Page 9 of Breaking the Ice Queen
Sienna stared at the wall of evidence and thought about the woman she’d confronted at the gala. The voice like a closing argument. The way she had assessed Sienna in two seconds and found her wanting. The stillness that had been so complete it functioned as its own kind of armor. Not cold, exactly, but sealed. As though every available surface had been inspected for vulnerability and fortified accordingly.
She had been thinking about Adriana Lovett more than the investigation strictly required. The charcoal suit. The perfume at the gala—vetiver and gin botanicals.
She shook her head and returned her attention to the timeline.
Destroying Burty Howarth’s empire would mean destroying Adriana Lovett’s reputation along with it. The legal framework was too intertwined to separate one from the other. Every NDA, every settlement, every shell company that Sienna was about to expose had Adriana’s fingerprints on it. When the story broke, Adriana would not be a bystander. She would be a co-builder.
She filed it away before she had to look at it too closely. Some footage you didn’t review until you were ready for what it showed you.
She turned off the office lights and stood for a moment in the dark with the wall of evidence glowing faintly in the residual light from the street.
Outside, Silver Lake was quiet. The taqueria on the corner had closed, its hand-painted sign dark, and a dog barked twice somewhere down the block and stopped. Dani had left an hour earlier with strict instructions for Sienna to eat and sleep, neither of which Sienna intended to do immediately.
She sat in her car for a moment before starting the engine. The jasmine air freshener swung gently from the mirror, and the press lanyard from the gala was still on the passenger seat where she’d tossed it three days ago. She picked it up, ran her thumb across the laminated surface, and dropped it into the glove compartment.
Three days since she’d looked Adriana Lovett in the eye and told her the truth was coming.
Three days since Adriana had looked back at her and not flinched, and Sienna had thought,You know. You know what Burty is, and you’ve been protecting him anyway.The knowledge should have made Adriana smaller in Sienna’s estimation. It didn’t. It made her more complicated, which was worse.
The truth was coming. Sienna was going to make sure of it.
She started the car and drove home through the quiet streets, already composing the next round of interview questions in her head.
4
ADRIANA
Burty Howarth’s office was on the fourth floor of a Brentwood building he owned outright, a detail he mentioned within the first five minutes of any meeting held there. The space was designed to project the casual authority of old money: dark wood shelving lined with award statuettes, a leather sectional that could seat eight, and windows overlooking a courtyard garden that was maintained by a team of three and never used by anyone.
Adriana sat in one of the two armchairs positioned across from his desk and waited for him to stop talking. Andrew was in the other armchair, legal pad on his knee, pen resting between his fingers with the still readiness of someone who was prepared to write but hadn’t yet been given anything worth recording.
The office smelled like the cologne Burty had been wearing since the 1990s, woody and expensive, probably discontinued and being custom-reproduced because Burty Howarth did not change things about himself unless forced. The air was thick enough to taste it, the woodiness layered over the chemical sweetness of furniture polish. On the shelves behind his desk, award statuettes were arranged in chronological order, each one polished to a high shine by an assistant whose entire job, as far as Adriana could tell, was to ensure that Burty’s accomplishments gleamed at all times.
He had been talking for eleven minutes. She knew because she had glanced at her watch twice, which was a habit she had trained herself out of in depositions but permitted in meetings where the other person was wasting her time.
“The point,” Burty said, leaning back in his chair with the practiced ease of a man who had spent decades arranging his body into shapes that suggested relaxation, “is that this Ramirez woman is nobody. Independent filmmaker, tiny production company, minimal distribution reach. She’s making noise because noise is how people like her get noticed.”
His voice was warm, confident, laced with a dismissive charm that had kept boardrooms and press conferences in check for thirty years. His silver hair was styled with professional care, and his suit, navy, bespoke, Italian, sat on him with the expensive looseness of clothes that had been tailored to suggest he hadn’t thought about them.
Burty’s smile was wider than the conversation warranted. His gestures were broader than necessary. Every casual lean back in his chair had the rehearsed quality of a man who had practiced relaxation until it became its own kind of effort.
“Burty.” She said his name without inflection, carrying an authority that made people stop and listen even when they didn’t want to. “A documentary filmmaker approached me at the Creative Legacy gala and described your shell company structure in enough detail to suggest she has internal sourcing. This is not noise.”
“You know what I love about documentarians?” Burty said, the warmth in his voice turning fond and slightly condescending, the tone of a man telling a story he has told before and still enjoys. “They’re romantic. They come in with a thesis, a villain, a third act. Then they find footage and they cut it around the story they already decided to tell.” He waved a hand, broad and unhurried. “I’ve had three of these in thirty years. You know what they found? Enough to write a think-piece nobody read. This one’s the same. She’s fishing. When you’ve been in this town as long as I have, you can tell the difference between someone who has the goods and someone who’s hoping you’ll hand them over.”
Adriana smoothed one hand along the arm of the chair. Burty was still performing the ease of a man with nothing to conceal. For a moment that surprised her, her mind pulled toward Sienna Ramirez at the gala: the stillness of her, the absence of performance, how she had looked at Adriana as if she already knew what Adriana was going to say and had decided to wait her out anyway. Then Adriana returned to the room.
“She’s not a journalist. She’s a filmmaker whose last two projects ended careers and put a state senator in prison.” She kept her voice level, each word placed with deliberate care. She had spent the week since the gala studying everything Sienna Ramirez had ever produced, and the picture that emerged was not of a woman who made noise. It was of a woman who built cases with the patience of a forensic accountant and then released them with the timing of someone who understood exactly how to make an industry pay attention.
“A state senator.” Burty’s smile was indulgent, the expression of a man offering a child a simpler explanation. “From Michigan. That’s hardly Hollywood.”
Andrew shifted in the chair beside Adriana. The movement was slight, a readjustment of his weight and a straightening of his left cuff, but Adriana caught it. She had spent nine years learning the vocabulary of Andrew’s small movements, and this one translated roughly as,He knows more than he’s saying, and I know more than I’m saying, and we should leave before one of us says it.
She did not leave. She had not come to Brentwood on a Tuesday afternoon, rearranging two client consultations and a mediation prep session, to leave without getting what she came for.
“Burty.” She uncrossed her legs and leaned forward, a posture she rarely used because it communicated engagement, which was a resource she rationed. “I need you to tell me the truth about the financial structure Sienna Ramirez described. Shell companies, payment routing, awards manipulation.” She held his gaze and let the silence do the work that additional words would have undermined. “I am your lawyer. I cannot protect you from an exposure I don’t understand. If there is exposure, any exposure, any amount, I need to know the shape of it before she publishes it.”
Burty responded to protection the way some people responded to flattery—it reminded him that he was important enough to require it.
