But no director. Amon must be doing damage control after that disastrous panel. He’ll scold me later, I just know it.

Dare is the first to see me; our eyes connect. It only takes a split second for him to slip an arm around Calvin’s and Felix’s shoulders to steer them in the opposite direction.

“You know, I think this is a shortcut,” he says smoothly.

Bless Darien Freeman. Bless his tight jeans and his curly hair and his insufferable smile. Bless everything about that Hufflepuff.

I hear Calvin ask, “But what about Jess?”

“She has that interview, remember?” Dare says quickly.

“Oh yeah…”

Meanwhile, the girl is just standing there, looking at me with my fists clenched and my arms stuck at my sides. Just seeing her makes me want to murder her again. Like, meat-grinder murder. Fargo murder.

There’s no one else in the hallway as I march up to her. The first thing I notice, in the steady flicker of the hallway halogens, is that she doesn’t have my light-blue eyes. Hers are dark gray. And no one noticed?

“Look, I’m really sorry—” she says hesitantly.

I turn her badge to read the name on it. Then I look at her through my long fake lashes and tell her, “You will never say a word about this. You will never write in your little blog about it. You will never talk about it on Instagram or even subtweet it. And if you impersonate me again, Imogen Lovelace, I will see you purged from this con—and every other con—forever. Do you understand?”

She stares at me like I’m speaking parseltongue. “You know I didn’t want to be you, right?”

“But you were.”

“What else was I supposed to do?” she bites back. “Tell everyone you weren’t there?”

A flash of anger burns in my belly. I let her badge drop, all those wretched pins clinking together. “You will never do it again. Got it?”

“But—”

“Jess!” shouts a familiar masculine voice behind me. I look over my shoulder and see my assistant, Ethan Tanaka, seventeen going on forty. His expression is pinched, no-nonsense. He stops a few feet away when he realizes who I’m talking to.

His eyes dart quickly between us. “So, that actually did happen.”

“It’ll never happen again,” I clip in reply, and turn back to Imogen. “Why’re you still here? It’s VIP only, and you’re not.”

Her head jerks back as if she’s been slapped, and then she scowls and shoulders past us on her way down the hall. I don’t take my eyes off her until she’s gone, and then I sigh in relief.

Ethan begins to talk but I raise a finger. “It was a misunderstanding.”

He holds up his hands. “I was only going to say you were rather rude to her.”

“She impersonated me, Ethan! She could’ve ruined my career—”