The Princess and the Fangirl (Once Upon a Con #2)(18)

“I said, I guess there’s no accounting—”

“About the background in the photo. This is the con carpet?” I point to the art-deco pattern behind the script. “This carpet?”

Realization hits him. “That carpet.”

All the color drains from his face—and probably mine, too. That confirms my worst fear. I tossed the script Amon gave me, I leaked it, and the worst of it is: this anonymous trash panda knows the future of my career before I do.

Never mind whether Amara is dead—

“I am so dead,” I say. My voice is barely a whisper but steadily gets louder the more I panic.

“Someone must have known what you threw away,” Ethan says. He presses the back of his head against the wall, looking up at the popcorn ceiling, but his brown eyes have a distant look. He’s thinking. “And that same person must have known you had it to begin with—maybe the hotel clerk?”

The peppy girl who had looked utterly disgusted by my impromptu Dumpster dive comes to mind. I shake my head. “I think she’s the same one from earlier,” I tell him, “so she couldn’t have taken that photo.”

“Crap,” he grouses.

Stay calm, I want to yell at myself. Jessica Stone doesn’t panic. She’s cool and controlled and—and— Everything I am not at this moment. I clench my fists and force myself to suck in a lungful of air and breathe it out slowly.

Get my mind back on track. Think of what to do. First things first.

“I have to find that script,” I say aloud, trying to keep my voice level. “Whoever took it is still here somewhere. I just have to remember who was in that lobby and…find them? Scour the con floor? When they post the next leak, try to figure out where they are and get there in time?”

“You’re seriously going to do that?”

“I have to. The execs already think I leaked the script, and if they find out I threw it away? I’ll be blacklisted for life. No one’ll work with me after this.”

Ethan pushes his glasses back up onto the bridge of his nose. “Jess, you can’t be in two places at once. You can’t be snooping out the culprit and be on panels and at signings and photo ops and….”

His voice trails off as he looks down at his coffee-stained T-shirt, and then back up at me, and the idea strikes us at the exact same time. It already worked once, hadn’t it? And no one noticed. No one even batted an eye.

“What if,” I say, “I could be in two places at once?”

He groans. “Jess, no.”

“Oh, Jess, yes.”





SOMEONE POUNDS ON MY hotel room door.

I barely glance up from my phone. I’m in the Marriott—the con’s official hotel—so it’s probably some drunk Spider-Man or Goku or Overwatch cosplayer mistaking my room for someone else’s. During the day, ExcelsiCon is pretty amazing, but at night, when the showroom floor closes, it gets wild. Already I’ve heard a conga-line dance party, led by Beetlejuice, sashay down the hallway to the Banana Boat Song and the last echoes of a flash-dance down in the lobby of the hotel almost a dozen floors below me.

So I decide to ignore the poor lost soul at my door and I roll over onto my stomach, scrolling through Twitter. So many people I follow were at the panel today, tweeting about Jessica Stone (me), saying that they supported her (ME!), and how they wished she would’ve spoken out sooner (definitely her). I try not to think about what could happen to my #SaveAmara campaign if Jessica Stone backed it. I got a taste up there on the panel, and I can’t get the sweetness out of my mouth. Starflame, it was intoxicating.

People actually listened to me—to her. To us.

Imagine what I could do with a little more time.

I pause on a tweet by Darien Freeman, posting a pic of him kissing his girlfriend’s cheek, him in his geeky Starfield T-shirt and her in what I assume is her costume for this year’s cosplay contest—Princess Amara with a Cinderella twist. His caption reads Ah’blena.

It’s a term of endearment in the Starfield universe. The closest translation is my heart or my other half, and for a moment I sort of wish I had someone to call me ah’blena.

“You don’t have time for romance,” I mutter to myself, and scroll on to the next tweet. Besides, I have a princess to save. I don’t need some hunk-a hunk-a burnin’ love clouding my head— Someone knocks on my hotel room door again.

This time I glance up, and wait. Because instinctively that’s what everyone does when they hear strange sounds at night, right? Like a dumbass, they wait for it to happen again instead of calling the police. Or the front desk.

This is why I’d die in a horror movie.

It’s not Milo—I just got a text from him saying he and Bran are at a showing of Galaxy Quest.

Another three loud raps on the door. I crawl to the edge of the bed.

“Hello!” a voice calls from the other side. Female. Light, honeyed yet harsh, with the slightest Southern drawl. I know that voice. I imitated that voice.

Dread coils in my stomach like a snake.

Oh no.

“Hello!” she calls again and bangs on the door. I stumble out of bed, my legs still wrapped in the sheets. “I know you’re in there! I have your keycard!”

Holy crap, how loud can she be?

Before she has a chance to wake up the entire hallway (including my parents, and I do not want to explain to them what a starlet is doing knocking at my door at ten p.m.), I unlatch the lock and peek through the peephole, but someone has their finger blocking it. Because that isn’t murdery at all.