From #1 New York Times bestselling author Tessa Bailey comes a gripping, heated romance about a girl trapped in a new reality, forced to make a choice between two brothers—one who is the high school golden boy, the other sworn to hunt down her kind—time travelers. This is Tessa Bailey as you’ve never seen her before.
Intrigued? Read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from Broken Rival by Tessa Bailey, which releases on October 6th 2026.
Magnolia Brown loves Friday night football games, volunteering and dominating at high school swim meets. Just your average everyday eighteen-year-old. Except for one thing:
She’s from fifty years in the future.
Magnolia’s parents, two brilliant scientists, are the inventors of time travel, but due to widespread destruction and rampant abuse of the technology from a corrupt few, time travel is outlawed and punishable by death. When Magnolia’s parents are seized and executed for illegally traveling to the past, they leave Magnolia stranded in 2026 without a way to get home.
Now Magnolia has nowhere to turn but a complicated Kansas family with two sons—Fallon, her high school sweetheart with secrets of his own, and Ramsey, the brooding militia commander who hunts and kills criminals like her. Magnolia knows Ramsey resents and hates her, but how can he be her true enemy when he looks at her with such hunger, despite his callousness, and guards her with his very life? Which brother can she trust and is the real danger coming from inside the house?
EXCERPT
CHAPTER ONE
2026
Drumbeats pepper the crisp fall air.
The scent of hot chocolate and corn dogs drift through the gaps
in the metal bleachers. Sparkles painted onto the cheeks of students catch the spotlights, never staying still. Shimmering, moving, going silver to pink. A horn signals the start of the second half and I smile, watching Fallon and his teammates take the field, the white knees of his football pants soiled with grass stains, his helmet dangling from his fingertips. He always leaves it off until the exact second official play resumes. One of his numerous good luck rituals.
Like kissing me in the parking lot before a game.
Taping his pinkie and ring finger together with white strips of athletic tape.
Parting his golden coif of hair to the left for away games.
Feeling eyes on my back, I turn and seek out Fallon’s mother, Camille, in the top row of the bleachers, her honey-colored hair pulled into a high ponytail, his jersey number—9—painted on her cheek in red, outlined in black. Looking nervous, she tilts her head toward the scoreboard, which shows a tied score. I hold up my crossed fingers and she does the same.
See you at home later, she mouths. Whatever happens.
Comfort steals through me and I smile, nodding. Home.
Home is a big house in the southeast corner of Aubrey with an entryway full of crosses. The opposite wall is painted pitch-black, but if you look at it from an angle, you can see where someone used a finger to draw the outline of a six-foot-two human figure in the wet paint. A nod to the boy who used to live there.
Home is dirty cereal bowls stacked in the sink, the smell of acrylic paint and daisies gathered from the fields surrounding the house. It’s the sound of the pastor muttering his sermons to himself in the study, his feet creaking the floorboards while he paces. It’s crop dusters flying over the Overmeyers’ farm to the north.
Home is Fallon.
I sigh gustily enough to emit a white cloud in front of my face, my gloved hands wedging between my thighs in my lap. When I came home with the Willoughbys two years ago, I slept in the guest room for three months until the pastor caught Fallon kissing me in the downstairs bathroom. He bought a small trailer after that and parked it in the backyard. Since then, the trailer has been my home. “I’m not harboring any notions this is going to keep you two away from each other,” he’d said wryly, opening the door to the trailer and gesturing us inside. Fallon laughed at my furious blush and tickled me up the stairs. “But if y’all are going to insist on holding hands in church, I think we’ll need to consider appearances.” The pastor dragged a long-suffering hand down his face. “You two couldn’t
keep this platonic, could you? Had to make it hard on me, huh?” Fallon laughs. “Sorry, Dad. She’s way too cute.”
Two years. Gone by in a blur. I’m eighteen now, but at sixteen, I still wasn’t used to being told I was pretty. My parents never once told me so, nor did I have access to a lot of kids my own age. As a child, I’d been close friends with another scientist’s son, but they left our station when I was six, leaving me isolated at our perfunctory employee housing near the lab. My thick brown hair always seemed kind of ordinary. Brown eyes, unremarkable.
