I woke up in a bedroom I had never seen.
The window had a security shutter rolled down on the outside of it. The bedroom door was shut and there was someone in a dark suit standing on the other side of it; I could hear his weight shift on the runner. My phone was gone. My handbag was gone. On the nightstand a bottle of water with the seal still on it and two Advil in a paper cup.
When the door opened I thought it would be Sumner's people.
It was Adrian.
His shirt was wrinkled. There was a fresh white bandage across the back of his right hand. The whites of his eyes were veined red.
I backed up against the headboard.
He stopped in the doorway.
"This place is safe."
I laughed at him. "Safe how. There's no signal here."
He was quiet for a second.
"My father's people are looking for you in the city."
"And what are you, Adrian." I stared at him. "Are you keeping me alive in this room. Or are you keeping me in this room."
He looked back at me.
"Both."
The word ran cold all the way down my spine.
He came over to the dresser and put a manila envelope on top of it.
"Your sister did not fall down the stairs. She photographed Sumner's ledger on her phone the week before. The ledger is the laundering of LP money through our distribution shell in the Caymans and the trafficking of women through what the club calls 'hospitality coordination.' She was being run down inside the building when she got out the back door."
I crossed the room and tore the envelope open.
Inside: an old printout of the phone photos, the corner of a ledger page in low resolution but legible. A list of names typed on a second sheet. Liam Spence. The night manager of the Vesper Club. Two investors whose names I knew from the trades. A senator's chief of staff. Wes Trevathan.
The last page on the list was Sumner Halloran.
My hands were shaking.
"How long have you known."
"Too late," Adrian said. His voice came out rough. "I found your sister after. She was already gone."
I looked up at him.
"Then why didn't you go to the police."
A muscle in his jaw worked.
"Three people went to the LAPD with Mara's name. Three people are dead."
The room went very quiet.
He kept talking.
"I took over the agency to get evidence on Sumner. I pulled you up because you were already on his board the day you got off the plane from JFK. Every man who's stopped breathing in the last nine months was a man who was about to hurt you. Some of those orders were mine. Some of them weren't."
I wanted to believe him.
I couldn't.
Adrian kept me at the Holmby Hills house for seven days.
Day one I broke a water glass against the bedroom wall.
Day two I didn't eat.
Day three a video call came through on a flatscreen mounted on the bedroom wall.
Cass's face filled it. Her eyes were swollen. There was a brace around her neck and the wall behind her was Cedars-Sinai mint green.
"Sloane. Honey. Please stop fighting him. He's keeping you alive."
I looked at the green wall behind her.
"Cass. What happened to you."
She wiped under her eye. "Little fender bender on Beverly. I'm fine."
The more she said fine the more I knew.
The call cut.
Adrian came in. I threw the remote at his head.
"You used Cass against me."
He didn't duck. The remote hit him in the shoulder and clattered onto the carpet.
"That wasn't me. That was Sumner."
"What's the difference."
The color went out of his face for a beat.
I crossed the room and stopped six inches from him. I made him hear every word.
"Adrian Halloran. You don't love me. You love a bird you saved. You want it pretty. You want it grateful. You want it quiet. You want it to stay in the cage you built for it. That's all this ever was."
His throat worked.
"That isn't true."
"Then let me go."
He looked at me for a long, long time.
"Not yet."
I smiled.
Everything warm in me died in those two words.
On the seventh night he came in carrying a long garment bag.
He unzipped it on the bed. Ivory silk. A bias-cut column. Schiaparelli, fresh from atelier, my exact measurements, no fitting required because Halloran Creative had had my measurements on file from day one.
"Tomorrow. The Globes. You have to be in the front row."
I looked at the gown.
"Sumner makes a move."
He didn't deny it.
"I get him to make the move where every camera in America can see him."
I said, "I'm the bait."
He closed his fist around the garment bag's handle.
"I'll keep you alive."
I lifted the dress out of the bag.
The Globes were live on NBC.
The carpet at the Beverly Hilton was the longest walk of my life. The bullet-scroll on the entertainment-news live feeds was still feasting on the recut Vesper Club footage. Brands had gone quiet. My fans were trying to control comments and getting buried.
A red-carpet host pushed a mic in my face.
"Sloane, there's been so much around you the last seventy-two hours. Anything you want to say tonight?"
I looked into the camera and smiled.
"Tonight is just about the work."
Backstage, Adrian was standing in the shadow of one of the back-of-house pipe-and-drape walls.
His eyes did not leave me.
I sat down at my table.
Rhi Vance sat down at the empty seat next to me.
She was in a black Valentino with a slit that hid the leg brace pretty well. Her face was still wrong. She crossed her ankles under the chair like a debutante.
I stared at her.
She set her clutch on her lap. Her lips did not move.
