Chapter 1She Stole My Face But Got My Hell

I had three Academy Awards sitting on the mantel of my Malibu estate. I was the golden girl of American cinema, the face on every billboard from Sunset Boulevard to Times Square.

Then I woke up in the body of an uncredited background extra with fewer than five hundred followers on Instagram.

My cracked phone screen lit up on the damp mattress. A direct message sat in my inbox, sent from my own blue-checkmarked, thirty-million-follower account:

Do you have any idea how many years I spent in your shadow?

The stunt falls were mine. The shattered ribs were mine. The bruises from every staircase roll were mine—while you stood in the golden light taking every standing ovation.

Now, everything you built belongs to me.

I stared at the screen for three long seconds. Then I lowered the phone and looked down at my wrists.

No track marks. No purple scar tissue from a decade of daily saline bags and vitamin injections just to keep my organs functioning.

I bent my knees. Nothing. No agonizing grinding of bone on bone.

A hard, ragged breath caught in my throat. I couldn't remember the last time my body hadn't screamed at me.

I had been nineteen when I signed my life away to the studio machine. Since then, I had jumped into a frozen river in the dead of winter for an auteur's vanity shot, tearing both menisci before my twenty-first birthday. My manager had dragged me out of a hospital bed with a hundred-and-four-degree fever, laced me into a steel-boned corset, and pushed me onto the red carpet at Cannes with instructions to smile through the haze. And then there were the private boardroom dinners—the ones where the executives poured glass after glass of vintage scotch, watching with predatory smiles until I excused myself to the bathroom, vomiting blood from bleeding ulcers before they would finally let me leave.

The final page of my ten-year representation agreement with the agency was etched into my retinas in black ink:

Should the Client fail to generate a minimum of one hundred and fifty million dollars in net corporate revenue within the ten-year contractual window, the Client assumes full, unconditional, and unlimited personal liability for the shortfall.

There was exactly one month left on that contract.

"Nora! Where the hell are you?" The assistant director’s voice tore through the paper-thin plywood door of the extras' holding room like a rusted saw. "The entire set is waiting on one damn corpse! You want your eighty-dollar day rate or not?"

I set the phone down.

In the cloudy, cracked mirror taped to the wall, a different face stared back at me. Rounder, softer, her cheeks flushed with the natural elasticity of twenty-four-year-old collagen. Her eyes were wide and dark—unhollowed by Hollywood starvation diets, uncorrupted by studio boardrooms. Alive.

I pushed open the door and stepped outside.

The harsh California sun hit my face, and I squinted on instinct. Parked dead center in the studio backlot was a midnight-black Maybach Sprinter van.

My van.

The automated door slid back with a quiet hum. A pair of custom, scarlet-soled Christian Louboutin stilettos touched the gravel first. Then came the face I had worn for twenty-eight years.

She wore my favorite cream silk slip dress, her chin tilted toward the sky at an angle so sharp it looked painful. The production coordinator rushed forward immediately, his posture bent so low his nose nearly grazed her elbow.

"Miss Bradley, thank you so much for your patience. We're setting up the rain sequence now. I apologize for the delay."

The woman wearing my face—Nora Powell—let out a dry, dismissive scoff. She didn't even glance down at the coordinator. She just extended an open hand into the air.

Beside her, my personal assistant, Paige, sprang into motion. Paige offered a paper cup of steaming espresso with both hands, her head bowed in practiced deference.

I had trained Paige myself. Back when my stomach ulcers left me curled into a fetal ball in my trailer, Paige had routinely forgotten to bring me a cup of lukewarm water. Now, looking at her, she was a model of terrified efficiency.

The woman took a sip, and her brows pinched together in disgust.

"Scalding," she snapped.

With a flick of her wrist, she inverted the cup.

The steaming liquid splashed straight across the pristine white leather of Paige’s sneakers. Paige gasped, flinching from the heat, but she didn't dare pull her foot away. Instead, she forced a trembling smile and dropped to her knees with a handful of napkins, scrubbing frantically at the mess.

I stood in the dusty shadow of the soundstage, watching this clumsy, amateurish performance.

