Battle Royal by Lucy Parker

Chapter One

Four Years Ago

TOP TV THIS WEEK

Sunday: For the many of us who grab something deliciously calorific and head to the couch for our weekly fix of Operation Cake, this Sunday night will see our favorite British bakers return to their stations for the semifinal. Will cakes rise? Will soufflés sink? Will judge Dominic De Vere really end up with a face full of frosting? Don’t miss it.

It was theexploding unicorn that finally broke him.

Until she accidentally brained the most eminent pastry chef in London with a projectile hoof, Sylvie Fairchild had been casually speculating whether—like her ill-fated unicorn cake—Dominic De Vere also contained a hidden robotic mechanism. If so, his internal programming didn’t seem to have grasped that the catalogue of human expressions offered more options than Arrogant Disdain and Asleep.

He had remained stony-faced through her polka-dot tart that turned his tongue every color of the rainbow. While Sylvie chewed on her lower lip and waited for the verdict from the judging panel, he chewed on three hours of her hard work as if it were a piece of cardboard.

“The bottom,” his dark, silky voice intoned at last, “is soggy.”

Behind the cameras, the Operation Cake production team beamed. They loved a soggy bottom in this competition. Or a cracked surface. Or preferably when a contestant just dropped the whole thing on the floor. Perked them right up.

The voices in the three judges’ earpieces obviously told them to stick their tongues out and display the technicolored stains, because Mariana Ortiz and Jim Durham obliged with enthusiasm. Dominic turned his head and skewered the executive producer with a look so wintry that her berry coulis almost became a sorbet.

“I think it’s delicious.” Mariana’s smile was blinding and her charisma tongue-tying. Unlike Dominic, the renowned food writer was a natural on-screen. Sylvie could only assume that Dominic’s gold-plated status in the industry was a big enough draw to the network that they were prepared to overlook his stiff body language.

And the unsolved crime attached to his name. The puzzle beyond the abilities of Nancy Drew that would stump even the little gray cells of Hercule Poirot.

The Mysterious Case of the Missing Personality.

Or, alternatively, he’d been chosen as the requisite sex symbol. Sylvie studied him critically as he moved to the neighboring station and forked a mouthful of tepid-looking lemon pie into his mouth. With those wickedly intelligent eyes and strong forearms, he was a visual treat, if you fancied your men large and stroppy.

Personally, she’d forgo muscles for an occasional smile.

Seven episodes in, and if he acknowledged her existence at all, he was dividing his cold stare between her pastel-painted fingernails and the streaks of pink in her brown hair. He’d started visibly bracing every time he had to visit her station.

She’d upped the amount of sparkle in her bakes this week, for the sheer amusement of watching him shudder. Bonus points when he actually closed his eyes against the exquisite horror of edible glitter.

Sylvie had seen dozens of his own, incredibly expensive cakes in his London bakery. His preferred color palette covered a diverse range from white to ivory. Sometimes he really pushed the boat out and ventured into the realms of cream. Once at a black-tie event, she’d spotted a De Vere cake on the banquet table that actually had gold accents, and assumed he was either extremely unwell or suffering an early-onset midlife crisis.

He went in for elegant minimalism. She rarely saw an object that couldn’t be improved with sequins.

She was, aesthetically, his worst nightmare.

His control started to waver in round two with her witch’s cauldron, a Black Forest gâteau that spilled out sinuous curls of smoke, teasing the taste buds with an elusive hint of . . . toffee? No, bourbon. Honey?

“Caramel brandy.” Dominic severed the speculation of the other judges. He was correct. She had infused the dry ice mechanism with caramel brandy. Bending in a very limber motion for a man with those shoulders, he examined the exterior of the cauldron, breaking off a tiny piece with a satisfying snap. She’d meticulously assembled the structure from white chocolate that she’d hand-painted to mimic rusted iron, using a customized pigment of a powdered food coloring mixed with—

“The chocolate has a bitter aftertaste.” Again, he cut short her explanation, rising to his feet. “Did you taste-test the pigment first?” His face was still carved marble, but as usual when he looked in her direction, his eyes were shooting out darts of irritation.

There was a weak sort of compliment in that. If a contestant had a baseline skill level and made a mistake with an otherwise promising dish, he cared enough for impatience. If you were just irredeemably shit, he plastered on the haughty android stare and mentally went to sleep.

Sylvie had experimented with his signature expression herself this morning, on the neighbor who kept snipping herbs out of her window boxes when he thought she was still in bed. He’d flushed all the way up to his hairline, stammered an apology, and offered her cash.

Handy.

And a very poor lesson in life that strutting about, nastily eyeballing people, netted results.

Dominic’s brows rose slightly when she didn’t immediately respond, and Sylvie suddenly remembered listening to a radio interview with one of his professional rivals, who’d sarcastically referred to him as the puppet-master.

My right hand and foot are attached to that brow bone by invisible strings. One twitch upward and my fist and boot want to follow suit.

Fatally, with the echo of that acerbic remark in her head, she smiled right in the middle of his continued critique.

