Chapter 1 #2
Up close, her eyes were colder than the photographs suggested. Not empty. Assessing. They swept Sienna’s press lanyard, her blazer, her stance, and arrived at a conclusion in approximately two seconds.
“I don’t believe we’ve met,” Adriana said. Her voice was low, pitched to carry exactly to Sienna and no further.
“Sienna Ramirez. I’m a documentary filmmaker.”
“I know who you are.”
The correction came without malice. Adriana lifted her sparkling water and took a slow sip, her gaze level over the rim.
“Then you know why I’m here,” Sienna said.
“I know why you think you’re here.”
Sienna held the eye contact. Adriana’s expression didn’t shift, but an edge behind it sharpened. An alertness. A quality of attention that looked, irritatingly, like interest, and like she resented having it.
The scent of Adriana’s perfume reached Sienna. Vetiver and cold gin botanicals, expensive, nothing sweet. It suited her. Sienna’s pulse picked up, and she attributed it to adrenaline.
“I’ve been investigating Burty Howarth for nine months,” Sienna said, keeping her voice level, conversational, the register she used in interviews when she needed the other person to underestimate how much she already knew.
“Illegal payments through shell companies. Silenced rivals. Manipulated awards. A pattern of corruption that goes back decades.”
Two people at a nearby table stopped talking. A woman in a red dress set down her champagne glass and turned her body away, as though proximity to this conversation might be contagious. The shifting attention was present, useful, irrelevant to the conversation itself.
“Your client,” she continued, “has built his career on a system of fraud that’s about to become very, very public.”
Adriana’s expression didn’t change. Not a muscle. She held Sienna’s gaze with the composed certainty of someone who had been threatened by professionals and found the experience underwhelming.
“That’s a significant claim, Ms. Ramirez.” Adriana’s voice remained level, but the temperature in it had dropped several degrees. “One I’d advise you to reconsider before it becomes a legal one.”
“Is that a threat?”
“It’s the best advice you’ll receive tonight.”
The room around them had gone selectively quiet.
Not silent. The gala continued, music and laughter filling the space above them.
But the people within earshot had stopped pretending not to listen.
Sienna could feel the attention pressing against her skin, the ballroom’s focus narrowing to the two of them standing near the windows.
Good. Witnesses made people careful. And careful people sometimes said more than they meant to.
“The rumors about Burty Howarth aren’t rumors,” Sienna said. “They’re documented. Sourced. And getting stronger by the week.”
Adriana lowered her glass. Her posture shifted. Not a flinch, not retreat, but a settling of weight into a stance that was unmistakably combative. A lawyer preparing her closing argument.
“Ms. Ramirez.” Adriana shifted her weight again.
A small movement, exact, the kind that in anyone else might have been unconscious.
In Adriana it was tactical. “You’ve approached me at a charity event to make accusations about a client I am not at liberty to discuss.
I’m going to be very direct with you because I suspect subtlety would be wasted.
” She paused. The pause was a weapon, and she wielded it with the confidence of someone who had been using silence to win arguments since before Sienna had finished graduate school.
“Whatever investigation you believe you’re conducting, I would strongly recommend you abandon it.
Not because I’m asking. Because the people you’re antagonizing have resources, patience, and institutional memory that significantly exceed your own. ”
Sienna didn’t step back. Didn’t break eye contact. Didn’t adjust her breathing.
She held Adriana Lovett’s stare and let the silence stretch until it became its own kind of statement.
“Thank you for the advice,” Sienna said. Her voice didn’t waver. Surprise crossed Adriana’s expression, fast and unguarded. “I’ll keep it in mind when I’m in the editing room.”
Adriana’s hand tightened on her glass. A fraction of a second, barely visible, and then her fingers loosened and the mask was back.
“Enjoy the gala, Ms. Ramirez.”
Adriana turned and walked away. The crowd rearranged itself around her with the ease of people who had been watching and were now pretending they hadn’t.
Sienna stood by the windows, her pulse loud in her ears, the Los Angeles skyline burning behind her.
Her hands weren’t shaking. They usually were after a confrontation.
The shaking, when it came, happened later, privately, usually in her car or her apartment where nobody would mistake it for uncertainty.
She pressed her palm flat against her thigh and breathed.
She had come here for a name. An assistant, a production partner, a loose thread in Burty Howarth’s operation.
Instead, she’d walked straight up to his wall and knocked.
The wall had not moved. But Sienna had been reading people long enough to recognize the difference between someone dismissing a threat and someone managing one. Adriana Lovett’s stillness wasn’t indifference. She had shut Sienna down with the speed of someone already working to contain the damage.
Which meant there was damage to contain.
Which meant there was a trail worth following.
Across the ballroom, Adriana had returned to the event’s gravitational center.
Standing with two men Sienna recognized from the trade pages, her glass in hand, her expression revealing nothing.
But she hadn’t looked at Sienna again. Not once.
And in Sienna’s experience, the avoidance of eye contact was more telling than any stare.
You rattled her. The thought was quiet, certain, and satisfying.
Sienna pulled her phone from her blazer pocket and texted Dani two words: She’s scared.
She lingered for another twenty minutes.
Worked two more conversations, collected a business card from an independent producer named Vance who said he had heard things about Burty’s distribution deals that “didn’t sit right,” and tucked the card into her blazer pocket with a mental note to follow up Monday morning.
Then she collected her coat from the check and walked out of the Monarch Hotel into the warm Los Angeles night, already planning her next move.
Behind her, somewhere in that gilded ballroom, Adriana Lovett was probably doing the same thing.
Dani’s reply came before Sienna reached her car.
Scared of what?
Sienna typed back, That I’m close.
Three dots appeared, disappeared, appeared again. Then: Good. Come to the office. I ordered Thai.
Sienna got into her beat-up Subaru, tossed the press lanyard onto the passenger seat, and pulled out of the valet lot. The car smelled like old coffee and the jasmine air freshener Dani had hung from the mirror as a joke that had outlasted the joke by several months.
The city moved past. Strip malls and palm trees and the restless light that Los Angeles wore like armor against its own contradictions. She drove with the windows down, the warm air pulling at her curls, and replayed every second of the conversation.
Adriana Lovett’s voice. Low, exact, thick with authority. Those eyes had taken Sienna apart in two seconds and reassembled a threat assessment without changing expression. The charcoal suit and the stillness that wasn’t calm but the absence of any movement she hadn’t authorized.
Vetiver.
She’d said I know who you are like it was already a problem she’d been solving.
Sienna gripped the steering wheel. Her pulse was still elevated, and she was honest enough with herself to admit that not all of it was professional.
Adriana Lovett was formidable. That was the word.
Not beautiful, not intimidating, but formidable.
A force that demanded your full attention and then punished you for giving it.
She shook her head and turned up the radio.
She had spent months pushing at Burty Howarth’s fortress from the outside. Tonight, she’d found the architect.
Now she just had to figure out how to get inside.