Fallon called them bronze, though. He declared that, somehow by looking at me, a person could tell by these bronze eyes that I’m smart. He told me I smelled like fresh, wild raspberries. That my lips were soft, my voice was like music. He’d lean over and hug me out of the blue.
Still does.
Eager to set my sights on my boyfriend, I return my attention to the football field and frown. Where are the players? I swear I saw
them return from the locker room just a minute ago.
I stand up and lean over, trying to determine if the team are out of sight or if maybe there is a problem and—
“Magnolia Brown.”
Hearing my name over the announcer’s speaker, my skin immediately shrinks around my bones. The fear of being trapped and removed, like a spider on someone’s bedroom ceiling, has never quite gone away. But it’s Fallon’s voice, which doesn’t make me nervous—God, no, just the opposite—it’s just that everyone seated in the bleachers has turned to stare at me now.
And they knew right where I was sitting, because they always do.
I’m a moving landmark, no matter where I go.
Sounds grow tinny and distant in my ears, but I smile through the temporary discomfort and find my boyfriend where he stands in the announcer’s booth, the ends of his hair brushing his filthy shoulder pads. Those familiar white teeth are stretched in a smile, hovering just above the silver microphone. His teammates flank him on all sides, giving him good-natured slaps and shoves of encouragement.
“Magnolia Brown, I love you. Will you go to prom with me?”
Briefly, I catch Camille’s eye, and she gives me a beaming eye roll that says exactly what I’m thinking: There he goes again. Fallon being Fallon. There are no small gestures with my boyfriend. No minor commitments. He only leaves behind big, boisterous, memorable marks. Everyone loves him for it, too.
That fondness for Fallon is why the people of Aubrey have slowly accepted me as one of their own over the last two years. There might be an asterisk beside my name in the town records forever, but to Fallon, I’m just Magnolia. I’m not simply the girl whose parents negatively impacted the course of history.
You’re just Magnolia. Good through and through. Nothing like her parents.
Not a threat.
Sweet and helpful and most importantly, grateful to still have her head.
I push an effusive smile onto my face, pressure leaking out from behind my eyes. “Yes,” I whisper. Then louder, “Yeah, I will.”
The game buzzer gives several noisy toots, the audience erupting into cheers. Many of those clapping are the same people who called for my death when I was sixteen. I shake their hands now and accept their kisses on the cheek, agreeing when they tell me how incredible Fallon is. How lucky I am. Don’t I know it?
I blow a kiss to Fallon as he takes the field a second time, waving to me while he runs backward. I want to watch the second half from the bleachers, but it’s my turn to volunteer at the Helping Hands booth, drumming up support for the canned food drive I’m organizing with my cochair, Vetta.
I’m scooting past a row of underclassmen when gunfire rat-a-tats in the distance.
All the motion in the stadium fades to stillness.
Every head in the audience turns in the same direction. Three miles north. Toward the Burn Line.
The black ring of burned earth that separates Aubrey from the Breach.
Residents of Aubrey were ordered long ago by Cyrus to stay inside the Burn Line, for their own protection. We do not venture to the other side. No one, not even the wiliest troublemakers in our school, is self-destructive enough to attempt it. This close to the Breach, they could be mistaken for a Taker and executed by the Deterrence on sight.
As the Breaches have been declared disaster sites by the federal government, populations who live the closest to those holes in the atmosphere have shifted away, migrating to towns and cities they deem safer, leaving many southeast Kansas towns deserted. Not
Aubrey, though. Everyone is either too stubborn to leave or their faith in Cyrus Royse is so great, they seem to believe we’re surrounded by an iron dome, rather than a man-made Burn Line that circles the town.
No one comes in. No one goes out. But we all proceed as normal.
The crowd is silent as a prolonged firefight ensues, parents folding children into their sides in the glow of the Friday night football game. Meanwhile, a sickly yellow hue reaches its fingers into the air above the Burn Line. A fire, perhaps. Bodies burning.
