Page 5 of Breaking the Ice Queen
“Andrew.”
He looked up from his own screen. He had found the same articles; his expression confirmed it.
“She doesn’t lose.”
“No.” Andrew’s voice was careful, the tone he used when he was about to deliver news she wouldn’t enjoy. “She doesn’t lose, and the people she investigates don’t recover. Every one of these ended careers. Not temporarily. Permanently. And the legal teams that tried to fight her ended up looking complicit in what they were defending.”
The implication was clear; any case built against Burty would name Lovett & Associates as co-respondents. Adriana catalogued the exposure the way she would for a client brief. She would assess it later when she had the space to think without Andrew watching.
She scrolled through Sienna’s press coverage. Minimal interviews, few photographs, an almost stubborn resistance to personal branding that most young filmmakers chased. No social media presence worth mentioning. No vanity projects. Every piece of work pointed in the same direction—toward a person who was interested in one thing and had organized her entire life around doing it well.
One profile existed in a digital journalism outlet from two years ago. The interviewer had tried repeatedly to draw Sienna into personal territory, her background, her motivations, her romantic life, and Sienna had redirected every question back to the work with a patience that must have been maddening. The pull quote was, “I’m not interested in being the story. I’m interested in the story other people are trying to bury.”
Underneath it was a photograph. Sienna at a press event, dark curls loose around her face, wearing a jacket that looked like the same one she’d been wearing tonight. Her brown eyes were direct, looking past the camera at a point the composition hadn’t been arranged to showcase. Her expression was calm, focused, and completely unimpressed by the lens pointed at her.
Adriana studied the image. The angle of Sienna’s jaw. Her posture, relaxed but alert, weight balanced, as though she was ready to move in any direction. The faint suggestion of a smile that never fully formed, more a readiness, an appetite for whatever came next.
She closed the tab with a decisive click.
“She’s further along than Burty thinks,” Adriana said. She leaned back in her chair and pressed her fingers to the bridge of her nose. The headache that had been building since the gala was lodging behind her eyes with the focused pressure of a migraine that intended to stay. “He told me three weeks ago that the rumors were gossip from disgruntled freelancers. Shell companies and payment trails are not gossip.”
“No, they’re not.”
Andrew wrote two quick lines on his legal pad, then set the pen down.
“Which means she has documents. Financial documents. The kind that require either a leak inside Burty’s operation or a source close enough to the money to know where it goes. And she’s been building this for nine months without anyone in his orbit flagging it loudly enough for us to hear.” Adriana lowered her hand from her face. “Nine months, Andrew. That’s a long time to build a case and not make a single mistake big enough for us to notice.”
“Which tells you something about how good she is.”
“Yes. It does.”
Andrew set his phone down on the desk. The light from the screen caught the sharp angles of his face, and for a moment he looked as tired as Adriana was trying not to look. Neither of them mentioned it.
“I need to know how far along she is,” Adriana said. “Who her sources are. What she’s planning to publish, and when.”
“I can pull the public filings for Parallax Films. Production schedules, distribution agreements, anything she’s filed with the guilds. If she’s close to release, there’ll be a paper trail.”
“Do it tonight. I want the filing history, the guild registrations, and anything connected to the third documentary on my desk by morning.”
Andrew nodded. He picked up his legal pad and stood, straightening his jacket with the automatic habit of someone who dressed well even when no one was watching. Then he paused in the doorway, one hand on the frame, and Adriana knew from the quality of the pause that what came next would be a truth she’d rather not hear.
“Adriana.”
She looked up from the screen.
“What.”
“If she has what she seems to have, this isn’t a reputation problem for Burty. It’s a legal one. For him and for anyone associated with his financial structure.” He held her gaze. “That includes us.”
“I’m aware.”
Andrew held her gaze a second longer.
“I know you are. I’m saying it out loud so that neither of us can pretend later that we didn’t discuss it.” He tapped the doorframe once with his index finger, a habit he’d had as long as she’d known him, a punctuation mark at the end of conversations he considered important. “Good night, Adriana.”
“Good night.”
He left. His footsteps faded down the carpet with the comfortable silence of a man who had delivered his closing argument and saw no need for rebuttal and did not need to linger for it to land. Adriana listened to them recede down the hallway until the silence of the office closed back around her. The building’s air conditioning cycled on with a low hum, and the ice in the glass on Andrew’s side of the desk settled with a small crack.
