Warning: This story contains spoilers for the Feb. 28 episode of Beyond the Gates.

Karla Mosley knows what you’re thinking. She’s thinking it too.

“I keep pushing the boundaries and waiting for them to be like, ‘That’s too much.’ And that has yet to happen,” the breakout star of CBS‘ brand new daytime drama Beyond the Gates tells Entertainment Weekly. The first new soap to debut on broadcast television since 1999, and the first Black-led soap to debut since 1989 just concluded its first week of episodes on a breathtaking cliffhanger. Mosley’s Dani Dupree, spurned by her ex-lover, shows up to his wedding with a gold-plated handgun. In the episode’s final moment, she fixes it straight at the bride and groom and fires.

Mosley understands that a character as erratic and electrifying to watch as Dani is “the gift that everyone wants. But also, it’s scary. It’s scary to have someone who’s that big, and to make these bold choices. You’re like, ‘Are people going to roll with it? Or is this completely insane?”

Beyond the Gates premiered this Monday after months of hype, following its historic announcement last spring. The daily daytime drama was created, written, and executive produced by daytime soap vet Michele Val Jean, who started her career out on Generations, TV’s first Black soap. Beyond the Gates‘ first episode brought viewers inside Fairmont Crest, a fictional gated community for the Black elite of a Maryland suburb.

This week’s episodes have kicked up plenty of intrigue around Laura (Destiny Love), the assistant to Dani’s sister Nicole (Daphnée Duplaix) being run off the road by a masked assailant, Dupree grandson and senator Martin Richardson’s (Brandon Claybon) mysterious past, and about half a dozen affairs carrying on around Fairmont. But it’s Dani’s convulsions of grief and rage around being jettisoned by ex-husband Bill Hamilton (Timon Kyle Durrett) and his intention to marry and move into Fairmont Crest with younger woman Hayley Lawson (Marquita Goings) that demanded viewers’ eyes and ears this week.

“I felt inside the ramping up of her despair,” Mosley explains, “having to be forced to be at this wedding and watching this man, who she loves with everything and gave up everything for, marrying someone who she thought of as a daughter, who’s also younger and beautiful. All these things that are just so frightening, I think, to women in middle age as their kids get older. I just felt like a total pressure cooker the whole time.”

Throughout the week Dani suffered indignity after indignity. The new Mrs. Hamilton waltzing around the Fairmont Crest country club in a flashy leopard trench, her model daughter Chelsea (RhonniRose Mantilla) having to tactfully explain that she doesn’t need her overbearing momager anymore, and Bill brutally rejecting her after Dani begs him to come back one last time. (“The desperation, it pains me to see it. What happened to all that pride?”)

She did have her moments, though, like landing a sucker punch square on Hayley’s face in front of God, the entire Dupree clan, and the Grand Dame of Potomac herself. But more than all the shame and anger, Mosley thinks it was an unexpected tryst with playboy photographer Andre Richardson (Sean Freeman) that galvanized her toward undertaking that terrible, irreversible action.

“For some people that might be a release. It might be like, ‘Okay, my life is going to go on. But for her, it just sort of further empowers her to remember, ‘Wait, I am amazing. I’m that b—-. And I’m going to come and defend what’s mine,'” she says.

Though the Duprees vow to stick together through thick and thin, even lining up to glare down Hayley after Dani knocks her halfway to the Lincoln Memorial, matriarch Anita (Tamara Tunie) and patriarch Vernon (Clifton Davis) are forced into an impossible position that requires them to join the ranks of Dani’s betrayers.

Martin’s mysterious past threatens to catch up to them all. Or, more accurately, Bill threatens to leverage it against the Duprees if they don’t do exactly as he says, whenever he says it. Attempting to spare his new bride’s feelings when the entire community rejects her wedding invitation, Bill compels the whole Dupree clan to attend — Dani included. In episode one, Vernon gives his daughter an emotional pep talk, telling her, “You’re giving that man power he didn’t earn. That devotion you gave to Bill? He threw it back in your face and walked away with his little chippie.” But by week’s end, he gently strong-arms Dani into attending Bill’s wedding and can’t even explain why.

“It’s historical for her. I think she’s had to do that so often in her life, growing up the kid of a politician,” Mosley says of Dani ultimately caving to her father. “It’s like, ‘We just have to do this.’ ‘I don’t want to go to this event.’ ‘Well, this is what we have to do. We’re all going to go together. We’re all going to wave and parade around.’ So I think that that’s part of her history, and he’s always been the one to be able to connect to her and ground her and get her to do it, but it probably triggers some old stuff there too.”

Mosley says she reacted to the wedding scene on the page the same way viewers are likely to react. “I was like, ‘What? What now?!’ And then, ‘How do you do that? How do you sustain that?’ She does not relent. I mean, once you pull a gun out, you’re all in.”

Though Mosley says she “can’t think about how the audience is going to receive” Dani while she’s playing her out of fear she may “water her down” due to fan pressure, it was important for her to “find the nuance in what she’s saying and what she wants. I think that she doesn’t ever intend to fire the gun. She wants an apology. It’s all emotional.”

The actress can’t say much about what’s to come for Dani, Bill, Hayley, and the rest of the wedding party. But she does tease that more is in the works in the Dani-Andre department. “I would just say that it’s not a one-night stand to her. They have trouble staying away from each other.”

That’s a hopeful indicator that Dani makes it out of this mess in one piece. But fans are advised to cross their fingers for Bill and Hayley, unless they were rooting for Dani to bring the drama and destruction all along.

Beyond the Gates airs weekdays on CBS at 2 p.m. ET/1 p.m. PT, and is also available to stream on Paramount+.