Chapter 8
ADRIANA
The restaurant was called Cielo, and it occupied the rooftop of a boutique hotel in Los Feliz that Adriana had chosen for three specific reasons: it was quiet, it was private, and it was nowhere near Hollywood.
She arrived twenty minutes early because she always arrived early and because tonight the early arrival served a secondary purpose—it gave her time to sit alone with a glass of water and consider whether what she was about to do was strategy or surrender.
Andrew had advised against the meeting. He had said so in the careful way that indicated he disagreed with the decision but respected her right to make it, which was Andrew’s version of shouting.
“You’re about to hand proprietary client intelligence to an active adversary in a public restaurant,” he had said, standing in her office doorway with his jacket on and his briefcase in his hand, ready to leave for the evening but unwilling to go before he’d said his piece.
“If Burty finds out, the malpractice suit alone could close the firm.”
“If Burty finds out through the documentary, the malpractice suit is the least of our problems.”
“That’s not reassuring.”
Adriana closed the folder on her desk and aligned it with the edge.
“It wasn’t meant to be.”
Andrew had given her a long look, the one that communicated an entire conversation in the space of a few seconds, and then he had said, quietly, “Be careful with her,” and walked out.
Adriana had spent the drive to Los Feliz trying to determine whether the warning referred to Sienna’s capacity to damage the firm, or to her.
Now she sat at a corner table on the rooftop, the towers of downtown glowed against a sky the city’s own light kept from going fully dark, the boulevards below her tracing their familiar grid in streams of red and white, and watched the elevator doors across the dining room.
The evening air was warm and carried the scent of night jasmine from the planters that lined the terrace railing.
The other tables were occupied by couples and small groups speaking in the low, intimate tones of people who had chosen this place for exactly that reason, to allow that kind of conversation.
Adriana had ordered sparkling water, cold and faintly mineral on her tongue when she’d first sipped it.
She had not looked at the menu. She had arranged her hands on the white tablecloth as though preparing for a deposition, which was, in a sense, what this was.
Except depositions had rules, transcripts, and the comforting structure of legal procedure.
This meeting had none of those things. This meeting had a woman Adriana couldn’t stop thinking about, a table between them, and a proposition that would dismantle nine years of professional architecture if it went wrong.
Her phone buzzed. Andrew. Text me when it’s done. Doesn’t matter how late.
She turned the phone face-down and returned her attention to the elevator doors.
Eight o’clock came and went. At 8:02, Adriana caught herself checking her watch and forced her hand back to the tablecloth. She was not a woman who checked her watch.
The elevator doors opened at 8:03.
Sienna Ramirez walked onto the rooftop terrace, and every careful arrangement Adriana had made for this evening took a direct hit.
She was wearing a dark shirt, sleeves rolled to the elbows, and the fitted jacket she apparently owned only one of.
Her dark curls were loose tonight instead of gathered back, falling around her face with the careless grace of someone who genuinely didn’t care about her hair and therefore looked better than anyone who did.
She scanned the terrace as she scanned every room Adriana had seen her enter: systematically, efficiently, and with an alertness that suggested she was cataloging every exit before she’d fully arrived.
Her brown eyes found Adriana’s across forty feet of rooftop, and the eye contact held.
Adriana’s pulse accelerated. She noted it clinically and did not adjust her expression.
Sienna crossed the terrace. She did not rush. She moved with the same confident, unhurried stride she’d brought to the gala and the Palomar, and when she reached the table, she pulled out the chair across from Adriana and sat down without waiting for an invitation.
“You came alone,” Adriana said.
“You asked me to.”
Adriana’s fingers tightened around her water glass, then released.
“I didn’t ask. I expected you to bring your business partner.”
“Dani wanted to come. She made a detailed case involving words like trap, settlement offer, and career-ending mistake.” The faintest trace of a smile crossed Sienna’s face. “I told her this was a conversation between you and me.”
Her eyes were watchful, assessing, and Adriana recognized the expression from their previous encounters.
The documentary filmmaker’s gaze, measuring everything, giving away nothing.
