Read Chapter 20: The Counter-Scheme

The call came at 11:47 PM, and Theo answered it shirtless, a toothbrush still in his mouth. A woman from Camille’s eroding inner circle—a former stylist with a grudge and a storage locker full of receipts—had been waiting for a defector’s moment. Elise watched his face change as she spoke, the toothpaste foam drying at the corner of his mouth while he nodded and asked precise, brutal questions.

“She’s willing to talk,” Theo said, hanging up, the toothbrush clattering into the sink. “In person. Tomorrow morning.” He paused. “She says Camille’s been funneling money through a shell company. Three of them, actually. One of them is registered to Marcus Blake.”

The name landed like a stone. Elise felt the floor of his flat tilt slightly beneath her. She was still in the same oversized jumper she’d worn since Camille’s grave photo had detonated in her inbox hours earlier, Theo’s jumper, pulled over her like armor. “Your agent. Your *brother’s* agency.”

“It’s a common name,” Theo said, but his voice lacked conviction. He scrubbed a hand across his jaw. “James has his own practice. Camille could have formed a company under a similar name to confuse us. Throw the trail off.”

“Or she’s not the only one surveilling us,” Elise said quietly.

They stood in the soft lamplight of his kitchen, the city sprawled beyond the window like a dark sea. Elise had seen Theo in many registers by now—controlled, furious, tender, broken—but she had never seen him calculating. It changed his face. The boyish ease she’d first dismissed as bland charm had hardened into something arctic and watchful.

“What’s your play?” she asked.

“Her live stream is in two hours. She’s going to show the world whatever she has tonight, frame it as a rescue mission, paint herself as the woman exposing the fake couple.” He pulled his phone from his pocket and began scrolling. “But she’s not the only one with a past. Remember that night at the BAFTA party? The one she skipped because she was conveniently ill?”

Elise frowned. “Two years ago. She won Best Actress. She didn’t attend.”

“She was in the south of France. At a Cannes hotel.” Theo turned his phone toward her. The screen showed a tabloid article, grainy but readable: a woman with Camille’s bone structure emerging from a hotel entrance, hand-in-hand with a man whose face was half-obscured by a baseball cap. The caption read: *“Camille’s Secret Weekend.”*

“That’s her,” Elise said, taking the phone. “But I don’t recognize him.”

“He’s a prosecutor in the Public Ministry. Married. Father of two.” Theo’s voice was flat. “The article was pulled within hours—some kind of legal threat or buyout—but the internet is forever, especially if you know where to dig.”

Elise handed the phone back slowly. “You think she did the same thing to you that she’s doing to me. Weaponizing a relationship to protect herself.”

“I think Camille has a pattern. And patterns have cracks.” He set the phone down and looked at her, and for a moment, all the scheming fell away. Beneath it, there was something almost raw. “I never wanted to fight this way, Elise. I wanted to make films. I wanted to tell stories that mattered.” A bitter smile crossed his lips. “Instead, I’m hacking my rival’s past because she’s threatening the woman I—”

He stopped himself. The unfinished sentence hung between them, a wire too hot to touch.

Elise let it dangle. She wasn’t ready to pull on it either.

“Then make your film matter,” she said. “After this. Use all this pain. God knows we’ll have enough material.”

Theo laughed, short and surprised, and for a moment the calculation in his eyes softened into something almost gentle. “You’re the only one who’s ever said that to me. That my work could matter *and* I could win.”

“Don’t get used to it,” Elise said, but her voice cracked on the last word, and they both pretended not to hear it.

They worked until 1 AM, spread across his couch with a whiteboard dragged from a closet and three empty espresso cups forming a fortress between them. Elise had expected to feel like a soldier preparing for battle. Instead, it felt disorientingly domestic. Theo would offer a theory, she would dismantle it; she would raise an objection, he would find a path around it. A rhythm formed, surprisingly fluid, their pens converging on the whiteboard as they mapped Camille’s known movements.

“She’s been chronicling everything she knows,” Elise said, circling a date. “Look at her timeline. Every public move she’s made aligns with a media event that involved either me or you. She’s been tracking us for months, maybe longer.”

“And someone’s been feeding her the details,” Theo said grimly. “The earrings. Your mother’s grave. She knew things only people very close to us would know.”

Elise’s hand stilled on the marker. “Close to *me* or close to *us*.”

Theo paused, understanding flickering across his face. “Marcus knows my schedule. He knows my patterns. He was the one who suggested Camille’s circle for that charity gala last year. Pushed hard.”

“And Nathan Cole reached me at precisely the moment my career bottomed out,” Elise said slowly, the pieces sliding together with an audible click. “He knew exactly when to strike. Who told him my vulnerabilities?”

The whiteboard swims in front of her for a moment. Fifteen minutes later, she found it. A forwarded email. Elise’s own agent had cc’d Marcus Blake on every contract draft since 2022—a standard industry practice, nothing suspicious. But buried in an old thread from October, nearly buried, was a message from Marcus to someone with a *@meridian-media.co.uk* address. The body read: *“She’s fragile. Push now. The mother’s death anniversary is perfect timing.”*

Elise read it three times. Then turned the laptop to face Theo.

His face went still. Entirely, unnervingly still.

“I got that email,” he said quietly, tracing the sender address. “It was in the c-c you all, but I assumed it was protocol. I was in post-production. I didn’t read the body.” He looked up at her, and she watched the betrayal settle in like a slow, creeping tide. “Marcus forwarded my personal schedule to Camille’s producer. For eighteen months.”

Elise’s hand moved, almost of its own accord, to cover his. “Theo.”

“I’ve known Marcus since I was twenty-three.” His voice was flat, hollow. “He watched my father die. He stood in the hospital corridor when my mother refused to come. He was at every premiere, every disaster, every therapy session I never admitted to having. He’s been my anchor.” A pause. “He’s been selling me to the enemy.”

The silence that followed was thick enough to choke on. Outside, London’s gears ground onward, indifferent to careers imploding in glass towers. Elise thought of the watch Theo never wore—his mother’s watch, abandoned in some drawer—and of all the ways trust gets broken silently, slowly, before anyone notices the strain.

“I should call James,” Theo said finally, but he didn’t move.

“Tomorrow,” Elise said gently. “Tonight, we walk into that live stream knowing what she has. If she shows our contract, we have the hotel receipts of her affair. If she tries to expose the ruse, we have the email trail proving she engineered it. We’ll be ready.”

Theo looked at her. “You already messaged Nathan Cole’s PA.”

The room seemed to contract. Elise’s blood chilled. “How do you know that?”

“Your lock-screen notification lit up about an hour ago. I wasn’t trying to spy.” Something unreadable crossed his face. “But they replied. Thirty-one minutes ago. Cole’s coming to London. He wants a meeting before Camille’s broadcast.”

Elise’s phone buzzed. She looked down. A calendar invite from an unknown sender, one hour out, at a hotel she didn’t recognize. The location was the same hotel where Camille had met her prosecutor lover.

The pieces clicked together with sickening precision.