Fade To Black Read online

  She surprised herself with a smile of her own.

  Because, yes, Sloane could picture that, too.

  Chapter Eight

  Dominic

  Dominic finished yelling then hung up the phone.

  He walked to his bar with a smile. Poured a half-glass of Artemis Tull Diamond into a glass, poured a second for Melinda, then left both whiskeys on the bar until she got there.

  It had been a satisfying call. Dominic didn’t exactly enjoy verbally slapping people around. Doing so frequently would be a bad idea. It could lead to seeking the behavior out. And that would make Dominic a bully instead of the kind of man who stood up for the underdog. But he was excellent at twisting an exchange to his favor and relished any victory he could share with Melinda.

  Dominic headed to the set of chairs by the window overlooking the pool and their sprawling back lawn. He took out his phone, scrolled for a few mindless minutes before deciding there were much better ways to spend the silence, then placed his phone on the end table between the chairs and took in his view instead.

  He was right to abandon the technology. Dominic had only been staring out the window for a few seconds before his brain began bouncing from one connection to the next. So many details to so many plans, finally coalescing after all these years.

  Juke would change the world, then the world would change everything else.

  He looked over just as Melinda drifted into the room.

  She glanced at the bar, saw their drinks waiting, then went to retrieve them.

  After handing one to Dominic, she sat next to him. “Your news is obviously good. Why don’t you go first?”

  “So, opposite of the way we usually do things?” He took a sip.

  She took a long one of her own. “I’d like to hear something positive.” Then followed it with another.

  “The strike is over. Everyone will be back to work on Monday. Carlson will probably cry himself to sleep tonight.”

  “Carlson needs to cry himself to sleep.” Melinda took a third swallow, set her tumbler on the end table, then stood. She wrapped her arms around Dominic’s neck and slithered onto his lap. “Thank you for taking care of that for us.” They kissed on the lips, not long but just enough. “I’m glad that you handled that mess, but we do have another problem.”

  “I gathered.” Dominic glanced at their glasses. “Should we finish our drinks first?”

  “Parvati says Juke development is falling seriously behind.”

  “And …” Because of course that was the start, not the end, of it.

  “And it’s definitely sabotage.”

  “Do we know this, or do we think this?”

  “That is the question.” Melinda sighed, still looking into her husband’s eyes. “And one Parvati and her team have spent an awful lot of time on. Honestly, if we weren’t on the lookout for bullshit from Wentz we could have — would have written this off as part of a difficult development. At least for a while.”

  “You said, ‘definitely sabotage.’ How do we know for sure?”

  “We don’t, really … but then again, of course we do. Day one sabotage on-set? The strike? Hacking our code? Do you really think—”

  “Honey,” Dominic softly said as he set a gentle hand on each of her arms, “of course Wentz is behind this. But what do we absolutely know? Why is production lagging, and how behind are we?”

  Melinda nodded. Then her posture reset along with her voice. “There’s a worm.”

  “What kind of a worm? What is it doing?”

  “Or at least, Parvati thinks it’s a worm. That’s the problem, Dominic. You’re asking what we know, and the answer to that is ‘practically nothing.’ We might have been hacked with a worm. Wentz might have an insider introducing broken lines into the code, but random shit keeps breaking, and there are twice as many evident glitches today than yesterday. The problems keep getting worse, and each of them goes deep.”

  “So the entire dev room is distracted.”

  “Exactly,” Melinda agreed. “Which points to sabotage.”

  “How far behind are we?”

  “You’re not—”

  Dominic’s phone started playing Warren Zevon’s Lawyers, Guns and Money — a ringtone that only played when their lawyer called. He only ever called from that number with an emergency. And not the sort he wanted to handle over the phone. “Hold that thought.” He gave her a nod then grabbed and answered his phone with an order. “Hey, Solomon. Face-to-face.”

  Melinda climbed off his lap. Then Dominic hung up and aimed his phone at the nearest TV. Two seconds later it went bright with their lawyer’s stoic face.

  “What is it?” Melinda asked.

  “We have a serious problem.” Solomon swallowed.

  This wasn’t just serious. It was worse than expected.

  “Someone broke their contract,” Melinda guessed.

  “No.” Dominic shook his head, already ahead of her. “It’s worse than that.” Then to Tummel, he said, “How many contracts?”

  “Three.”

  Melinda asked, “Who?”

  Solomon swallowed again. “Hendrix, Boone, and Coleman.”

  Silence.

  Dominic finally said, “This isn’t unexpected.”

  “Three is unexpected.” Melinda shook her head. “They are unexpected.”

  She was right on both counts. They expected Wentz to squeeze hard and hit them with a broken contract or two, but not with three, and certainly not so soon.

  The number wasn’t even the worst of it. Amaya Hendrix, Samantha Boone, and Noah Coleman — the trio was at the top of every industry list detailing Hollywood’s up and coming stars. Because the Shellys had put them there. They weren’t three of Shellters biggest names, but they would be.

