The roles Adrian put in front of me kept getting bigger.
A24 prestige picture. A Vogue September cover. Anchor seat on a Sunday-night NBC unscripted. Headline performer at the Vanity Fair Oscar party.
It was like a hand under my back lifting me up through the ceiling.
Every time I went up one floor, someone fell off the building.
The 1st AD who'd made me kneel on a parking-lot apron for a "blocking demonstration" four years ago turned out to have a gambling problem; he tried to jump off the parking structure at Vine and Selma and got stopped by a barista. The actress who'd slapped me across the face in front of a craft-services tent in 2022 had a public breakdown on a podcast and signed herself into a residential facility in Malibu. The new ingenue who'd written a Substack accusing me of "stealing her career path" deleted the post by morning, deleted her IG, and her management stopped returning emails.
I said to Cass, "Doesn't this feel wrong to you."
Cass was quiet for a long time.
She said, "Sloane. This business eats people. The only thing that ever changes is who's the meal. It used to be you. Now it's somebody else. That's the entire mechanism."
I said, "Some of these people shouldn't be dying."
Her head came up.
"Who died."
I didn't answer.
The color left her face one section at a time.
I knew she was afraid.
She was afraid of Adrian.
She was also afraid of losing the version of her life he'd handed her by handing me to her.
Those were the same fear.
That night a number I didn't know came up on my phone. I answered because it was a 213 area code and I was waiting on a courier.
The voice was almost a whisper.
"Ms. Marchetti. Your sister's death was not what they said it was."
I sat down on the edge of my couch.
"Who is this."
"I worked the back bar at the Vesper Club. Five years. Liam Spence called me three days before he died. He said you had the evidence on a drive."
I stood up.
"Where are you."
The man gave me an address in Eagle Rock. He said please come now.
I grabbed my keys and my jacket. I called the elevator.
The doors slid open.
Adrian was in the elevator.
He looked at the keys in my hand.
"Where are you going."
I felt my shoulders lock up. "Friend."
He smiled, just a corner of his mouth, and took my phone out of my hand before I knew I'd let him.
The dial log was still on the screen.
He read the number. His face went still.
"Did I or did I not tell you to stop digging."
I went for the phone.
He held it out of reach and hit redial.
The line picked up. Someone breathing hard.
Adrian said one sentence into my phone.
Adrian took me back to his penthouse off Doheny.
When the door closed behind us I understood, for the first time clearly, that I had never been protected.
I had been kept.
He threw my phone onto the couch.
"You are not leaving this apartment tonight."
I laughed at him. "On what authority."
He took off his overcoat. He folded it once over the back of a chair. He said, evenly: "Because I'm the reason you have a career."
It went through me like a clean knife.
I stared at him.
"So what am I supposed to do. Drop to my knees? Thank you?"
He walked closer.
"Sloane. I didn't force any of this on you."
"You didn't have to force it," I said. "You closed every other road in the city and held one open."
Something moved in his face that I hadn't seen before. Anger.
"What did you want. To go back to being slid a script and a bump on a coffee table? To Liam Spence holding a thumb drive over you? To Hal Brenner's bungalow? To a tertiary part once a year if you were lucky?"
My voice cracked.
"I want the truth."
He went quiet.
I took one step toward him.
"Did my sister die at the Vesper Club."
His face went somewhere very far away.
"Who told you that."
I started to laugh.
He hadn't denied it.
The wire I had been holding tight in my chest for five years gave out and snapped.
I grabbed the rocks glass off the bar and threw it at him.
It hit the wall behind him and broke. Glass on the parquet at his feet.
"Adrian. I came near you to find out about my sister. That is the only reason I came near you."
He stood very still.
After a long time he said, low, "I know."
I felt my own face freeze.
He bent down and picked up a piece of the broken glass. The edge cut his thumb. A drop of his blood went onto the floor and he didn't seem to notice.
"From the night you walked into Hal Brenner's bungalow with your hair still wet. I knew."
He straightened up.
"Sloane. You thought you were the hunter."
He looked at me and his eyes were the coldest thing I have ever seen in another human being.
I thought he'd torch it the next morning. Say it out loud, end the pretense, lock me in or let me go.
He drove me to set instead.
The Bentley pulled up to the gate of the Culver City lot and he leaned across the console and tucked the loose end of my scarf into the collar of my jacket like nothing in the world was wrong.
"Press junket at three. Don't say anything off-message."
I turned my head away.
His fingers brushed empty air. He didn't react.
"Last night," he said, "I can write off as you being upset."
I said, "I'm not stopping."
He looked at me. "Then the people around you start getting hurt."
My head jerked back to him.
"You touch Cass and I will —"
He smiled, a half-smile.
"See? You already know I would."
My legs were not entirely under me when I climbed out of the car.
Hair-and-makeup was its own trailer at this budget level. I opened the door and Rhi Vance was sitting in my chair.
She'd lost fifteen pounds. Her face was the wrong color of pale. There was a black leg brace under the hem of her sweatpants from her ankle to the middle of her thigh.
When she saw me, her eyes filled up with hate.
