Total pages in book: 47
Estimated words: 43557 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 218(@200wpm)___ 174(@250wpm)___ 145(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 43557 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 218(@200wpm)___ 174(@250wpm)___ 145(@300wpm)
“I’d like to say it’s not what it looks like, but it’s basically exactly what it looks like.”
“Come here,” he crooks his big alien finger at me. “We need to change your room, and possibly flee the planet. I’m still getting information in from the local security. If you’ve killed someone with the missile you just hurled out of the window, you could be facing charges.”
“Oh, I really hope I haven’t killed anyone,” I say, the expression seeming weak and pathetic compared to the intensity of the emotion. “I have a really bad feeling that a lot of people are getting hurt in the name of my fame.”
“Yes,” he agrees. “More than usual.”
“Anchor Jessie Stone said my tour has a bodycount.”
“Because people keep dying,” he says bluntly. “Some of it was planned by Simon, some of it has happened through your recklessness. Others were just unlucky. Statistically, everything has a bodycount, but she’s right, your tour is overly represented in mortality rates.”
As he speaks, he ushers me out of the suite and into a much smaller, much less well-appointed room, one with no windows and very solid walls. It feels like a cell. I wonder if that is what I have in my future. I feel as though I must be in the sort of trouble that gets people put in places like these.
“Mind telling me why the television in your room just made a quick exit through the window?”
“Mind telling me why a small drone army just tried to kill me? Because it’s probably the same reason. I am being fucked with. The news is almost exclusively about me. There are wars going on, Zayne. Many, many intergalactic wars. But every time I tune into the news, I hear what an asshole I am.”
Zayne gives me a curious look, but before he can formulate any kind of an answer, I keep talking.
“I don’t want to be a starlet anymore,” I tell Zayne. “I want to run away.”
“You can’t run,” he says. “It’s too late. You could have done once at the beginning, but now your actions have become blended with Scowl’s.”
“Is that a weird way of saying I am as bad as him?”
“Nobody is as bad as him. But you have treated yourself recklessly, and you have not considered how many other people depend on you, not just for their livelihoods, but for their lives. You can’t throw appliances out windows. You can’t cause crowd chaos. You can’t break your contract without breaking mine in turn. You’re not stupid, but you keep making these decisions that can only lead us both to disaster. I cannot seem to get a grip on you. No matter what I do, fresh chaos emerges.”
He sounds frustrated with himself almost more than he is with me.
“Are you… what are you…” I’m suddenly so scared, mostly that he’s going to leave me. I know I am a nightmare to deal with. I am an absolute asshole, and I am making it very easy for Simon Scowl to make this narrative around me. “Please don’t hate me. Please don’t quit on me.”
“I don’t hate you,” he says. “I could never hate you. I do, however, intend to punish you. In a matter of days your wounds will be healed, and then your ass is mine.”
“Alright,” I agree. “That seems fair.”
Amatter of days goes by real quick. By some incredible stroke of luck nobody was hurt by the falling television or glass. The narrative in the media has shifted to this all being one big publicity stunt for what is now being called the Bad Girl tour. I’ll give Simon Scowl credit, he knows how to pivot.
A little of the guilt assailing me is assuaged, but I know I am still in trouble, both with Zayne, and just generally speaking. Zayne has revealed the worst of Simon’s marketing tactics to me, and to say that I’m appalled is an understatement. I know now that I have made a deal with the devil, and that Zayne and I are trapped in the same contractual nightmare.
“Do you ever think about just walking away?”
“I used to,” Zayne says, his golden eyes falling on me with a possessive, warm smile. “But I have a lot to stay for. And my family is relying on me to tolerate Simon. My lot is not truly that bad.”
“Neither is mine, I guess. Except for that chaos follows me everywhere.”
“I’m not sure that it so much follows you, as is generated by you,” Zayne notes, though he does so with a warm smile.
I have not forgotten that I am in trouble, and nor has he. I am healed, which means I can be punished. There is a strange intensity about waiting for it to happen, not wanting the inevitable pain, but knowing it is coming and somehow wanting it almost as much as I don’t want it.