She said, almost into the table linen, "The recorder wasn't the only copy."
My heart kicked once against my ribs.
"Cass had me bring it."
I turned my face to look at her.
Her eyes had filled. She was smiling anyway.
"Sloane Marchetti. I hate you. But I hate being treated like a dog more than I hate you."
The lights came down.
The Best Actress – Drama category started.
My face hit the giant screen behind the podium.
The presenter slid a black envelope open.
"And the Golden Globe goes to — Sloane Marchetti."
The room came up around me in applause.
I stood.
From the backstage shadow, Adrian was watching me, and there was something in his face I had never seen there before.
I climbed the steps to the stage.
The trophy went into my hand. Cold in the palm. Heavier than you'd think.
The presenter handed me the microphone.
I was supposed to thank my director. My cast. My agent. My team at Halloran Creative. The Hollywood Foreign Press.
Instead I closed my hand around the mic. I looked into the lens of the floor camera.
"Before I say anything else tonight. I'd like the broadcast booth to play an audio file I've sent over."
The whole room went silent at once.
The big screen behind me went black for one second.
Then Sumner Halloran's voice came through every speaker in the Beverly Hilton.
"Marchetti girl took the book. She is not leaving this building."
Then the Vesper Club night manager, voice shaking:
"Sir. What about the sister?"
A pause.
Sumner, half-laughing:
"Leave her. She's a little thing. We hold the sister over her if she grows up disobedient."
The ballroom exploded.
People were standing. People had their phones up. The live feed on the right wing of the stage showed Twitter scrolling so fast you couldn't read the words.
Security started moving toward the booth.
Sumner Halloran came to his feet at table 14, face going gray.
Adrian came at me from the wings at a dead sprint.
I thought he was going to stop me.
He went past me. He grabbed the headset off a stage manager and spoke into it without slowing.
"Lock every exit on this floor. Nobody with Sumner Halloran's name gets near her."
I stood very still on the stage.
The next file started playing.
Wes Trevathan, on a clean line:
"Adrian. Spence is handled. We didn't find the drive."
Then Adrian, much further away from the mic:
"Who in God's name told you to touch him."
Wes:
"Mr. Halloran's instruction."
Adrian:
"Move the bartender out of LA. Put him somewhere. Sloane Marchetti is on me to manage."
The ballroom went the kind of quiet that happens once in a career.
Standing on that stage with a Golden Globe in my hand, I finally understood what I had been inside.
Some of the people who had stopped breathing in the last nine months. Adrian had killed. Some, Sumner had killed. Some, Adrian had hidden so Sumner couldn't.
He had lied to me. He had locked me in a room. He had taken my phone away.
He had also, in his own broken way, stood between me and a bullet for nine months.
None of which gets him out of the room he's in tonight.
I lifted the trophy in my right hand.
I leaned into the microphone.
"My sister, Mara Marchetti, was not a hostess. She did not fall down a flight of loading-dock stairs because she was drunk. She was murdered for what she saw."
I looked down into the ballroom at Sumner Halloran.
Sumner Halloran tried to walk out the side door of the ballroom.
The people on the door weren't Beverly Hilton security.
They were LAPD.
The detective in front had a badge clipped to the lapel of her blazer. Late fifties. Black hair pulled back. I knew her face the second I saw it.
Five years ago she had taken my walk-in report on Mara at the West LA station. Inside ninety days she had been transferred to a traffic desk in Lancaster.
She walked the length of the ballroom to Sumner's table.
"Sumner Halloran. You are under arrest for conspiracy to commit murder, racketeering, and trafficking. You have the right —"
Sumner cut his eyes to Adrian.
"You went to outsiders to take down your own father."
Adrian was at the foot of the stage. He didn't move toward the table.
"You're not my father."
Sumner started laughing. The laugh got uglier.
"You think you walk out of this room clean. The things you did for that girl. Does she know."
I turned my head toward Adrian.
He did not look away.
They closed cuffs around Sumner Halloran's wrists. As they led him through the room he turned his head to find me.
"Sloane. You think he held you up to save you. The first time he saw you was not in Hal Brenner's bungalow."
My heart dropped a floor.
Adrian's face went the wrong color.
The NBC broadcast cut to commercial.
In the chaos backstage Adrian caught my wrist.
"Let me get you out of here."
I twisted out of his grip.
"What did he mean."
Adrian didn't speak.
I stepped into him until I was inches from his face.
"Adrian Halloran. This is your last chance."
His throat worked.
"Five years ago. The back alley behind the Vesper Club. I saw you."
My head went hollow.
He kept going.
"You were holding your sister. You were waving a car down in the rain. You were asking the people in the car to help."
My fingers went so cold I couldn't feel them.
"That was you."
He closed his eyes for a second.