Breaking the Ice Queen (L.A Ice Queens #2)

Chapter 1

SIENNA

Sienna Ramirez adjusted the press lanyard around her neck and stepped through the gilded double doors into two hundred of Hollywood’s most self-congratulatory people raising glasses to a cause none of them could name without checking the invitation.

The ballroom hit her in layers: gardenias first, cloying and deliberate, then the low roar of voices competing with Gershwin.

The charity gala occupied the top floor of one of Sunset Boulevard’s most obscene buildings, floor-to-ceiling windows framing a Los Angeles that glittered like it had nothing to apologize for.

She cut through the crowd with the camera-off confidence of someone who spent most of her career behind one.

Her dark curls were loosely gathered at the nape of her neck, and she wore the one good blazer Dani had insisted she own: black, sharp enough to pass in this room, comfortable enough to forget she was wearing it.

Beneath it, her shoulders were tense, the pre-interview tightness she never fully shook.

She rolled them once, subtly, and let the room take shape around her.

The gala was in aid of the Hollywood Creative Legacy Foundation, which sounded like an organization designed by committee to mean as little as possible.

Crystal chandeliers threw the kind of warm light that made everyone look ten years younger and fifty percent more generous.

An orchestra played Gershwin in the far corner with the quiet competence of musicians accustomed to being ignored.

The centerpieces were arrangements of white orchids and bare branches lacquered into shapes that probably cost more per table than Sienna spent on rent.

Somewhere in this ballroom was a connection to Burty Howarth.

Producer, distributor, the man behind decades of prestige Hollywood drama whose award-season campaigns were as carefully engineered as his balance sheets.

Maybe a disgruntled assistant. Maybe a production partner whose loyalty was wearing thin.

Maybe just someone who drank enough champagne to forget they were supposed to be careful.

Nine months of digging and she had the shape of the story but not its spine.

Decades of illegal payments routed through shell companies.

Silenced rivals. Awards manipulated through a network of bribes and strategic favors that reached from production companies to voting academies.

All of it buried under layers of NDAs and an institutional silence that didn’t need to be enforced because everyone who benefited from it understood the rules without being told.

She needed a name. One person willing to go on record.

Her phone buzzed in her blazer pocket. Dani. How’s the shark tank?

Sienna typed back without looking down. Swimming.

Dani replied immediately. Get me a name and a plate of whatever rich people eat at these things.

A smile tugged at Sienna’s mouth. Dani Cariddo was back at their shared office in Silver Lake, surrounded by editing equipment and the remnants of whatever takeout she’d ordered, running background on three of tonight’s attendees.

They’d been building the Burty Howarth investigation together since the beginning, and Dani’s instinct for following financial paper trails was the reason they had as much as they did.

The production company they’d built, Parallax Films, was still young enough that every project was a bet.

This one was the biggest bet they’d placed yet.

A waiter materialized with a tray of champagne flutes.

Sienna took one to hold rather than drink.

She lifted it once out of habit, caught the dry citrus bite of cold champagne at her lips, then lowered it again without drinking.

The glass was cold and slick with condensation against her palm as she surveyed the room.

Industry faces she half-recognized from trade publications: agents, studio executives, a showrunner whose series had just been renewed for a fourth season.

All of them moving through the warm light with the unhurried flow of people who belonged here.

Sienna did not belong here. She planned to use that.

She worked the periphery first, as she always did.

A conversation about distribution deals with a mid-level exec at Pinnacle Studios who dropped Burty Howarth’s name once, casually, as someone everybody owed favors to.

A quick exchange with a publicist who went quiet the moment Sienna mentioned documentary work.

The publicist’s expression said everything her words didn’t, and Sienna filed it.

She was angling toward a cluster of producers near the bar when the room changed.

Not the noise. The noise stayed the same. But the attention in it shifted. Heads turned, conversations thinned by half a second, and a woman walked through the crowd with an authority that made people adjust their posture.

