Chapter 2
ADRIANA
Andrew Stylin was sitting in the leather chair across from Adriana’s desk when she walked in, still wearing the charcoal suit from the gala, her jaw set at an angle she knew he’d seen in depositions and hostile takeover defenses.
He had two fingers resting on the arm of the chair, a legal pad balanced on his knee, and the expression of someone who had been waiting for exactly this entrance and had already decided to let her speak first.
He had loosened his tie. The jacket of his navy suit was draped over the chair’s back, and his sleeves were rolled once at the cuff, which was Andrew’s version of casual.
He had been her senior associate for nine years and her business partner in everything but title for the last five, and in that time Adriana had never once seen him leave the office before she did.
It was not loyalty. It was more complicated than loyalty, and she had never asked him to name it.
Adriana dropped her clutch on the desk and stood behind her chair rather than sitting in it.
Floor-to-ceiling windows framed the city below.
A single orchid sat on the credenza, white, in a ceramic pot that cost more than it should have.
The desk held a lamp, a closed laptop, and nothing that could be mistaken for sentiment.
“How was the gala?” Andrew asked. His voice carried the studied neutrality he reserved for moments when he already knew the answer.
“A filmmaker cornered me in front of half the industry and accused Burty Howarth of decades of systemic fraud.” She said it flat. But Andrew had known her long enough to hear the flatness as its own kind of temperature reading.
He waited. He was good at waiting. It was one of the things that made him invaluable.
Adriana moved to the window and looked out at the grid of lights below.
Thirty-two floors of distance between her and the street, and still the city pressed against the glass as though it wanted in.
Her own reflection stared back at her from the glass.
Hair, suit, expression—all accounted for.
Nothing a jury could use. The dark twist of her hair.
The sharp line of her jaw. She pressed her fingertips against the cool surface and let the contact ground her.
Her pulse had not quite returned to its resting rate. She had left the gala forty minutes ago, and the adrenaline from the confrontation was still circulating. She breathed it down. She was very good at breathing things down.
“Tell me about the filmmaker,” Andrew said.
“Sienna Ramirez.” The name came out clipped. “She runs an independent production company. Parallax Films. She’s been investigating Burty for months, and she approached me publicly, at a charity event, with enough specifics to suggest she has real sourcing.”
“How specific?”
Andrew uncapped his pen, holding it above the legal pad.
“Shell companies. Payment trails. Award manipulation. She knew the structure, Andrew. Not just the rumors.”
Andrew set his pen down on the legal pad. The movement was unhurried, and Adriana read it for what it was—his version of concern.
“She didn’t name names,” Adriana continued, turning from the window. “But she didn’t need to. The level of detail she threw out in thirty seconds of conversation tells me she’s been inside the financial structure. She has access she shouldn’t have.”
“Or she’s bluffing with public records and hoping you’d fill in the gaps.”
Adriana’s fingers pressed against the glass of the window behind her.
“I didn’t.”
“I know you didn’t.” Andrew met her eyes. The corner of his mouth moved, not quite a smile. A shared understanding that didn’t need to be stated. “But the fact that you’re standing behind your chair at eleven o’clock instead of sitting in it tells me it got through.”
Adriana pulled the chair out and sat. The leather was cool. She aligned the clutch with the edge of the desk and opened her laptop.
“Pull up everything we have on Sienna Ramirez.”
Andrew was already reaching for his phone. “What are we looking for?”
“Her work. Previous documentaries. Who she’s investigated, what happened to them, how far she’s willing to go.
” Adriana typed the name into the firm’s media monitoring database and waited for the results to populate.
“If she makes threats at parties and doesn’t follow through, I need to know.
And if she follows through, I need to know that faster. ”
The results came in layers. Sienna Ramirez had three documentaries in five years, all independent productions, all distributed through platforms that prioritized journalistic credibility over commercial reach. The subjects read like a casualty list.