  “This is our fault,” Dominic said. “Every one of us should have seen this on our own. There’s no excuse for our collective failure. Of course that fucker went for the low hanging fruit. We expected Wentz to hit us in our profit centers, but he hit our investments instead. Not only will Wentz benefit from our money and work, his signing our people onto projects is leverage he can use to make others jump ship.”

  “There is some good news there.” Solomon brightened. “The contracts were all bought out — 3.7 million for all three combined, wired by the end of business today.”

  “They’re worth a hell of a lot more than that,” Melinda said.

  “Then it’s our fault for not making the buyout amount higher,” Dominic argued. “This is on us.”

  “You’re right, honey.” She turned to Solomon. “Don’t go far. We’ll be calling you soon.”

  A single nod then the lawyer was gone.

  After the screen turned black, Melinda climbed back onto Dominic’s lap.

  He looked into her eyes. “I know what you’re going to say.”

  “Of course you do.” Melinda began grinding against him.

  “So, this is war?”

  “It was already war,” she said, grinding harder. “Consider this genocide for his reputation.”

  “Then genocide it—”

  But her mouth was on him.

  Chapter Nine

  Sloane

  “Cut!” Sloane called.

  “Was that better?” Orson asked her.

  “It was perfect.”

  He nodded.

  Three takes, and the first two were terrific. But she wouldn’t get anything better than that third one and both of them knew it.

  She was back on set, exactly where she wanted to be, and the production was finally moving.

  When she let it.

  Sloane was pissed at herself for a few things, but at least she was back in a place where she could more easily focus her energies. The strike was over, almost before it started, leaving Sloane yet another reason to roll her eyes at her own idiotic behavior.

  Why had she ever doubted the Shellys? Of course they could and would take care of it. Melinda had been right; the whole thing had been an excuse to
take a nice little vacation … right at the start of filming. She had permission to see things that way and still wasted the opportunity. She could have fully enjoyed her time with Orson instead of losing her shit like she had.

  Good thing he was such a professional. Orson came to the set ready to work. If Sloane didn’t already know better, she wouldn’t have any idea that his director fell apart just yesterday. He wasn’t treating her with pity, despite her behavior in Malibu.

  “Fifteen minutes,” she announced to the room.

  Murmurs and shuffles as everyone went their separate ways, including Lila. Then Sloane found herself quite suddenly, and mercifully, alone.

  She sat, wanting a moment to think, but also needing to prove that she could go five minutes without checking on the nanny-cam, which was just one of her two-thousand neuroses. Approximately. Though that number did seem to be multiplying fast.

  After Sloane had checked the nanny-cam a half-dozen times in the first hour, Lila offered to do that for her in the future, so she could “stay focused on the work.” It was hard to ignore the sarcasm when Lila vowed to keep her abreast of any important updates with completion of their current project — a thousand-piece puzzle of Oliver from Pixar’s Ratatouille. Sloane had to steal her glances after that.

  It’s not like she enjoyed feeling this neurotic. She hated that she couldn’t stop checking. Or thinking about checking. Things were going great, and yet something in her stupid lizard brain kept insisting that Jolie was in danger.

  Or that something was about to go horribly, terribly wrong.

  If it hadn’t already.

  But that was ridiculous. The day had been going great so far. The only thing even remotely close to a problem was her.

  Cassidy’s accent was barely audible, though Sloane was still having to work at pretending she didn’t hear it. They reshot her scene from the first day, and Sloane was thrilled with the result. Or at least she wanted to be, and probably would be by the end of the day.

  Orson nailed his first scene, which delighted her, not just because she could put that one to rest in her mind, but because his performance made it easy to imagine how he might approach a few other scenes that she had questions about.

  She caught Miles smiling several times throughout the morning and well into the afternoon.

  Her boxes were all ticked. And yet for some reason, her teeth were still on edge.

  Sloane stood and walked over to the nanny-cam. After making sure Jolie was still alive and preferably smiling, she chastised herself for giving into such base paranoia yet again.

  She was the director and doing her production zero favors by expecting the shadow of disaster to lay in wait around each and every corner.

  It was so infuriating, this thing she couldn’t outrun. Past trauma kept turning her into a victim of present paranoia. Sloane saw potential danger everywhere.

  She couldn’t stop staring at the lighting rigs, waiting for one to fall. Or analyzing every gesture made by the crew, assuming each one might be a precursor to someone walking out. Cassidy had delivered her lines perfectly, and yet Sloane couldn’t stop wondering if she was perhaps missing something obvious. Or if—

  “Hey.” She heard Miles behind her. “You got a minute?”

  She turned around and her stomach sank. She knew the look on his face. And it didn’t help that he had waited until no one was around before approaching her. “What? What did I do?”

  “I didn’t say you did anything, chérie. So please don’t start out being defensive.”

  “You look like you’re going to scold me.”

  “You always think that,” he said.

  “Your fault for being German. What did I do wrong?”

  “I’m half-French and half-Belgian, and you didn’t do anything wrong.”

  “Fine, Miles. What could I have done better?”

  “There are a couple of things we could do to move faster.”

  “You seemed happy with the day so far,” Sloane said. “What am I missing?”

  “I am happy. But we’re almost three days behind schedule now. We should—”

  “The schedule has padding.”