She knew who this was before the woman had finished crossing the room.

Adriana Lovett. Senior partner at Lovett & Associates.

The most feared entertainment lawyer in Los Angeles, which was a title that required genuine commitment in a city that manufactured fear as a secondary export.

She represented studio heads, A-list producers, and executives who needed legal protection the way other people needed oxygen.

She also represented Burty Howarth. Had for nearly a decade.

Adriana moved through the gala in a charcoal suit cut so sharply it looked architectural.

Tall, composed, dark hair pinned in a twist that didn’t permit a single loose strand.

Cool gray eyes that took inventory of the room without appearing to look at anything.

A beauty that didn’t invite approach but issued warnings.

Sienna watched her accept a glass of sparkling water from a waiter and exchange exactly three words with a studio executive who seemed pathetically grateful for the attention.

Adriana’s expression gave away nothing. Not warmth, not boredom, not the faintest suggestion that she existed in the same emotional register as anyone else in the room.

The trades called her the Ice Queen, which was the kind of nickname that told you more about the people who gave it than the person who wore it.

Sienna had read every profile, every sidebar, every guarded interview Adriana had given over the past decade.

There weren’t many. Adriana Lovett preferred to operate from the spaces between headlines, where the work was cleaner and the leverage was better.

She was striking, the kind of face a camera would love in tight close-up, which was an observation Sienna filed in the same category as intimidating and extremely well-dressed.

The charcoal suit fit like it had been made that morning.

Her hands were economical when she spoke, and she didn’t use them often.

Everything about her suggested a woman who had decided long ago how much of herself the world was allowed to see and had not revised the number upward since.

Sienna set her untouched champagne on a passing tray.

She had spent weeks reading depositions that bore Adriana’s signature.

Settlement agreements so airtight they might as well have been tombs.

Cease-and-desist letters that read like poetry written by someone who found human connection distasteful.

Every document was a masterclass in airtight language designed to make problems disappear before anyone could name them publicly.

Her mentor, Joaquin Torres, had warned her about lawyers like Adriana back when Sienna was still a junior researcher on his team.

The dangerous ones don’t threaten. They restructure the conversation until the threat was always there and you just didn’t notice.

That was before Joaquin had buried his own investigation under pressure from investors, before Sienna had watched the best journalist she knew choose silence because the cost of speaking was measured in ways she couldn’t afford.

She hadn’t spoken to him in three years.

She still thought about him every time she was tempted to back down.

Adriana Lovett was the reason Burty Howarth still had a career. She was the wall between his secrets and daylight, and she had been building that wall for years.

Sienna should have circled back to the producers at the bar. Should have kept working her list, picking up scraps, playing the long game she’d been playing for months.

But nine months of patience had given her the shape without the spine.

The quiet approach wasn’t working. And there was a calculation underneath the impulse: if she walked up to Adriana Lovett in front of two hundred witnesses and rattled the cage, the reaction would tell her more in thirty seconds than three more months of peripheral sourcing ever could.

Every documentary had a moment where you stopped filming from behind the hedge and knocked on the front door. This was hers.

She walked directly toward Adriana Lovett.

Later, Dani would call this the most productive act of career suicide she had ever witnessed.

The crowd between them wasn’t thick, but it was curated, people who understood proximity to Adriana as a form of currency and were rationing it.

A studio lawyer angled to intercept her and Adriana dismissed him with a look so brief it barely qualified as eye contact.

An actress whose name Sienna couldn’t place received a polite nod that somehow conveyed both acknowledgment and a complete lack of interest in further conversation.

Sienna reached her near the east windows, where the city sprawled below like an argument no one was winning.

“Ms. Lovett.”

Adriana turned. The movement was unhurried, deliberate, the kind of turn a director would keep in a single take because the timing was perfect. She had been aware of Sienna’s approach for the last thirty seconds and had chosen this exact moment to acknowledge it.