywood was done with him and he was done with them. He secluded himself in his lavish home, throwing opulent parties even Jay Gatsby couldn’t have imagined. Parties where the night was always young and the Devil lived in everyone’s eyes.

Not a party for A-listers, or B-listers, or celebrities of any kind, really. No, this party was for their princes and princesses—fresh twenty-somethings lent fortunes by rich parents who handed out credit cards like candy and didn’t ask where the money was going.

Getting into a Gorman Jacobs party was a feat of connections, money, promises, and favors, and Gorman owed Eleanor many of those, because she saved his career one-too-many times for him to reject her. When she took down Rowen Rhodes, an actor who competed for many of his most prized rolls, he had told her he respected her greatly. When she had slandered Maisy Minoso, a director who tried to have him blackballed when everyone decided smoking was bad, he told her he adored her.

Truth is, he was scared shitless of her. He had seen her Midas touch and was smart enough to avoid it at all costs.

Eleanor hated these kinds of parties. They were full of unblemished adults who hadn’t worked a day in their lives. But they were a perfect source of intel. Young, drunken idiots loved to blabber and didn’t care who was around. Most of the time they didn’t say anything worth listening to, but every once in a while, through the glitz-and-glamour slop they spit out, you caught wind of something worthwhile.

That night, though, she wasn’t rumor-hunting. She was there on a mission to meet Molly Marriet, because Molly Marriet was the main squeeze of one Mr. Leon Blanchard, a raspy-voiced singer who in his younger days had been a bachelor but was now married with a family and not supposed to be poking it into twenty-year-old girls.

She didn’t give a shit about the affair. Most people wouldn’t, either. Cheating was low-brow. It would make someone gasp, maybe go hm, and not much else. But to the person being exposed? It was everything. Even whispers of infidelity could turn their personal life into a headache. In time, she would go after Blanchard and get him to give up some juicier dirt on some more interesting folk. Tonight was about exhausting Molly—about getting her to confirm the affair.

It only took a few minutes to find Molly out on the veranda, giggling with a gaggle of drunken girls whose outside voices were loud enough to drive everyone else inside. Eleanor’s mother would have called them “screechers”—girls who had nothing to say, just squawked like a pigeon over everyone else, fighting to be the loudest.

Eleanor knew all of these girls. They were daughters of CEOs who always found their way together at these types of parties. She wondered if they actually knew anything about each other.

Carrying an old-fashioned in one hand, a dark and stormy in the other, Eleanor barged into the conversation, pushing between two blonde girls. “Well, isn’t this something. Five girls, all heirs to some of wealthiest companies in the world, gathered at a party like this.” She leaned toward one of the blondes. Her daddy was a governor, she just didn’t remember where. “Care to give me an interview? I’d love to learn about how you know Gorman.”

Eleanor smirked as fear flickered across the girl’s faces. They had been trained to fear and get the fuck away from her. She leaned over to the other blonde, who was looking back toward the doors, planning her escape. “I think I know how you got here, Shelly Bailey, daughter of Herman Bailey, founder of our country’s foremost realtor company. Yes, a little birdy told me about a certain thing you do with your lips. Let me see, he called it—”

The girl didn’t make an excuse to leave. Neither did the other three. Like robots shutting off for the day, their eyes simply went glassy, all thoughts emptied, and they hurried off, returning home, their circuits overloaded. That left her alone with Molly, who stared at her in deep disgust. Somewhere deep in the mansion, a record scratched, shifting us from the booming voice of Hank Williams to tump-tump drums of the beginning of the Rolling Stones’ Sympathy for the Devil. “How fitting,” Eleanor said, smirking.

Molly tried to push past her, but Eleanor stepped in front of her. “Come now, we only just met, and you haven’t even introduced yourself to me yet.”

“You already know me,” Molly spat.

