Chapter 1The Starlet and the Spectre

I’m Hollywood’s resident Ice Queen, the beautiful statue who can’t act her way out of a paper bag. My agent, in a stroke of what she called “brand expansion genius,” shoved me onto a live-streamed celebrity survival show to, in her words, “boost my relatability.”

Nobody expected the show’s engineered crisis—a mechanical wolf meant to add a dash of drama—to malfunction. Nobody expected it to hunt me with single-minded, metallic fury.

And certainly, nobody expected me, under the unflinching eye of a dozen drone cameras, to snap a branch from a dead tree, sharpen it on a rock in three fluid motions, and pin the machine to the forest floor with one clean, powerful thrust through its synthetic heart.

Later, staring blankly into a drone lens, I offered my only explanation.

“I grew up in the country.”

A pause.

“We had a hog farm. You learn a thing or two about butchering. It’s practical, right?”

* * *

The day I retired, my handler—Director K—placed a heavy hand on my shoulder. His voice was as gravelly and devoid of emotion as ever.

“Spectre,” he said, using my call sign. “You’ve lived up to the name. For years, you’ve been the sharpest point of The Blade. You’ve earned your rest.”

He stared at me with those piercing gray eyes. “The organization will grant you one request for your new life. Anything.”

A thrill, the first I’d felt in years that wasn’t followed by the scent of blood, shot through me. My eyes, I’m sure, lit up with visions of a life I’d only ever seen in movies.

“My new life?” I leaned forward, my voice practically buzzing. “I want it all. The glamour, the scandal, the mindless decadence. I want to burn through money, dance until dawn, and be utterly, gloriously frivolous.”

Director K’s perpetually grim face twitched. It was the closest I’d ever seen him come to a smile. He nodded slowly, the picture of managerial solemnity.

“Understood,” he said. “You want to experience the rewarding, hands-on labor of a federal penitentiary. An excellent choice for personal growth.”

I blinked.

A week later, the organization unceremoniously dropped me into the glittering cesspool of Los Angeles.

According to K, it had all the glamour and decadence I’d asked for, but the paychecks were, technically, legal.

Three years later, my unblinking stare and an acting ability so wooden a director once famously declared me “splinter-proof” had cemented my status as Hollywood’s Ice Queen.

While the gossip blogs and internet trolls debated which powerful producer I was sleeping with to maintain my career, no one could possibly guess the truth. That I was Spectre, the top field operative for The Blade, a clandestine organization that operated in the shadows to protect national interests. That I held the standing record for a solo infiltration: thirty elite hostiles neutralized in under five minutes. A record that remained unbroken.

If The Blade was the ghost that guarded the country, I was the ghost that other ghosts feared.

Back then, they had a saying in the underworld: “A glimpse of the Spectre is the Reaper’s kiss.”