"I hope you're happy, Marchetti."
I sent the hair stylist out and closed the door.
Rhi reached into her tote and pulled out a small digital recorder. The kind reporters used before phones.
"I know you're digging into the Hallorans."
I didn't take it.
She set her jaw. "I'm not trying to hurt you. Adrian and that family hurt me too."
She told me she had not, in fact, fallen down those stairs on Stage 14. Someone had been on the landing above her. She'd woken up at Cedars-Sinai and her manager had been sitting in the chair next to the bed and her manager had told her that if she ever said any other version of the story out loud, the Vance family would be back to being a name on the side of an old soundstage and nothing else.
"They cut my parents a check," Rhi said. "And they gave them one sentence to take home."
She looked at me.
"Touch Sloane Marchetti again and the Vances stop working."
My throat closed up.
She shoved the recorder into my palm.
"On there is a voicemail Wes Trevathan left my manager. In his own voice."
I opened my mouth.
The trailer door opened.
Wes Trevathan was on the step, hands folded in front of him like a maître d', the kind of polite smile he must have practiced in front of a federal jury for ten years.
"Ms. Marchetti. Adrian asked me to walk you to your trailer."
His eyes went to my palm.
Wes Trevathan took the recorder.
Rhi Vance was off the picture by the end of the day. The publicist's statement said her prior injury had flared up and she needed to recover.
That night Adrian took me to a private dinner on the eighteenth floor of the Vesper Club building above Sunset.
The whole top floor.
Directors. A senator's chief of staff. The president of a luxury house. Two studio heads. A Vogue editor. The woman who programs the Globes telecast.
Adrian kept his hand on the small of my back and walked me from one cluster to the next.
Every one of them smiled at me like a long-lost niece.
I knew they weren't smiling at me. They were smiling at the space at his elbow.
Halfway through the evening I went out onto the terrace to breathe.
A voice came up behind me. An older voice. The kind of voice that owns a room without raising itself.
"You must be Mara's little sister."
I turned around.
Sumner Halloran was standing in the shadow off the terrace doors with a tumbler of something amber. White hair, no jacket, a watch on his left wrist that costs more than a house in Lancaster.
I had not been five feet from him in five years.
I tightened my hand around my champagne flute.
He looked me up and down and his mouth softened.
"You don't look much like her. She was quieter. She had better manners."
The blood went up the back of my neck.
"You knew her."
He took one slow step into the light.
"She took something that wasn't hers."
I held his gaze. "She took what."
He didn't answer me. He looked back through the terrace doors to where Adrian was being talked at by the Vogue editor.
"Adrian's broken a lot of rules trying to keep you in one piece, the last few months."
I did not know what he meant by keep.
He leaned in. His breath smelled like a small expensive cigar.
"You think it was Adrian getting all those people out of your way, sweetheart."
I froze.
His smile got wider.
"The person who actually needs your mouth shut. That has never been him."
Behind us the room went loud all at once. Glass breaking. A woman's gasp.
Cass came running across the dining room with her phone in her hand and her makeup ruined.
"Sloane. We have a problem."
She held the phone in front of me.
The push at the top of the screen, all three trades, every entertainment platform at once:
The clip had been cut filthy.
The footage of Mara stumbling out the loading-dock door had been topped and tailed, leaving only the seconds where her hair was in her face and her dress strap was off her shoulder. They had blurred her face just enough that the headline had to identify her for you.
The replies were a sewer.
Whole family's trash apparently.
Wonder if Sloane's career got built the same way.
Makes sense why Halloran's pushing her. Knows the type.
I stared at the screen with my fingernails biting half-moons into my palm.
Adrian came across the terrace in four long strides and took the phone out of my hand.
"Don't read it."
I slapped him.
The whole terrace went quiet.
He didn't move. His face turned to the side and stayed.
I said, low, "You told me you destroyed Liam Spence's drive."
He looked at me and for the first time in nine months I saw something in his eyes I'd never seen there.
He was scared.
"That wasn't me."
"Only Liam had a copy. Liam is dead. The drive ended up in your office."
He grabbed my wrist. "Sloane. Listen to me."
I started laughing.
"You Hallorans are something. One of you plays the good cop. One of you plays the bad cop. One of you murdered my sister. One of you puts a Globe ballot in my hand."
Behind us, Sumner Halloran started slow-clapping with the rocks glass still in one hand.
"Adrian. I always said. A stray that keeps biting the hand. You clip its wing."
Adrian whipped around. "Shut up."
Sumner's face went hard.
"For her you have been running interference on me for months. You moved a witness. You took my people off the board. And now you want to make this a family conversation in front of the talent."
I couldn't breathe.
Adrian stepped between me and his father.
"Whatever happened five years ago. It ends here."
Sumner laughed without sound.
"It ended a long time ago, son."
The lights went out.
Every fixture on the eighteenth floor at once. Pitch dark. The skyline of Los Angeles through the floor-to-ceiling windows the only light left.
A hand closed over my mouth from behind.
The last thing I heard before I went under was Adrian losing his composure completely.