“And you already know me? My, what a wonderful thing it is to be famous. You get to skip awkward introductions.” Eleanor put a hand around Molly’s shoulder and pulled her back toward the balcony, back toward the gorgeous view of a well-developed rich-folk’s paradise. “But see, I’m real protective of my image, and people, jealous folk, they like to spread lies. So, tell me, what have you heard?”

Molly’s eyes fluttered. The girl was already a little tipsy, and maybe had a cocktail of pills working their magic on her oh so weary bones. Eleanor offered her the dark and stormy. A friendly gesture. The girl took it, looked down at it, then twisted her lips into a snarl. “I’ve heard you’re a self-centered bitch who can’t keep her mouth shut,” she said, and clearly she thought it was clever, because she smiled. “That’s what daddy says.”

“You put it so harshly, I don’t know if I can agree. But maybe it’s a little true.” Eleanor was smirking now. “Well, I’ve been hearing about you for a long time, Ms. Molly Marriet. Yes, it’s true. Ever since you were a little girl, doing those paper towel commercials. What was that jingle you used to sing?”

Molly started to walk away. “Fuck off.”

Eleanor caught her wrist. “Clean, clean, clean. Clean the mess away,” she softly sung. “And you, Ms. Marriet, are about to have a big mess on your hands, because I hear you’ve got a penchant for older men, and Mr. Blanchard, well, he’s hitched, with children of his own. Tell me, how are you going to clean up their lives when mommy and daddy get divorced?”

Molly looked like she had been slapped. “How the fuck do you know about—”

“—I know about everything, Molly. I know that, when you were filming those commercials, you were a little tantrum-throwing-baby who kept storming off set. I know that, when you were fifteen, there was a girl you didn’t like very much, and her car caught on fire, thank god she wasn’t in it. I know you’ve had plastic surgery on your nose three times already because they just can’t get it right. And, maybe most important to you, you self-centered little brat, I know that you’re closing in on a deal with Lady Perue’s modeling agency, a gig which will set you up for the rest of your life. Something that will finally help you step out of daddy’s shadow and into the limelight.”

At some point, Eleanor had begun pacing around Molly Marriet, and the girl kept her eyes on the ground, terrified of meeting her gaze, afraid it might turn her to stone. She stopped in front of Molly, leaning close in her ear. “You know, they have rather strict guidelines on just who is allowed to join them. Image is everything to a model. People can’t find beauty in someone with the heart of a slut.”

There were tears in the girl’s eyes. “What do you want?” she said. “A confession!?”

Eleanor smirked. “Oh, sweetie, you just gave me one. But no, honestly, I don’t give a shit about ruining your life. I want to ruin Blanchard’s, because that makes me more money. So, if you know any secrets about him, any secrets at all, now is the time to spill—”

“—Eleanor Fucking Robertson! I was wondering where you scuttled off to!”

A heavy hand slung around her shoulder and pulled her in for a heavier hug. When she looked up, Gorman stood against her, lips wet with liquor, eyes glassy. He wrinkled his whiskers at her, then turned his attention to Molly. He knew exactly what was going down between the two of them and only chuckled. “Molly, why, you look like you’ve seen a ghost. Know what they say ‘bout this girl? Spend enough time around her, you’ll become one. Why don’t you get going?”

Molly didn’t have to even be told once. She scurried off like a squirrel after a gunshot. Eleanor reached after her, “hey, wait!”, then turned her glare onto Gorman, who knew better than to fuck with her. “What’s the big idea, ass-hat? I was doing my—”

It was only then that she saw the man standing next to Gorman. He was a man who blended into the background but when he finally caught your attention, he stole it. Danger leeched off him, the stench of a hundred deaths. He was tall. Handsome, too. Blonde hair slicked back, streaks of chestnut brown darkening it. A suit tailor-made to fit his slender body. And black gloves. Interesting. Not good. A man with black gloves is a man willing to get his hands dirty but never leave behind a mess.

Gorman pulled her toward the man. He wasn’t smiling, but his face told her he was afraid. Of her, sure. But more so of this man. “I’m so sorry to interrupt you, Eleanor, baby. But my friend here, he asked me to introduce the two of him. This is D’Angelo Darce.”

