Chapter 11
SIENNA
The whistleblower’s name was Marcus Reed, and he called on a Thursday afternoon while Sienna was elbow-deep in financial timeline reconciliation in the Silver Lake office.
Sienna sat up straight. Her hand tightened on the phone. Dani, who was across the room editing footage, looked up at the shift in Sienna’s posture and set down her headphones.
“On the record,” Sienna repeated. “Mr. Reed, can I ask why now?”
“Because I’ve spent two years trying to forget what I saw in that company.
” He stopped. And then, steadier, “I can’t.
Forgetting isn’t working.” His voice held as he continued, the words coming in pieces, conviction carrying even when his voice didn’t quite.
“I have documentation. Internal records. Email chains, authorization signatures. I can testify to the payment structures, the shell company routing.” A pause, longer than the others.
“The systematic manipulation of industry awards. On camera, with my name attached. I’m prepared for the legal consequences. ”
Sienna pressed her free hand flat against the desk.
The surface was cool under her fingers. Steady.
Real. On the other side of the room, Dani had put her headphones down completely and was sitting motionless, reading the conversation from Sienna’s body language with the fluency of someone who had been doing it for years.
“Mr. Reed, I need you to understand what you’re offering.
” Sienna kept her voice level, professional, even as every nerve in her body was firing.
“On-the-record testimony against Burty Howarth will expose you to legal retaliation from one of the most powerful entertainment law firms in Los Angeles. You’ll face blacklisting.
Potential criminal liability for your own involvement in the payment structures. Your name will be public.”
“I’ve spent six months meeting with my attorney preparing for exactly that.
” Marcus Reed’s voice didn’t waver. “I watched that company destroy people for years, Ms. Ramirez. I processed the payments. I coded the transfers. I was part of the machinery, and the fact that I was following orders doesn’t change what it did.
” A pause. “I’m ready. I have been for a while.
I was just waiting for someone who could do something with what I have. ”
When the call ended, Sienna sat with the phone in her hand, pulse racing, the Silver Lake afternoon light falling through the office windows onto the timeline boards, the source maps, the months of work that had just crystallized into evidence: concrete and unassailable.
Her hands were trembling. Not from fear, from the electricity that ran through her body when a story locked into place, when months of fragments coalesced into a structure that could bear scrutiny.
Dani was already standing. “Tell me.”
“Marcus Reed. Director of financial operations, Howarth Media Group, 2016 to 2022. On the record. With documentation. Email chains, authorization signatures, the full internal paper trail.”
Dani’s eyes went wide. Her mouth opened.
She pressed both hands over it, held them there for three seconds, and then crossed the room in three strides and wrapped Sienna in a hug that was fierce and trembling and held nine months of early mornings, late nights, cold coffee, and the persistent fear that the story might never come together.
“This is it,” Dani said against Sienna’s shoulder, her voice muffled and thick.
“Sienna. An inside witness with documentation, willing to testify on camera with his name attached. This is the piece we’ve been building toward since you walked into that parking structure in Burbank and our first source couldn’t look us in the eye. ”
“I know.”
Dani released her and stepped back, wiping her eyes with the heel of her hand.
“This makes it real. This makes it airtight. Burty’s lawyers can discredit anonymous sources.
They can challenge financial records as stolen or misattributed.
They cannot discredit a director of financial operations who is sitting on camera with his own documentation saying I was there and this is what happened. ”
Sienna’s hands were still gripping Dani’s shoulders. She loosened them.
“I know.” Sienna pulled back from the hug and looked at her partner.
Dani’s eyes were bright, her jaw set with the fierceness she reserved for moments when the work they did mattered in ways that went beyond ambition.
The sight of her cracked open a dam in Sienna’s chest that she had been holding together through sheer will for months.
She wiped her eyes with the heel of her hand. “I need to tell Adriana.”
Dani nodded. The nod was smaller than the moment deserved, and the expression that accompanied it was Dani’s “I see you and I know what this means” face, but she said nothing except, “Go. I’ll start prepping the interview protocol.”