Not everyone is staring into the distance anymore.
Prickles on my skin tell me I’m being observed. Covertly, sure, but the silent judgment is not subtle. It’s always there. They think I can’t feel it.
A very intense part of me doesn’t want to seek Fallon’s comfort. He’ll mope if I don’t let him give it to me, though, so I look over and meet blue eyes that are hunting for mine from the football field, nodding back at him when he mouths, Are you okay?
Yes.
As soon as a full minute has passed without gunfire, the buzzer sounds, a blast of cheers go up and the game resumes, as if nothing happened. Pom-poms wave in the stands, cheerleaders call to the audience through a bullhorn, the Tiger mascot dancing out of rhythm to the delight of the children in the front row.
I duck my head and move through the tunnel leading to the concessions area, waving at Vetta, hustling forward with an apology on my lips. “Sorry I’m late to relieve you. How’d we do on pledges?”
“Good. Really good. People love to get rid of their verging on moldy green beans.”
“Don’t they, though?” I scoot behind the waist-high table and hip bump her out from behind it. “Go watch the rest of the game. I’ve got this.”
She tilts her head at me. “So you’re just going to pretend like your live-in boyfriend didn’t ask you to prom in front of the whole town?”
“Like I always say, Fallon is going to Fallon. And he’s not . . .” I sigh. “Okay, fine. I guess he’s technically my live-in boyfriend. Weird circ—”
“Weird circumstances. I know. We all know. And we hate you for it.” She smiles to let me know she’s at least partially joking. “You’re already shacked up with your man, and mine will only take me on a date if his boys are there, too.”
“Maybe he wants to show you off.” I waggle my eyebrows at her. “Hell, I would. A kickboxer and an uncompensated volunteer? You’re a catch.”
“Bah. Enough of that.” She laughs, her smile slowly ebbing from her face. “Did you hear those gunshots? They sounded . . . close.”
“Yeah, I did,” I reply, averting my eyes by scanning the pledge sheet, turning to a fresh page and uncapping the pen. “Sounded like it was near the Burn Line, as usual.”
“Yeah, but it’s been a while since the Deterrence had to intercept anyone trying to cross from the Breach into Aubrey, right? Like . . . at least three, four months?”
“That’s a good thing,” I point out, making it clear where I stand on the issue of Takers. Forever making it clear. “I’m sure the gunfire is nothing to worry about or they’d be issuing a curfew for tonight.”
“On a game night? The horror!”
I raise an eyebrow. “A game night you’re missing, standing here talking to me.”
A collective “ohhh” emanates from the stands. “Fine, twist my arm. I’ll go watch.” She skips backward toward the packed bleachers, nearly running into a couple returning to their seat with two loaded chili dogs. “As if Fallon Willoughby ever loses.”
That statement lingers in the air long after Vetta is absorbed by the stands.
Everyone has gotten their mid-game snack now and used the bathroom. It’s just me, waiting in case the odd spectator happens by but mainly to field the postgame rush. For now, though, I’m alone in the muffled roar behind the stands. In the filtered spotlight.
That’s when I let myself acknowledge the Presence. At least to myself.
The ringing in my ears grows more tense, more suspenseful, my mouth turning dry as a bone. Electricity dances slowly up the length of my arms and wraps around my throat, forcing me to cough to release the pressure. There’s no name for what watches me from the darkness. Or I won’t name it.
I’m not willing to admit which.
But it’s always there in moments like this. In the silent, finally alone moments, it reminds me that I’m never actually alone. It’s watching. Keeping tabs. Entertained by my actions. My very normal actions designed to help me blend in.
The Presence is not buying my serene act for a second. There’s something different about it tonight, though.
A sizzle of warning that drips down my spine and leaves a burn behind.
There’s change in the air.
From BROKEN RIVAL by Tessa Bailey. Copyright © 2026 by Tessa Bailey. Reprinted by permission of Avon Books, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
