Chapter One #2
That’s the fucking knife in my gut.
Forty-eight hours later and my patience is a fraction of paper-thin.
I’ve interviewed models, actresses, even a minor royal.
The next few candidates blur together—Instagram-famous, fashion-forward, all airbrushed perfection and zero soul.
Hell, it’s almost as if they’ve taken a leaf out of Delphine’s book to be all polish and no substance.
I stifle a bark of acid laughter to think perhaps they’ve done exactly that.
Delphine’s exit was deliberate, loud and extremely public after all.
Renée tries her best to keep things professional, but even she’s yawning by the fifth ‘I believe in true love’ and ‘I’m the perfect candidate for you’ monologues.
‘I swear,’ I mutter after the sixth exit, ‘if one more of them says she’d die for me, I’ll test it.’
Renée laughs…until my deadly serious face causes her humour to whittle away. ‘You’ve been in Hollywood too long. You forget the art of subtle lies.’
I lean forward, elbows on my knees, making an effort to unclench my jaw and release my bitterness for a moment so I can just…
breathe. Telling subtle lies is one thing, but seeing—to a single one of these candidates—the glint in their eyes when they scan the academy award trophies behind me, and the naked ambition beyond the role I’m offering, has bile crawling up my throat.
Maybe that’s my problem—the inability to divorce myself from the disaster to end all disasters labelled Delphine.
‘I built a damn empire from nothing. Sold my first script on spec. Got Variety’s “One to Watch” before I turned thirty. But none of that means anything to him.’
Renée pauses for a moment, then sighs. Approaching the chair just vacated by the last candidate, she sits down.
I know what’s coming and, unlike many subordinates, she’s not shy about voicing her opinion.
As my oldest and most loyal employee, in a world based on fleeting connections and make-believe, she’s earned her right to speak her mind. Even when I don’t want to hear it.
‘He’s old school. Ghanaian royalty wrapped in brocade and power and entitlement. No one has said no to him in decades. But…is there a reason to think he’s just adding strings on a project he wants to make happen, too?’
‘No,’ I say bitterly. ‘He’s disappointed. Always has been. I chose stories over steel mills. Lights over cocoa farms. Every trip home he reminded me that I’d let him down.’ Memory sears harder. ‘He called my work childish. Fiction. Weak.’
Renée closes her iPad, sensing the crack beneath the surface.
‘You don’t want to go back,’ she says gently.
‘No.’ I stand, jaw tight. ‘Not like this and not under his say-so. Because every time I do, he tries to remind me that I’m still that boy in the guest wing—an heir in name only. Never enough. I despise that he’s forcing my hand. Using what matters most.’
Obibini Studios is my vision of African cinema, told without apology or foreign filters. Ghanaian stories, Ghanaian talent, shot on our soil with global scale.
It’s everything I hadn’t dared to dream of as a boy. A reality within the palm of my hand.
And it’s hanging on the illusion of a relationship I don’t want, with a woman I’m paying to play a role and therefore can’t trust as far as I can throw her. All for the approval of a master manipulator I no longer respect.
A growl escapes before I can stop it.
Renée checks the list, ever the assistant eager for forward momentum.
‘We’ve got two more tomorrow. One of them is a model-slash-activist. The other’s a tech heiress who’s been to rehab, but she’s clean now.
She’s been to Ghana a few times during Detty December.
Loves it there. She might just swing it for you. ’
I grunt, doubting that. Dirty or ‘Detty’ December has become the catchphrase for the near hedonism in Accra and the surrounding cities.
As much as I loved the tourism and cultural boom it’d brought to the country, I doubt a woman fresh from rehab was the right person to plunge into an atmosphere like that.
Still, I look up when a glass slides across my desk. It’s filled with two shots of my favourite cognac. ‘Is this sympathy or a preamble to more bad news,’ I gripe.
Renée grimaces at my arid tone. ‘It’s a don’t-bite-my-head-off-but…’
‘But what?’
‘But unless you want to start taking out your own trash and cooking your own meals, you need to pick a name from the list of housekeepers I sent you on Monday.’
Did I despise the fresh grip of tension that seized my middle? Very, very much. ‘Remind me again why I pay several agencies and minions to handle this and yet you’re bothering me with this?’
Renée rolls her eyes. Heaven bless her for being old enough to be my mother, therefore necessitating my ingrained imperative—as a well-brought up Biney of the Great Ghana Bineys—to treat her with the utmost respect.