Sienna arrived at the conference room at Lovett & Associates at seven-thirty that evening, carrying the momentum of Marcus Reed’s phone call and the adrenaline that came from knowing a story was about to break open.
Adriana was at the conference table, reading glasses on, surrounded by the organized stacks of documents that defined their shared workspace.
She looked up when Sienna walked in, eyes widening a fraction, posture adjusting in the instant it took to read Sienna’s body language and know the situation had changed.
“What happened?”
“I got a whistleblower.” Sienna set her bag down and remained standing.
The energy in her body was too large for sitting.
“Marcus Reed. Director of financial operations at Howarth Media for six years. On the record. With internal documentation. Email chains. Authorization signatures. He can testify to everything.”
Adriana took her reading glasses off. She set them on the table and looked at Sienna with an expression that Sienna had never seen on her face before.
Relief. The kind she couldn’t have faked if she’d wanted to.
“On the record,” Adriana said.
“On the record. With his name. On camera.”
Adriana stood, and the space between them narrowed.
“That changes everything,” Adriana said. Her voice was low, stripped of its usual register, carrying the rawness of someone who was allowing themselves to feel the full impact of good news for the first time in a very long time.
“It does.”
They were standing on the same side of the conference table now.
Sienna couldn’t remember when that had happened, whether she had moved or Adriana had moved or they had both moved toward the same gravitational center without either of them choosing to.
The documents were spread between them. The laptop screen glowed with the timeline they had been building for weeks.
The whiteboard was covered in their joint handwriting.
“Show me what you have,” Adriana said, and leaned toward the laptop.
Sienna leaned in from the other side. The screen was between them. The glow from it lit the underside of Adriana’s jaw, the line of her throat, the angles of her face seen from close enough that Sienna could count the flecks of darker gray in her light eyes.
Their shoulders were not touching. The distance between them was perhaps three inches.
Sienna could feel the warmth of Adriana’s body through the gap, the same warmth she’d been cataloguing for weeks, but tonight it carried a different charge, because contact would have been a decision and this proximity without touch was unchosen by both and neither was willing to break it.
Sienna pulled up the notes from Marcus Reed’s call.
She walked Adriana through the details of his position, his access, and the scope of documentation he was offering.
Her voice held. Her hands did not, and the tremor had nothing to do with the case and everything to do with the warmth radiating from the woman standing three inches away.
“His attorney has cleared him for testimony,” Sienna said. “He’s prepared for retaliation. He’s prepared for the legal exposure. He said forgetting wasn’t working.”
“Forgetting never works.” Adriana’s voice was quiet. Close. The words carried the resonance of someone who was speaking from experience about wounds larger than Burty Howarth’s financial crimes. “It just postpones the reckoning.”
Sienna looked up from the screen.
Adriana was looking at her.
They weren’t looking at each other about the case anymore.
Sienna held the gaze. Her heart was loud in her ears. Her breathing had gone shallow. The conference room was quiet, no music, no traffic, just the hum of the building’s systems and the sound of two women standing very close together and not moving.
The eye contact lasted five seconds. Ten.
Adriana’s lips parted. Not to speak. A microsecond of honesty breaking through the surface of her control. Her eyes were wide and bright and, for the first time since Sienna had known her, entirely unguarded.
Sienna’s gaze dropped to Adriana’s mouth and returned to her eyes, and the return trip took exactly long enough for both of them to understand what it meant.
Neither of them looked away.
The moment held. Stretched. Became its own kind of gravity, pulling them toward a threshold that they could feel without naming.
Sienna’s pulse hammered. Adriana’s hand, resting on the conference table, was close enough that their fingers could have touched with the smallest movement, a reach, a tilt, the slightest closing of the distance that separated possible from real.
The building’s elevator chimed somewhere down the hallway. A door opened and closed. The mundane sound broke the moment without ending it. The eye contact held for another two seconds, and those two seconds contained everything that the previous weeks had been building toward.
Then Adriana took an audible breath and looked away first, but not before Sienna saw what looking away had cost her.