Chapter Thirteen
Who She Calls First
The call came four days later, a little before noon, and Senna felt the floor tilt the moment she recognized the number.
"I need to tell you something you're not going to want to hear," said Renata, the lead voice actor on the flagship contract, her voice tight with something between apology and panic.
"I've been offered a role on a television series.
Filming starts in three weeks. I have to withdraw from the audiobook.
I know this leaves you in an impossible position and I'm sorry, I genuinely am, but I can't turn this down. "
Senna sat very still at her desk, feeling the careful architecture of the six-book deal, the thing she'd staked her studio's next two years on, begin to crack. "The delivery deadline is in five weeks, Renata. I don't have time to cast and direct a replacement from scratch."
"I know. I'm sorry. I really am."
The call ended a few minutes later, and Senna sat in the sudden silence of her office feeling something close to panic she hadn't experienced since the confession itself, a professional crisis with no obvious solution and a clock she couldn't stop.
Imke found her twenty minutes later still staring at the same blank casting spreadsheet, having accomplished nothing. "You've been sitting like that a while."
"Renata's out. I need a replacement voice actor with a very specific accent range within five weeks and I don't have a single name that fits."
"Have you called anyone for help?"
"I'm handling it."
"Senna." Imke's voice was gentle but firm, the same tone she'd used weeks earlier about the coffee mug.
"You've been running this studio solo for two years.
I've never once seen you ask anyone for help with anything, even when you clearly needed it.
I'm not trying to overstep. I just think you might actually get further faster if you let someone else's network work for you too. "
Senna sat with that, feeling the truth of it land somewhere uncomfortable.
She thought of the six months she'd spent building Klarheit's reputation entirely on her own reading of talent, refusing outside recommendations even when colleagues offered them, telling herself it was quality control rather than admitting, as she was forced to now, that it was simply easier to trust her own judgment than to owe anyone a debt of gratitude she'd have to find some way to repay.
It occurred to her, sitting there with the useless spreadsheet still open, that this was the same instinct that had kept Colt's world separate from her own for three years, the same reluctance to let anyone else's competence touch the parts of her life she'd built to prove she didn't need it.
She thought, unbidden, of Colt's logistics contact, the vehicle transport network Eisenwolf ran legitimately alongside its less legal operations, a network that crossed paths, she vaguely recalled him mentioning once, with voice talent agencies that supplied audio for training materials.
She texted him before she could talk herself out of it. Random question. Do you still know people at that voice casting agency you mentioned once? I'm in trouble on the Berlin contract.
His reply came within minutes. Give me twenty.
He called with a name and a number inside the promised window, and by evening he was at the studio in person, having tracked down not just a contact but an actual audition tape from a performer whose range matched almost exactly what the project needed.
They worked until past one in the morning, running cold reads together, Colt patient and genuinely useful in a way that had nothing to do with romance and everything to do with two people solving a real problem side by side.
He read opposite lines for her to test chemistry, held a stopwatch while she timed pacing, brought her coffee without being asked exactly the way she'd once brought him coffee in the rain.
By the time they found a workable candidate, both of them were exhausted, slumped at either end of the mixing desk in the particular loose, companionable quiet that follows solving something together.
"I don't think I've asked anyone for help with this business since I started it," Senna admitted, into the tired stillness. "Tonight's the first time in two years I let someone else carry part of it."
"How does it feel."
"Terrifying. And also like I might have made this so much harder on myself than it needed to be.
" She looked over at him, unguarded in the exhaustion of the hour, the careful walls she usually kept up too tired to hold their shape.
"You didn't just find me a name and a phone number.
You stayed until one in the morning running lines with me.
Most people would have considered the favor discharged after the introduction. "
"Most people aren't trying to prove something to you." He said it simply, without weight, just an observation offered honestly into the tired quiet between them. "I wanted to actually be useful. Not perform usefulness and disappear."
"I missed you." The words came out before she'd fully decided to say them, too tired to hold the wall in place any longer.
"These last few weeks, working with you, talking with you again.
I missed this. I wasn't going to say that out loud, but it's one in the morning and I'm too tired to keep pretending otherwise. "
Something shifted in Colt's face, careful and disbelieving, like a man afraid the words might evaporate if he moved too fast toward them. "I missed you too. Every single day since the kitchen table."
Neither of them moved to close the distance between them.
He didn't push for more, didn't reach for the opening she'd just handed him, and she understood, watching him hold himself back with visible effort, that the restraint itself was its own kind of answer, proof of exactly the change he'd been trying to show her for weeks without words.
"Go home," she said finally, softer than she meant to. "Get some sleep. Thank you, for tonight."
"Anytime." He stood, gathering his jacket, and paused at the door, looking back at her with an expression she felt in her chest long after he'd gone. "I mean that. Anytime, for anything, for as long as you'll let me."
She sat alone in the studio for a while after he left, the exhaustion of the crisis giving way to something quieter, and admitted to herself, in the empty room, that she was no longer entirely sure what she was protecting herself from by keeping him at arm's length.
She texted Imke the update on the casting solution before she finally left for the night, a short, factual message about the new voice actor, and Imke's reply came back within minutes: Glad it worked out.
Also glad you asked for help. Progress on two fronts tonight.
Senna read it twice, smiling despite herself at how thoroughly her own staff had apparently been tracking her growth in real time, and locked up the studio with a lightness in her chest she hadn't expected to feel again this soon after the confession that had broken everything open five weeks earlier.