1: She Has Lost Her Mind

Carmen's POV

My half-sister had completely lost her mind, and I was sitting on my own bed watching it happen in real time.

Mirabel had shown up at my apartment twenty minutes ago without calling ahead, which was very like her, and she had been talking ever since. Pacing back and forth in front of my window with that restless energy she got whenever she wanted something badly enough that her body couldn't contain it. I had seen this version of her before. It never ended well for whoever happened to be in the room.

"Just hear me out," she said, for the third time.

"I have been hearing you out, Mirabel. That's the problem."

She ignored me, which was also very on-brand. Her heels clicked against my floor as she turned and came back the other way. I watched her and thought about how she always did this when she wanted something badly enough that the desperation became so obvious. The pacing, the restlessness, like the desire had nowhere to go and so it just moved her around the room. I had seen this exact version of her twice before: once when she was trying to convince our father to buy her a car at seventeen, and once when she found out Tanya had been selected for a French designer campaign that Mirabel had been chasing for two years. Both times she had gotten what she wanted, and she always found another angle when the first one failed, which was why I had a bad feeling about this one.

"Carmen, do you actually understand what the Paris Mode d'Elite is?" She stopped pacing and looked at me the way she always looked at people she considered slightly below her intelligence, which was most people. "This is not some local runway. This is Europe. The models who walk that stage don't go back to being ordinary. Not ever. One season and everything changes." She pressed two fingers to her temple like her own ambition was physically weighing on her. "Tanya has been sitting at the top of that world for three years. Three years, and I have been working twice as hard as her for twice as long, and she keeps getting the calls I should be getting, signing the contracts I should be signing, and now she's going to walk this show too, she is going to walk it and smile for every camera while I sit and watch, and I am not going to sit here and let that happen"

She stopped pacing and looked at me with something close to excitement.

"Connor Vega is still finalizing his last selections," she said. "The show is in three months. Most of the top names are already confirmed. He has a handful of spots left and he has been dragging his feet on them, which means there's still a window." 

There was  a smirk on her face. "He womanises. Everyone in the industry knows it, he doesn't even try to hide it. He has a type, and you..." she trailed off and looked at me in that particular way she had, the one that was almost a compliment and was specifically designed not to be one. "You happen to fit it. And you are beautiful, even though I hate to admit it"

"What exactly are you hinting at, Mirabel?"

“I want you to go to the nightclub this Friday, find Connor, seduce him, spend the night, and before he falls asleep you whisper my name and ask him to put me on the list." She said it the way someone described a bus route. "Then you call me immediately and I switch places with you. He wakes up, finds me there, my name is already submitted. Done."

“You are out of your mind! I don’t sleep around”

She let out a short laugh. "Oh please. Stop acting so morally upright. Holier than thou." She waved her hand at me like the objection was small and irritating. "And think about what this means. Tanya has had her chains long enough. You could help me snatch everything she has built, every single thing, and don't tell me you wouldn't enjoy watching that, not after what she did with Russell."

Not that I cared about Russell, or Tanya, or any of the nonsense Mirabel had been spewing from her mouth for the past twenty minutes.

Russell was a past memory. I didn't like remembering him, especially not the way things ended, especially not what he said to me before they did.

Russell James and I had started dating when he was seventeen and I was sixteen, back when he was still at Deportivo Como's academy in Spain, working hard like every other young footballer who was trying to catch the eye of scouts and make it professionally. He was driven and focused and in those days he made me feel like I was part of something, like his future was our future and we were building toward it together. For almost two years that's exactly what it felt like.

The contract from Merseyside Football Club came when he was twenty. First team. England. He was over the moon and I was over the moon with him, celebrating the way you celebrated someone you loved when they got the thing they had been working toward their entire life. I didn't anticipate how quickly the distance would settle in once he was actually there. The calls started coming less frequently. The texts got shorter and arrived later. He was always busy, always just about to sleep, always in the middle of something whenever I reached out. I made every excuse I could think of because I loved him.

The rumours didn't help. Everyone had stories about footballers and what happened when they entered that world, all the access, all the attention, the presence of women who wanted to be exactly where you were. I tried not to listen, and I tried to be the girlfriend who wasn't insecure and didn't make things difficult.

Then I saw a photograph of him with Tanya. She was making a name for herself in the elite modelling space by then, the kind of woman who showed up everywhere and made it look effortless. She had taken a picture with Russell outside his home stadium after a match, the two of them standing close in a way that just felt wrong. I brought it up to him and he laughed it off. "Am I not allowed to take pictures with fans? It's really nothing." I didn't fully believe him, but I also didn't push it, because pushing it would have required admitting out loud how frightened I already was.

My doubts stayed. In fact, they grew. And then, on a Sunday afternoon, I found a cheap flight to Liverpool and booked it on impulse, because I couldn't manage the distance anymore and wanted to throw him a surprise visit. I had a key which he had given to me himself and said it was so I could visit whenever I wanted.

The apartment was quiet when I let myself in. Music playing from the bedroom, low. I remember thinking he was probably resting.

I walked to the bedroom door and pushed it open.

I heard the moans before I fully registered what I was seeing. My blood ran cold. Tanya was in his bed! My hand found the door frame. My legs were already giving out underneath me.