The Quiet Accounts had exposed a venture capital firm’s pattern of burying environmental liability in subsidiary companies; the managing partner resigned within six months of release.
Paper Walls had tracked the collapse of a housing nonprofit that turned out to be a money laundering operation for a state senator.
The senator was currently serving four years.
Each investigation followed the same pattern: extended research, meticulous sourcing, and a final product so thoroughly documented that the legal response options for the targets shrank to almost nothing.
Cease-and-desist letters had been filed against Paper Walls by three separate law firms. All three had withdrawn within weeks of seeing the evidence package.
That was not the profile of someone who bluffed at parties.
The third documentary was still in post-production.
No public details. Adriana clicked through three trade articles mentioning it and found nothing except the words Hollywood and power structure.
A fourth article, in a smaller industry newsletter, quoted an anonymous source saying the project was “going to change what people think they know about how this town actually works.”
Her next breath came shallow. She swallowed once, the last of the champagne still bitter at the back of her throat, and kept scrolling.
“Andrew.”
He looked up from his own screen. He had found the same articles; his expression confirmed it.
“She doesn’t lose.”
“No.” Andrew’s voice was careful, the tone he used when he was about to deliver news she wouldn’t enjoy.
“She doesn’t lose, and the people she investigates don’t recover.
Every one of these ended careers. Not temporarily.
Permanently. And the legal teams that tried to fight her ended up looking complicit in what they were defending. ”
The implication was clear; any case built against Burty would name Lovett & Associates as co-respondents. Adriana catalogued the exposure the way she would for a client brief. She would assess it later when she had the space to think without Andrew watching.
She scrolled through Sienna’s press coverage.
Minimal interviews, few photographs, an almost stubborn resistance to personal branding that most young filmmakers chased.
No social media presence worth mentioning.
No vanity projects. Every piece of work pointed in the same direction—toward a person who was interested in one thing and had organized her entire life around doing it well.
One profile existed in a digital journalism outlet from two years ago.
The interviewer had tried repeatedly to draw Sienna into personal territory, her background, her motivations, her romantic life, and Sienna had redirected every question back to the work with a patience that must have been maddening.
The pull quote was, “I’m not interested in being the story.
I’m interested in the story other people are trying to bury. ”
Underneath it was a photograph. Sienna at a press event, dark curls loose around her face, wearing a jacket that looked like the same one she’d been wearing tonight.
Her brown eyes were direct, looking past the camera at a point the composition hadn’t been arranged to showcase.
Her expression was calm, focused, and completely unimpressed by the lens pointed at her.
Adriana studied the image. The angle of Sienna’s jaw. Her posture, relaxed but alert, weight balanced, as though she was ready to move in any direction. The faint suggestion of a smile that never fully formed, more a readiness, an appetite for whatever came next.
She closed the tab with a decisive click.
“She’s further along than Burty thinks,” Adriana said.
She leaned back in her chair and pressed her fingers to the bridge of her nose.
The headache that had been building since the gala was lodging behind her eyes with the focused pressure of a migraine that intended to stay.
“He told me three weeks ago that the rumors were gossip from disgruntled freelancers. Shell companies and payment trails are not gossip.”
“No, they’re not.”
Andrew wrote two quick lines on his legal pad, then set the pen down.
“Which means she has documents. Financial documents. The kind that require either a leak inside Burty’s operation or a source close enough to the money to know where it goes.
And she’s been building this for nine months without anyone in his orbit flagging it loudly enough for us to hear.
” Adriana lowered her hand from her face.
“Nine months, Andrew. That’s a long time to build a case and not make a single mistake big enough for us to notice. ”
“Which tells you something about how good she is.”
“Yes. It does.”
Andrew set his phone down on the desk. The light from the screen caught the sharp angles of his face, and for a moment he looked as tired as Adriana was trying not to look. Neither of them mentioned it.
“I need to know how far along she is,” Adriana said. “Who her sources are. What she’s planning to publish, and when.”