Suddenly, her eyes cut across the gravel. She found me in the crowd with predatory precision. A smirk curled her lips as she adjusted her designer sunglasses and strode straight toward me, her heels clicking against the asphalt.

The crew parted like the Red Sea.

She stopped inches away, looking down her nose at the shell she had discarded.

"So you're the double?" she murmured. Her voice was dropped low enough that only the two of us could hear. "How does it feel? This is the life of the people you never bothered looking at from your pedestal."

I didn't answer. I just looked at her lips. She had painted them with a garish, neon-red matte lipstick.

It looked cheap. In my entire career, I had never once touched a shade so tacky.

The assistant director jogged up behind me, grabbing my shoulder and shoving me roughly toward a trench dug into the dirt. "What are you doing standing around? Miss Bradley acknowledging your existence is the highlight of your pathetic life. Get down in the ditch!"

It was late October. The water trucks were pumping stagnant, gray runoff from an artificial drainage ditch near the perimeter fence. The stench of algae and rusted iron hung thick in the air.

The woman wearing my face turned to the director with an imperious flutter of her fingers. "We need visceral realism for this scene, Frank. The body needs to be completely submerged in the mud. I won't have lazy background talent compromising the caliber of my picture."

The director nodded like a bobblehead. "Of course, Miss Bradley. Absolutely."

I said nothing. I walked straight into the mud.

The icy mire soaked through the rough cotton of the costume in a heartbeat. I laid flat on my back, sinking into the muck. Foul water seeped into my ears, and the smell of rot assaulted my sinuses.

Yet my knees didn't ache.

Usually, the slightest drop in barometric pressure sent blinding needles through my torn cartilage. Now, apart from the shock of the cold, this body didn't sound a single alarm.

The rain towers roared to life. Cold, heavy drops slammed into my face like lead pellets.

"Cut!"

Her voice pierced the roar of the downpour from behind the monitors.

"The double is breathing too heavily. Corpses don't pant, Frank. She's ruining the frame."

I held my breath and let my head sink an inch deeper into the sludge.

"Cut! Her hands are too stiff! Reset!"

"Cut! Her jaw is tense! Do it again!"

Take after take. More than a dozen resets.

For two straight hours, I lay submerged in freezing, rancid water. Every grip and camera operator on that crew knew she was deliberately torturing a nobody. But not a single soul on that set was going to stick their neck out for an eighty-dollar-a-day extra against Hollywood’s reigning golden girl.

Finally, even the director grew uneasy. He crept over to her director's chair, keeping his voice soft. "Miss Bradley... I think we have what we need. Any longer in that ditch and we're looking at hypothermia. An ambulance on set would shut us down."

She let out an exaggerated, theatrical yawn. "Fine. It’s passable, I suppose. The quality of background talent these days is frankly embarrassing."

She spun on her designer heels and vanished into the Maybach.

I dragged myself out of the ditch. Soaked to the skin, shivering so violently my teeth clicked like dice in a cup.

Paige walked over, pinching her nose in disgust. She pulled an eighty-dollar check from her clipboard, let it slip through her fingers, and watched it flutter into the mud at my feet.

"Take your money and clear out," Paige sneered. "Don't hang around to foul Miss Bradley's air."

I didn't bend down to pick up the paper. I just stood there, looking straight into her eyes.

Something in my expression made Paige step back, her lip curling into a nervous sneer. "What are you staring at? Look at me like that again and I'll have security drag you off the lot."

The corner of my mouth twitched into a faint, humorless smile. I turned and walked toward the communal extras' trailers.

I had barely stripped out of the mud-soaked clothes when the burner phone in my canvas bag buzzed. A voice memo from my old number.

I hit play. Her shrill, forced laughter bounced off the tin walls of the narrow stall.

"Nora, darling... are you wishing you could kill me right about now? Too bad you can't touch me. You're dependent on the eighty bucks I throw into the dirt just to keep yourself fed. Don't bother coming back tomorrow. I already had the casting office put your name on the permanent blacklist."

I used a coarse paper towel to wipe the dried silt from my hairline. My fingers moved across the cracked screen, typing out a single sentence:

I hope you manage to keep smiling like that until the end of the month.