Chapter 2 #2
“I can pull the public filings for Parallax Films. Production schedules, distribution agreements, anything she’s filed with the guilds. If she’s close to release, there’ll be a paper trail.”
“Do it tonight. I want the filing history, the guild registrations, and anything connected to the third documentary on my desk by morning.”
Andrew nodded. He picked up his legal pad and stood, straightening his jacket with the automatic habit of someone who dressed well even when no one was watching.
Then he paused in the doorway, one hand on the frame, and Adriana knew from the quality of the pause that what came next would be a truth she’d rather not hear.
“Adriana.”
She looked up from the screen.
“What.”
“If she has what she seems to have, this isn’t a reputation problem for Burty. It’s a legal one. For him and for anyone associated with his financial structure.” He held her gaze. “That includes us.”
“I’m aware.”
Andrew held her gaze a second longer.
“I know you are. I’m saying it out loud so that neither of us can pretend later that we didn’t discuss it.” He tapped the doorframe once with his index finger, a habit he’d had as long as she’d known him, a punctuation mark at the end of conversations he considered important. “Good night, Adriana.”
“Good night.”
He left. His footsteps faded down the carpet with the comfortable silence of a man who had delivered his closing argument and saw no need for rebuttal and did not need to linger for it to land.
Adriana listened to them recede down the hallway until the silence of the office closed back around her.
The building’s air conditioning cycled on with a low hum, and the ice in the glass on Andrew’s side of the desk settled with a small crack.
Adriana turned to the window again. The city spread below, indifferent, the sprawl of lights that she had spent twenty years learning to navigate.
She had built this firm from a shared office in Culver City with a borrowed desk and a client list she could write on a napkin.
Lovett & Associates was her architecture.
Every client, every case, every settlement had been a decision she’d made with her eyes open, and she did not regret the building.
But the building rested on foundations she had not examined as closely as she should have.
Burty Howarth had been her client for nine years.
In that time, she had protected him from lawsuits, secured settlements that made inconvenient accusations disappear, and constructed legal frameworks that ensured his business operations remained opaque to anyone who might ask uncomfortable questions.
She had never asked those questions herself.
She had considered this professionalism.
The same professionalism that had built a firm valued in the tens of millions, that had secured her a reputation as the most effective entertainment lawyer on the West Coast, that had insulated her from the vulnerability that had nearly destroyed her fifteen years ago when someone she loved had used every weakness she’d ever shared as ammunition.
Professionalism was not a flaw. It was a strategy, and it had worked.
But standing in the ballroom of the Monarch Hotel tonight, Sienna Ramirez had looked at her with the clear-eyed certainty of a witness who could not be impeached.
And the worst part was that Sienna had not looked cruel when she asked her questions.
She had looked like someone who wanted the answers for their own sake, not as leverage.
That was more unsettling than cruelty. Cruelty Adriana could handle. Sincerity was another matter entirely.
Adriana opened her laptop again and began drafting a memo to the firm’s risk assessment team.
The words came with the fluency that twenty years of legal practice had installed in her: clean, direct, leaving no room for interpretation or sentiment.
She outlined the potential exposure, the recommended containment strategy, and the immediate action items.
The filmmaker would be stopped. The investigation would be contained. Burty’s business, and therefore the firm’s business, would continue under the protections Adriana had spent a decade constructing.
She had done this before. Not with filmmakers, but with journalists, regulators, and the occasional ambitious prosecutor.
The mechanism was always the same: identify the threat, quantify the exposure, apply sufficient legal and institutional pressure to make the cost of pursuing the story exceed its value.
It worked because most people, when confronted with the full weight of a firm like Lovett & Associates, chose pragmatism over principle.
Sienna Ramirez had not looked pragmatic. She had looked like someone who had already weighed the costs and decided they were irrelevant.
That was the plan, though. It was clean, logical, and strategically sound.
Andrew had agreed. But the look he’d given her on his way out of the office said what she wasn’t ready to examine—he agreed with the strategy, but not with what the strategy required them to ignore.
Adriana typed for another hour. The city dimmed below her. The orchid on the credenza stood in its clean ceramic pot, white and still and requiring nothing from anyone.
When she finally closed the laptop, the office was silent and the hallway beyond her door was dark. Andrew had gone home. The building’s ventilation hummed with the low, constant hum of a system designed to keep running whether anyone was present or not.
She picked up the clutch from the desk, turned off the lamp, and stood for a moment in the darkness with the city’s reflected light on her face.
Sienna Ramirez.
The name sat in her thoughts with an uncomfortable weight.
Not the filmmaker’s accusations, which were manageable, even if they were better sourced than she’d expected.
What sat wrong was how Sienna had refused to flinch.
Adriana had spent twenty years in rooms with people who bluffed for a living, and she knew the difference between someone performing courage and someone who’d simply run out of reasons to be afraid.
You could negotiate with greed. You could settle ambition out of court. You couldn’t do a damn thing with someone who believed what she was saying.
Adriana had spent her career learning to protect things. Her firm. Her clients. Her reputation. The fortified life she had built in the ruins of the last time she’d trusted someone enough to be unguarded.
She did not need a twenty-nine-year-old filmmaker with clear eyes and conviction making her question the foundations.
She locked her office and walked to the elevator alone.