Page 31 of Breaking the Ice Queen
She gripped the steering wheel and thought about Adriana in dim hallway light. About the sound of Adriana’s voice sayinggood nightas though the words contained everything she wasn’t saying. About the instinctive rise of Adriana’s hand as the elevator doors closed, the reach that wasn’t a wave but a reflex, the body acting before the mind could override it.
Adriana had reached for her involuntarily. That was the part Sienna kept coming back to. Not the eye contact, not the proximity, not the silence full of words neither of them said. The reach. The body overriding the mind. Adriana Lovett, who never made an unplanned gesture in her life, reaching for Sienna as the doors closed.
Sienna pulled into her parking spot in Echo Park and sat in the car with the engine off and the night folding around her. In the coming days, they would interview Marcus Reed. The documentary would take its final shape. In the coming weeks, everything would accelerate toward publication and exposure and the dismantling of Burty Howarth’s empire.
And somewhere in the middle of all of it, she and Adriana were going to have to decide what to do about the thing that was building between them. The thing that lived in three inches of space and extended eye contact and the instinctive rise of a hand as elevator doors closed.
Sienna got out of the car and walked up the stairs to her apartment, and the night was warm and the stars were invisible behind the city’s persistent light, and she was not thinking about the case.
12
ADRIANA
The offer to drive Sienna home was practical. That was what Adriana told herself as she reached for her keys at the end of the session. It was eleven o’clock on a Thursday night, the parking structure was three blocks from the office, and Sienna had mentioned offhandedly that her car was in the shop because of a transmission issue that her mechanic was calling “terminal but negotiable.”
“I’ll drive you,” Adriana said, and the words came out before she had fully weighed the implications of being alone in a car with Sienna.
Sienna looked at her. The look lasted two seconds and contained an assessment that Adriana recognized because she was running the same one—the risk of accepting versus the awkwardness of refusing versus the simple, uncomplicated desire to not be apart yet.
“Okay,” Sienna said.
They took the elevator to the parking garage in silence. The building was empty. Their footsteps echoed on the concrete, and the sound was oddly intimate, two sets of shoes in an underground space designed for hundreds. Adriana’s Mercedes was on the second level, black and gleaming and waiting in its designated spot.
Sienna looked at the car and then at Adriana.
“Of course you drive a black Mercedes.”
“What’s wrong with a black Mercedes?”
“Nothing. It’s just very you. I bet it’s clean inside.”
“It’s a car. Cars should be clean.”
“Mine has three takeout bags in the back seat and a press lanyard from 2024 in the glove compartment. Cars should be lived in.”
Adriana unlocked it. “Get in before I change my mind about the ride.”
Sienna got into the passenger seat. The interior was, predictably, immaculate. The dashboard lit up with its quiet array of blue-white displays, and the car moved up the ramp and out into the Los Angeles night.
Neither of them spoke. Three weeks of talking, and they were discovering what the silences had been carrying.
Adriana drove east on Wilshire, then south toward Echo Park.
Sienna in the passenger seat changed the quality of the air. The same shift she created across a conference table, the same alteration of atmosphere, but without the buffer of twelve inches of documents between them, without the work to hide behind, it pressed closer. Sienna sat with her head tilted slightly toward the window, her dark curls loose against the headrest, her profile lit by the passing streetlights, her face becoming a series of photographs: illuminated, shadowed, illuminated, shadowed. Her hands were resting in her lap. Her breathing was steady and slow.
Sienna spoke at a red light on Sunset.
“Can I ask you something?” Her voice was careful, considered, the voice of someone who had been composing this question for some time.
“Yes.”
“Why do you hide behind so many walls?”
The question was direct, simple, and delivered without accusation or pity.
Adriana’s hands tightened on the steering wheel. The leather creaked under her grip.
“That’s a personal question.”