And it happened. His controlled demeanor chipped. She was looking straight at him, and she saw it, felt it down to her bones. The driving instinct in his body. His gaze went to her hair and locked there. He wanted to touch it. In that instant of time, he obviously desired nothing more than to slide his long fingers into the fine strands, cup her head with that huge palm, tug her forward, take a slow breath . . . and sling her out the window by her ponytail like the Trunchbull.

She couldn’t help it. She outright laughed, and he continued to visibly loathe her.

Most of the Operation Cake contestants were petrified of him. They all but dropped their piping bags and scuttled under their benches when he stalked past.

Unless someone she loved was being targeted, in which case she would fight like a lioness, Sylvie was not a very confrontational person. If her meal was too cold in a restaurant, she ate it anyway. Unfair parking ticket? She’d probably just pay it. She’d peeked through the curtain and watched the herb heist for days before she’d tried out the De Vere Glare.

Yet there was not one single second on this set that she’d been intimidated by the man himself. She flatly refused to shy away from a person she found about as likable as a stubbed toe. He was totally devoid of empathy and warmth, she bet he was a bloody nightmare to work for, and she’d wear her apparently “garish, style-over-substance” cauldron cake as a hat before she’d let her knees so much as quiver in his presence.

She was a favorite with the other two judges, so she thought she might scrape through another week despite Dominic pacing around the studio like a sweet-toothed Grim Reaper.

Unfortunately, the final round put the casting vote in his hands.

And Sylvie put a shit-ton of glitter in his hair.

In her defense, when she’d practiced the robotic component of her unicorn cake in the garden shed at home, the results had been significantly less impressive. The treasure chest was to burst open in stages, spilling out hundreds of colored sweets before it set off a chain reaction to move the unicorn’s hoof and horn. She’d made dead certain that everything would taste as good as it looked. Dominic had commented before that her foundations were sometimes sacrificed for the exterior glitz. He wasn’t wrong, and she did listen to legitimate criticism.

Levers in right place? Aww. Look, he’s waving at you. Wrong place? I appear to have constructed this small missile.

“Fantastic,” Jim Durham said, bending to examine the chest as it sprang apart on cue and the sweets cascaded forth. One of his knees gave an alarming little creak, thus providing an unintentional soundtrack for her hinges. Sylvie remembered watching Jim’s old cooking show on TV as a child. She and her aunt had taken turns each week making the Friday recipe for dinner. He was in his seventies now and on the list for a double knee replacement, he’d told her. Popping a sweet in his mouth, he winked at her. “I’d expect nothing less from our resident witch. What other magic do you have in store for us?”

He was such a nice man. Always kind and supportive. Smelled a bit like port.

She smiled back at him. “Only the good kind. Promise.”

“You couldn’t have worked any harder today,” Mariana praised her, also circling the display and reaching to toss a sweet onto her tongue.

Dominic surveyed the spectacle from a short distance. His wide chest moved with a silent heave of breath. “Unicorns now.”

He sounded like a fed-up character in Jumanji, forced to endure one of her ghastly trials after another.

The arrogant dude whinging in the back never fared well in a film.

Sylvie opened her mouth to respond—and became aware of a low clicking sound that she’d initially thought was Jim’s knees again. Even as it registered properly, the rhythm of the mechanism stuttered. That wasn’t right. The second apparatus should have flicked over by now, setting the unicorn in motion.

She leaned forward to check the control box, and—shit. “Duck!”

“Oh, a duck.” Jim took a few steps back. “Is it. I must admit, I did think it was a unicorn, too.” He looked slightly doubtfully at the long horn. “His bill—?”

“Duck!”

“Yes, indeed. Duck. Clear as a bell,” Jim said soothingly. “If the creator says it is so, then so it shall be.” He reached to pat her shoulder.

Dominic’s eyes suddenly narrowed on the control box.

Sylvie grabbed Mariana and hauled her back.

The mechanism came crashing down, catapulting the unicorn off the table and throwing up a cloud of glitter.

Contestants screamed. Mariana swore like a sailor. Jim’s knees sounded like chattering teeth. The cameras tracked every movement.

And a large edible hoof nailed Dominic right between the eyes.

The rest of the unicorn continued to smile jauntily as its head sailed past, one eye lowered in the wink of a creature that hadn’t quite grasped the gravity of its situation, until it splattered against the fridge.

The cakes were still delicious, Sylvie’s fellow contestants assured her as they rescued chunks of chocolate sponge from the scene of the massacre, and the producers were beside themselves with glee, imagining this week’s teaser shots.

Glitter twinkled in the stubble that edged Dominic’s chiseled jawline.

Hoof remnants smudged his forehead.

He was ominously still as they stood, staring at one another. Only his chest moved with his even breaths.

Without breaking eye contact, he swept one hand through that lush head of thick silvery black hair, and a massive cloud of sparkling particles swirled through the air, as if he’d thrown a handful of stars.

She was eliminated from the show twenty minutes later.

For weeks afterward, she continued to find random pieces of glitter on her clothing, in her pockets, behind her ears—and every time it glimmered in the light, she heard a deep, scathing voice.

Cheap tricks and glitter might get you a gig pulling rabbits out of hats at kiddie parties, but they won’t make you a baker.

And every time, the response that came from deep inside her was the same.

Plus or minus a few expletives, depending on her mood.

Watch me.