‘Because you said something about not wanting another Cilla on your hands.’
A brand-new sensation, dirty and shaming, rises to join the tension. Sadly, I did say those words. But out of a healthy dose of self-loathing. And yes, a respectable amount of bitterness and chagrin too.
Because didn’t I swear heaven and earth against another Delphine, only to end up with a stealthier, more cunning version? One with sensible shoes and a seemingly genuine smile who’d found a chink I would’ve sworn wasn’t present until she’d exposed it.
So yes, it was true I didn’t want another one of her to ever cross my threshold. I live in a town where gold-digging was birthed. You would think I’d have that reminder emblazoned on my forehead or something.
And yet Cilla Rockson, the housekeeper who once moved as if shadows across my Bel Air mansion, her eyes always a fraction too sharp, too aware—had proved she had a talent for living up to the label. I’d suspected it. Succeeded in avoiding it.
Until the night my world burned to ash, and I reached for her as a drowning man would a life jacket. Except it’d been a jacket riddled with holes and subterfuge.
We had one night. One reckless, unforgettable night. The kind of sex not even the best director in the world could replicate on the silver screen. The kind that made even cynical poets scrounge up a meaningful line or sonnet. All. Fucking. Lies.
I drifted into a half-dream afterward, drowsy with grief and sated with sex, only to wake before dawn to a cool bed and the kind of foreboding that guaranteed box office.
I’d found her, drawn by the sound of papers rustling.
There’d she’d been, her hair still wild from my fingers, standing in my private study, phone light glinting as she hovered over documents she’d had no business looking at.
‘Couldn’t sleep,’ she’d said when I appeared in the doorway, forcing a smile.
‘Thought I’d tidy.’ The story was flimsy, but I swallowed it, tugged her back to bed, convinced myself paranoia would ruin the memory faster than truth.
Yet my gut snarled. Continued to snarl until a deeper background check had revealed that indeed, a UCLA dual-degree talent like she possessed doesn’t spend six months scrubbing marble for minimum wage unless she’s mining something more valuable.
At sunrise she was gone, her uniform returned, a terse resignation letter on a kitchen napkin. Security footage confirmed the punch in my stomach. She’d snapped photos of my private documents about Obibini Studios the moment she thought I was out cold.
So I did what every Biney heir is taught—erase the threat before it spreads.
I told myself it was just protocol, that the woman who polished my floors had played me.
But no amount of blacklisting has erased the truth that haunts every night since—it wasn’t a lapse in judgement.
And dammit, it was also the most visceral connection I’ve ever experienced, aided no doubt by the weight of my grief, but nevertheless…
a connection that still caught me hard and raw when I allowed myself to dwell on it.
Which I absolutely wasn’t going to keep doing now.
Did it grate that she’d quit before I could locate the words to fire her? Sure.
I’d convinced myself it was for the best. That anyone that over-qualified didn’t scrub toilets for the view. But I’d devoted too much time developing a reasons for that ploy.
All very, very unsavoury.
I drain my glass, every intention of washing her memory down with my next swallow. But then it happens—soft, sneaky. A flicker of memory. Dark curls. Full lips. Thick hips. About as far from the stick-thin imitations who strut down Rodeo Drive as you could get.
That single night branded me more than I ever admitted. The sound of my name leaving her mouth in a seductive plead. The false promise of comfort and succour in her eyes.
Cilla.
Turns out she was the best actress never to audition for a role I wasn’t offering.
The best actress…
Yesu. I freeze for a moment as possibilities clang like church bells. If she was playing a role then, could she—
I’m already standing. Already brushing past Renée, who calls my name in confusion.
I head for the elevator, phone in hand. By the time I’m striding into the underground garage, I’m already dialling.
‘Get me an address,’ I say to my security chief. ‘Cilla Rockson. Need it in the next fifteen minutes. Everything else you can dig up should be forwarded to me by six a.m. tomorrow.’
I kill the call and climb into my car, heart pounding harder than it should. Because maybe I don’t know what I’m doing. I need someone to lie for me. Pretend to love me. Let the world believe we were meant to be.
And there’s only one woman who ever made it feel true for a few short hours shrouded in grief and lust.
Maybe I’m playing with something I can’t afford to feel. But I’m going to see her anyway.
And this time, I won’t be the one left wanting.
Hell, I might find some much needed satisfaction before this repulsive demand is over.
Cilla
The knock on my door comes just after eleven p.m.