Chapter III #2
“Because I saw the email chain. Three of the people CC’d are lawyers at Lovett and Associates.
And the language wasn’t subtle. They’re going to try to discredit your sourcing, challenge your access to confidential materials, and pressure anyone connected to the project to withdraw their cooperation. ”
The fluorescent light above the editing station hummed. Sienna pressed her free hand flat against the desk and felt the cool surface under her palm, grounding herself against the surge of adrenaline that was making her heartbeat loud in her ears.
“When did this start?” she asked.
“This week. After the gala. Whatever you said to Ms. Lovett got their attention. They’ve had two strategy meetings since Tuesday, and the tone has shifted from monitoring to active suppression. They’re treating you like a legal threat now, not a nuisance.”
Adriana Lovett’s name on an email chain directing a campaign to destroy Sienna’s project. The same woman who had stood at the gala with sparkling water and that unreadable face and told Sienna to abandon the investigation. She had said it as advice. Now she was executing it as strategy.
Sienna’s jaw locked. Her teeth pressed together until her molars ached.
“Can you get me copies of those emails?” she asked.
“No. I’ve already said more than I should have. Every time someone’s gotten this far, the project died and the filmmaker didn’t know what hit them until it was over.”
The call ended. The source wouldn’t leave a number, wouldn’t agree to a follow-up, wouldn’t confirm anything that could identify them. The line went dead and Sienna sat with her phone in her hand and the recorder still running on the desk, its red light blinking steadily in the dim room.
Dani appeared in the partition doorway. She had been listening. Her face was serious, and the brightness that usually animated her features had been replaced by resolve.
“This is what happened with the Garson documentary,” Dani said. “The one we spent months building before the investors pulled the funding. Same playbook. Pressure the pipeline, isolate the filmmakers, make the project too expensive or too risky to complete.”
“I remember.”
“I know you remember. I’m reminding you because that one worked. They killed the project and nobody ever saw the footage.” Dani crossed her arms. “This is the same machine, Sienna. Different people, same machine.”
Sienna set her phone down. She looked at the timeline on the wall, the web of red and blue circles, the names and dates that represented years of corruption buried by the very institutional power that was now turning its attention toward her.
“I’m not backing down.”
The words came out quiet, final, spoken the way a narrator delivers the thesis line of a documentary. She had made this decision years ago, the first time she’d watched a story die because the people with money decided it was inconvenient.
Dani held her gaze. Her dark eyes were bright and her jaw was set and there was nothing uncertain in her expression.
This was why they worked together, why they had built Parallax from nothing and kept building it even when the funding dried up and the projects got dangerous.
Because when it mattered, neither of them blinked first.
“I know you’re not,” Dani said. “And I’m in. Completely. Whatever this costs.”
“It could cost Parallax. If they pressure our distributors hard enough, we might not have a release platform.”
“Then we’ll build one. Or we’ll leak the footage and let the internet do what it does.
I didn’t start this company to make comfortable documentaries, and neither did you.
” Dani uncrossed her arms and pulled the editing chair over.
“Now show me the Friday interview footage. I think the audio needs cleanup on the second segment.”
They worked until midnight. The takeout went forgotten on the desk and the coffee went cold and bitter beside it and neither of them noticed.
The evidence they were assembling was more comprehensive than anything Sienna had built before, and she had built investigations that put executives in prison.
Financial records from four sources. Testimony from seven individuals across different departments and eras of Burty Howarth’s empire.
A pattern of corruption so systemic and so sustained that it had become invisible through sheer familiarity, the industry equivalent of a building nobody noticed because it had always been there.
And woven through all of it, holding the structure together like steel cable through concrete, was Adriana Lovett.
Her name appeared in settlement documents and NDA templates.
Her firm’s letterhead was on the cease-and-desist letters that had silenced three previous attempts to investigate Burty’s business practices.
Her legal frameworks had made the shell companies possible, the payment structures defensible, and the entire operation opaque to anyone who might have wanted to ask questions.
Sienna stared at the wall of evidence and thought about the woman she’d confronted at the gala.
The voice like a closing argument. The way she had assessed Sienna in two seconds and found her wanting.
The stillness that had been so complete it functioned as its own kind of armor.
Not cold, exactly, but sealed. As though every available surface had been inspected for vulnerability and fortified accordingly.
She had been thinking about Adriana Lovett more than the investigation strictly required. The charcoal suit. The perfume at the gala—vetiver and gin botanicals.
She shook her head and returned her attention to the timeline.
Destroying Burty Howarth’s empire would mean destroying Adriana Lovett’s reputation along with it.
The legal framework was too intertwined to separate one from the other.
Every NDA, every settlement, every shell company that Sienna was about to expose had Adriana’s fingerprints on it.
When the story broke, Adriana would not be a bystander. She would be a co-builder.
She filed it away before she had to look at it too closely. Some footage you didn’t review until you were ready for what it showed you.
She turned off the office lights and stood for a moment in the dark with the wall of evidence glowing faintly in the residual light from the street.
Outside, Silver Lake was quiet. The taqueria on the corner had closed, its hand-painted sign dark, and a dog barked twice somewhere down the block and stopped. Dani had left an hour earlier with strict instructions for Sienna to eat and sleep, neither of which Sienna intended to do immediately.
She sat in her car for a moment before starting the engine.
The jasmine air freshener swung gently from the mirror, and the press lanyard from the gala was still on the passenger seat where she’d tossed it three days ago.
She picked it up, ran her thumb across the laminated surface, and dropped it into the glove compartment.
Three days since she’d looked Adriana Lovett in the eye and told her the truth was coming.
Three days since Adriana had looked back at her and not flinched, and Sienna had thought, You know. You know what Burty is, and you’ve been protecting him anyway. The knowledge should have made Adriana smaller in Sienna’s estimation. It didn’t. It made her more complicated, which was worse.
The truth was coming. Sienna was going to make sure of it.
She started the car and drove home through the quiet streets, already composing the next round of interview questions in her head.