But the look was new tonight. A watchfulness that was less adversarial and more curious, as though she had arrived genuinely uncertain about what she would find.
“So here I am,” Sienna said. “Between you and me. What do you want?”
A waiter appeared. Sienna ordered water without looking at the menu either. As the waiter retreated, her gaze dropped briefly to where Adriana’s fingers wrapped around her glass, then returned to her face. She hadn’t come to eat. She’d come to listen.
The city hummed below them. Traffic moved in streams of light along the boulevards, and somewhere in the distance, a helicopter crossed the sky with the steady pulse of rotors that was as much a part of the Los Angeles soundscape as the coyotes and the car horns.
Adriana took a breath. The breath was timed the way she timed breaths before opening statements.
She had spent the last forty-eight hours preparing what she was about to say, and the preparation had been necessary not because the argument was complex but because saying it out loud would make it real.
Across the table, Sienna’s forearms rested against the white cloth, the rolled sleeves exposing the fine line of her wrists. Adriana redirected her attention to the downtown skyline and then back to Sienna’s face.
“I want to propose an alliance,” Adriana said.
Sienna’s expression didn’t change. But her eyes sharpened with the alertness of someone who had anticipated several possible openings to this conversation and this one had not been among them.
“An alliance,” Sienna repeated.
She set her water down and laced her fingers together on the table.
“A temporary one. With explicit terms and a specific objective.” Adriana set her glass down and folded her hands on the table, a negotiation posture she had used in a hundred conference rooms, but which felt different here, on this rooftop, with this woman, in a context that was not a negotiation and both of them knew it.
“I have access to Burty Howarth’s internal documentation. Financial structures, corporate entities, payment routing that your investigation has identified from the outside. I can provide the inside view, the evidence that would make your case not just compelling but legally unassailable.”
The rooftop bar’s ambient music shifted to something low and brassy.
Sienna tilted her glass, watching the water catch the light. “And what do you want in return?”
“Your evidence. Your sourcing. The documentary platform that gives the story reach and credibility that a legal filing wouldn’t achieve.
” Adriana met Sienna’s gaze and held it.
“Between us, we have everything necessary to expose Burty Howarth completely. Separately, we each have enough to be dangerous but not enough to be conclusive. Your documentary without my documentation is a compelling story that his lawyers will tie up in court for years. My documentation without your platform is evidence that will disappear into a legal filing that no one outside the profession will ever read.”
Adriana watched Sienna absorb this. Twenty years of reading people across negotiation tables, and Sienna Ramirez gave away exactly what she chose to. Everything else stayed behind that gaze.
Sienna leaned back in her chair, arms loose, thinking visibly. She was comfortable with silence and used it the way Adriana used words.
“At the gala you told me to abandon my investigation,” Sienna said finally.
“At the Palomar you threatened legal action against my sources. Now you’re offering to be one of my sources.
” She tilted her head, and the movement exposed the line of her neck in the warm light, and Adriana’s gaze tracked the movement before she could redirect it.
“I don’t trust you,” Sienna said. The words were direct, spoken without malice, in the voice of someone stating a fact she wished were different.
Adriana let the words land. She pressed her palms flat against the tablecloth.
“I know.”
“You’ve spent nine years protecting the man I’m trying to expose. You have every strategic reason to offer this alliance and every personal reason to sabotage it.” Sienna’s gaze was unflinching. “Why should I believe this isn’t a more sophisticated version of what you’ve been doing all along?”
“Because I’m here.” Adriana’s voice dropped.
Not to a whisper, but to the low, unadorned register she used only when she meant every word.
The careful version of herself she had arranged before Sienna arrived was gone, stripped away by her own honesty, and she could feel its absence like cold air against bare skin.
“I’m sitting in a restaurant that isn’t in Hollywood with a woman I’m supposed to be fighting, offering to hand over documentation that could end my career.
I don’t have a strategic reason for that, Sienna. ”
The first name slipped out. It was the first time she had used it, and the sound of it between them changed the temperature of the table by several degrees.