Chapter 24 #3
The parking garage is silent. Our footsteps echo against concrete.
Elias unlocks the car and opens the passenger door.
I slide into the seat, and he closes it gently behind me before circling around to the driver's side. Then he’s in the driver’s seat with the engine already running.
He doesn’t pull out immediately. Just sits for a moment, both hands on the wheel, his jaw working.
Then he reaches for his phone, dials a number, and puts the call on speaker.
Adrian answers on the second ring. “Hey. What’s up?”
“Maya’s with me,” Elias says, his voice is colder and sharper than before, carrying the particular edge I've only heard a handful of times. “Production just pulled her from the final days. ‘For her safety.’ Decision’s already made. She’s out.”
Silence on the line. Then: “They did what?”
It's Adrian's voice, but not the relaxed version of him from this morning. Something raw sits beneath every word, threaded with genuine fury.
“James Chen delivered it. Production consensus. They’ve redistributed her responsibilities. She’s done.”
“That’s bullshit.” Bash’s voice now, joining the call.
I didn’t hear him pick up. He must have been with Adrian.
His tone is different too—not the teasing tone I’m used to, but something colder.
“Absolute bullshit. She’s been running that set better than anyone for months.
This is about her designation, not her performance. ”
“I know,” Elias says.
“Where are you?” Adrian asks, concern threading through the anger in his voice. We’re coming to you. Right now.”
“No.” The word comes out before I can stop it. My voice sounds strange to my own ears—thin, shaky, nothing like the professional composure I managed in James’s office. “Please don’t. I can’t—I can’t handle becoming the omega causing problems on set. I can’t be the reason there’s drama. Please.”
Silence on the line. I can hear both of them breathing.
I can hear the struggle in it—Adrian wanting to act, Bash wanting to comfort me, both of them fighting the instinct to fix this immediately because fixing it would mean drawing more attention to the very thing I’m begging them not to highlight.
“She’s right,” Elias says. “Confrontation now makes it worse for her. Not better.”
Another pause. Longer this time.
“Where are you, then?” Bash asks. His voice has softened. The anger is still there, but there’s a softer emotion beneath it now. “Just tell us where you are. We’ll come. No scene. I promise.”
I close my eyes. The weight of the day presses down from all sides—the hypervisibility, the distance, the meeting in James’s office, and the hollow feeling of being told the career I love is conditional on a body I never asked for.
And beneath all of it—the certainty of where I want to be.
“Can I come to your house?” I ask quietly.
There is a brief, surprised silence on the line. Then:
“Yes!” Adrian’s voice. “Yes. Of course. Whenever you’re ready. However you need to get here.”
“We’ll meet you there,” Bash says. His tone has shifted completely to the particular softness he reserves for moments when teasing isn’t the right tool. “We’ll be there soon as possible.”
Something in my chest softens.
There’s a strange comfort in it, in being chosen and choosing back without either of us having to prove anything first.
“Promise me you won’t confront anyone,” I say. “Promise. For me.”
A pause. I can hear Adrian struggling with it. Can picture the set of his jaw, the tension in his shoulders when he’s holding himself back from something he believes deeply is wrong.
“I promise,” he says finally. The words cost him. I can hear it.
“I promise,” Bash echoes. It may be easier for him, maybe. Or maybe he just trusts Elias to handle the practicalities.
“We’ll see you soon,” Elias says. Then he ends the call, sets the phone in the cupholder, and turns to look at me.
His expression has softened. The cold anger is still there, banked beneath the surface, but his eyes are warm. Focused entirely on my face in a way that makes the hollow feeling in my chest ease slightly.
“Are you okay with me driving?” he asks.
I nod.
He puts the car in reverse and pulls out of the parking space. The garage slides away behind us, concrete giving way to afternoon light, the studio receding in the rearview mirror until it’s just a building among buildings, getting smaller with each passing block.
The final days of production. The routine I’ve built. The certainty that work was the one place nobody saw anything except my competence.
Maya-the-production-coordinator. Steady. Reliable. Safe inside the role she worked so hard to earn.
It’s supposedly not gone. James said I’d be welcomed back for future productions. That the door is open.
But something fundamental has shifted. The career I love now has conditions it didn’t have two weeks ago, and the weight of that conditional acceptance sits cold in my stomach as the city passes outside the window.
Elias drives, letting the silence settle between us. He doesn’t try to fill it with platitudes or empty reassurances. Instead, he keeps one hand on the wheel and the other resting on the center console, close enough that I could reach for it if I wanted to.
I don’t. Not yet.
“This production doesn’t define your future,” he says after a while. His voice is quiet. “None of this changes your talent. Your career isn’t over because one director made a call he thought was protective.”
I nod. Don’t trust myself to speak.
“You’re good at what you do. That doesn’t change because your body is changing. Anyone who can’t see that isn’t worth working for anyway.”
The simplicity of the statement cuts through the noise in my head. It’s not a grand reassurance or a dramatic promise, just a fact delivered in Elias’s particular way: clean, precise, and without wasted words.
I turn toward the window and watch the city slide past—intersections, storefronts, the landscape of a place I’ve lived in long enough to stop noticing.
The grief is still there. The hurt is still there.
But beneath it, another realization takes shape.
When everything fell apart, I didn't ask Elias to take me home.
I asked to go to them.
Not my apartment. Not Nadia’s. Not anywhere neutral.
Their house.
I wanted to be where they were. With them. Surrounded by amber and cedar and bergamot and stone, the familiar combination of scents that has become, against every rational argument I’ve made to myself, the place I feel safest.