Page 49 of Hot Mic

‘Paragraph Fourteen, Section B,’ Gemma interrupted smoothly. ‘The exclusivity and non-compete clause. If you breach your contract or resign before the agreed term, Violet Audio retains exclusive ownership of the Dating by Design brand name, RSS feed, and existing archive for the remainder of your contract. Which I think has about eighteen months left.’

Sienna felt the floor beneath her polished leather heels tilt violently.

‘Furthermore,’ Gemma continued, her voice entirely devoid of warmth, ‘your non-compete clause prohibits you from hosting any podcast for that term.’

‘That is unenforceable,’ Sienna rasped, her hand shaking as she tightened her grip on the phone. ‘That is an illegal restraint of trade—’

‘It is entirely legal,’ Gemma said flatly. ‘If you walk, you sit on your hands without an income while we keep doing Dating by Design with a replacement host. Can you afford your mortgage on zero income for eighteen months?’

Sienna’s breath hitched. Her chest felt clamped in a vice.

Her house. Her career, her reputation, all tied directly to the network feed. If she walked, she lost everything. If she stayed, she had to sit in that studio, strapped to a machine that would strip away every piece of armour she had left, right in front of Robin Croft.

‘Five o’clock tomorrow,’ Gemma said, her tone snapping back to business. ‘Studio B. Don’t be late, Sienna.’

The line went dead.

Sienna slowly lowered the phone. The office around her felt suddenly cold. She looked at her desk, at her organised binders, her charts. The pristine fortress she had spent years building to keep herself safe from chaos.

It wasn’t a fortress anymore. It was a cage. And tomorrow, Sienna was going to walk into Studio B, and all hell was going to break loose.

Forty

Robin was ninety-nine percent sure that Gemma was a supervillain.

‘A lie detector,’ Robin muttered aloud to Kiki. ‘She’s putting us on a literal lie detector.’

But really, why should Robin care? She’d snogged Sienna, and she wasn’t ashamed of it.

Except... if they strapped a monitor to her and asked her if she’d kissed Sienna, she’d have to admit she lied. That would suck.

But it wasn’t the worst of it.

The inevitable follow-up questions that Zoe would ask. They were the real problem. That machine might just broadcast her secret to a million listeners: that she was falling for the coldest woman ever to host a romance podcast.

But wasn’t that on brand for Robin? What was the big deal with her making a fool of herself? All she ever told people was that making a fool of yourself was a secondary concern. So why did it frighten her so much?

She didn’t know. She didn’t want to know.

Panic hit her like a bucket of ice water.

‘I’m fine, Kiki,’ Robin said, pacing into her living room while the dog tried to avoid her feet. ‘I’m completely fine. This is easy. I’ll just be relaxed. It won’t even be able to read me.’ She paused. ‘Do you think I could beat it if I get drunk?’

Kiki looked at her vacantly.

‘I’ll take that as a no,’ Robin sighed.

Forty-One

The polygraph technician was a woman named Karen from an independent firm. She had spent the last fifteen minutes moving between Sienna’s and Robin’s chairs in the studio with clinical efficiency, wrapping thick pressure cuffs around their upper arms, attaching galvanic skin response sensors to their fingers, and securing pneumatic respiration chest straps over their clothes.

Zoe was pretending to look at her tablet while she watched the clown show commencing from her peripheral vision. Behind the glass of the booth, Gemma and Dora stood silently behind Pip, hands folded, watching. Pip was wearing a hoodie and a frown.

‘We are live in three, two...’ Pip gestured through the glass.

Zoe leaned into her console mic, her voice bright and polished. ‘Welcome back to Head vs Heart. We have Karen from Apex Polygraph Services in the studio with us today, keeping our hosts entirely honest after the fallout of Date Five. Listeners, remember you can also watch live on the video stream, so you don’t miss a single twitch or line spike. Karen, are we fully strapped in?’

‘All sensors are attached and receiving signals,’ Karen replied as she checked her laptop screen. ‘We’re ready for baseline calibration.’