  “That doesn’t mean we can take that padding for granted.”

  “I’m not taking it for granted, Miles! I’m—”

  “Perhaps overthinking a few things,” he finished.

  Which only infuriated her further. “I’m taking the time to get things right.”

  “You absolutely are. But you’re also overthinking Cassidy’s accent. She’s got this, okay? And—“”

  “You act like I’m being picky without any reason!”

  “I didn’t say you were being picky …”

  “But?”

  “But I do believe that we’re slowed down a bit by your neuroses—”

  “Screw you, Miles!”

  He softly replied with a shake of his head. “Remember, we’re not supposed to raise our voices at one another.”

  “Remember, I asked you to please not use that word.”

  “Picky?” Then, “Oh. Sorry. I didn’t mean to—”

  “It’s fine, Miles.” She already wished this was over. He was right and she didn’t need the reminder. “I’ll try harder, do better, whatever. I get it.”

  He looked at her, obviously wanting to say more — anything from an apology to another slew of unwanted advice. After a long pause, he said, “I guess I’ll go and check in on Jolie, then.”

  “Thanks.” The guilt felt terrible. “Sorry for being a jerk.”

  Miles gave her a forgiving smile. “You’re not being a jerk. We knew this was going to be hard.”

  “Yeah, well …” She didn’t have an end to that thought.

  But Miles didn’t need one and wasn’t waiting around for it. He wasn’t even gone from the set before she was second-guessing herself again, starting with a trip back to the nanny-cam.

  Everything looked fine. Connor was no longer there, which meant Orson had probably gone home. No movie stars queued up to rescue her today.

  An old voice returned to her mind, chastising her, same as it had for the last two decades.

  “You’re in over your head because you’ll never be good enough.”

  The voice sounded like it always did, so Sloane needed a second to register the ugly reality that the voice wasn’t stuck in her mind this time. It was coming from right behind her — the monster standing in a place he absolutely had no right to be.

  She wheeled around and found the courage to stare her enemy in the eye. “How did you get in here?”

  “That’s funny.” He gave her a long and patronizing smile. “I came to ask you the exact same thing. How did you get here?” His smile widened. “We both know you have no business being on a film set.”

  He let the weight of his oppressive words sink in, then watched her try and wade away from the insult.

  “You should leave before you make a fool of yourself again. Or before someone gets hurt.”

  “You hurt people, not me.” Sloane wanted to sound strong, but he was making her sound like a frightened little child. “You’re the one who needs to go.”

  He casually looked around the empty space, his smile never wavering, proving he wasn’t in a hurry. “You still don’t understand … I can go anywhere in this town that I want to, and there’s nothing you can do to stop me.”

  “For now.” She didn’t even know what that meant.

  “Okay, then.” The saccharine smile grew, followed by a condescending little pat on her shoulder. He allowed her little victory before claiming it as his. “There’s nothing you can do to stop me for now.”

  The monster tied her tongue and he knew it.

  There was a slurry of words inside her mind. She couldn’t decide what to say, and the longer she stayed in this marsh of indecision, the deeper her verbal paralysis.

  He added the insult of a wink to the injury of his predator’s grin, then he turned around and left.

  She remained froze
n inside the papery skin of the little girl he ruined.

  Sloane wasn’t sure how long she stood there, assaulted by what if?s and acidic memories.

  She had to get out of there. Now. She’d been right to worry and needed to regroup. The Shellys would have to reassure her with something better than, don’t worry about it or whatever meaningless words they would use to try and convince Sloane that she nothing to fret about.

  She straightened her shoulders and walked back to the nanny-cam, looking over with an almost lazy glance, expecting to see Jolie fitting pieces into her puzzle. But instead, Sloane saw something that caused her to gasp, clap a hand over her mouth, then dash to Jolie’s trailer.

  She threw open the door, but the monster was already gone.

  And so was Tiffany.

  “Hi, Mommy!” Jolie looked up from her puzzle, offered her mother an enthusiastic wave, then returned her attention to the mess of pieces scattered across the table.

  Sloane crossed the trailer in a few purposeful strides and was kneeling next to Jolie two seconds later, examining her daughter without being obvious, trying not to scare her, despite being out-of-body terrified herself. She didn’t see any tangible evidence, but Sloane also knew she wasn’t likely to see any physical damage done in such an abbreviated length of time. If anything, Jolie seemed overjoyed, gleeful like she had been at the beach building a sandcastle with Connor.

  “Where’s your father? Was he here?”

  Jolie nodded, not looking up. “Yeah. But he had to go.”

  Goddammit, Miles. “Where’s Tiffany?”

  She looked up from her puzzle again. “Miss Tiffany had a family emergency.”

  Heart pounding. “What kind of family emergency?”

  She shrugged. “Mr. Auspicious gave her a note.”

  A cold chill. “Mr. Auspicious.”

  “That’s what the man said his name was.”

  Pure fury. “That’s not his name.”

  “He told me that, too.” Jolie gave her an emphatic nod. “He said it meant lucky, and that good things happened around him, so it was sort of like a nickname.”