Eleanor struggled to keep her jaw from dropping, and instead stared deeply into Darce’s eyes, waiting for the man to say something. Those eyes were cold—killer’s eyes. It was different than hate. Hate was easy to understand. Darce gave her nothing to go off of. He carried the emotion of a corpse already stiff and rotten, life already lived. Something had buried the human part of him. But what?

That was her job to find out.

“We haven’t,” she said, not wanting to let the silence stretch on. She reached out, offering her hand. “Eleanor Robertson.”

“Eleanor fucking Robertson!” Gorman shouted, putting his hand on Darce’s shoulder, drunkenly staggering. Darce looked at the hand on his shoulder. “You know all she’s written? Chrissakes, they could fill a library with—”

“—I know all about her, yes,” Darce said. Then, the man stretched his hand out toward her. “A pleasure to finally meet you, Ms. Eleanor.”

Gorman looked between the two of them like both were going to skin him like a cat at the next opportunity, awkwardly chuckled, fumbled out an excuse for leaving, something about getting drinks, lots of drinks, and then hurried back into the party, where he instantly snatched up three martinis from three college-age girls, and downed them in quick succession, trying to drown out the fear that this was the last party like this he was ever going to throw.

Then it was just the two of them, Eleanor Robertson and D’Angelo Darce, stood out on the balcony, overlooking the world that feared them. Next to them, a hot tub bubbled. Behind them, the party roared. And down below, Beverly Hills slept, unaware that two cobras lurked in their backyards. Thankfully for them, they were hunting each other.

Eleanor leaned her back against the railing. Darce put his hands against it. Minutes might have passed. Hours, even. Eleanor wasn’t going to say anything. Confident as she was that she would sink him like the fucking titanic, she wasn’t about to leak anything in her own ship. He was going to have to take the initiative, and he did, reaching out and putting his hand atop hers on the railing, giving it a gentle squeeze. He never looked at her—just kept his eyes straight ahead.

“It’s good to finally meet you, Eleanor,” he said. “I’ve heard so much about you.”

Eleanor looked at him a long while. Unlike him, she didn’t give a damn about appearing stoic. She had earned her back off her cockiness, off her inability to be shaken by even the mightiest men. So, she looked him right in the eye and smiled. “And tell me, what have you heard?”

After a long while, his eyes finally met hers. “That you’ve done fine work.”

He clapped his hand against hers. “Enjoy your night, Eleanor Robertson.”

And that was that.

The implication was not lost on Eleanor. The tense, the tone, and every breath between the words implied that, in his mind, her time doing such work was over. Tonight was the last night she roamed freely through this world, and tomorrow, she would be the one waking up to the headlines, feeling the pressure of the media, watching as the world crumbled around her.

Eleanor had walked into their meeting confident, having planned for months what she was going to say and how she was going to turn the tables on him. Yet in a matter of minutes, with only a handful of words, he had decimated that belief in herself, leaving her stood there, alone, shaking. She had never lost before, never believed she could—but it was tough to imagine she hadn’t just lost there.

There was something in the way Darce spoke. Something sickly. Something deranged. Something that told you he was a poison to be around. Something that told her that he knew more than she ever imagined. The battle was on, war between them struck. But in D’Angelo Darce’s mind, he had already won.

She needed to get to work if she was going to prove him wrong. Needed to charge straight at him with a counterattack so brutal it left him reeling. But she couldn’t move. She stood there until dawn, until the liquor had drained entirely out of her system and the sun started to rise, trying to come up with something that would work.

But she only came up with one option, and it was the red button—she had to get the Berea manuscript out to the world. If she did that, she wouldn’t just jump ahead of him, she would give him a problem. A major fucking problem. A mess to clean up. And while he did, she could focus on tearing him down. On fucking ruining him.

The next night, her home was raided by men with guns.

THE END OF PART ONE