“I want to propose an alliance,” Adriana said.
Sienna’s expression didn’t change. But her eyes sharpened with the alertness of someone who had anticipated several possible openings to this conversation and this one had not been among them.
“An alliance,” Sienna repeated.
She set her water down and laced her fingers together on the table.
“A temporary one. With explicit terms and a specific objective.” Adriana set her glass down and folded her hands on the table, a negotiation posture she had used in a hundred conference rooms, but which felt different here, on this rooftop, with this woman, in a context that was not a negotiation and both of them knew it.
“I have access to Burty Howarth’s internal documentation. Financial structures, corporate entities, payment routing that your investigation has identified from the outside. I can provide the inside view, the evidence that would make your case not just compelling but legally unassailable.”
The rooftop bar’s ambient music shifted to something low and brassy.
Sienna tilted her glass, watching the water catch the light. “And what do you want in return?”
“Your evidence. Your sourcing. The documentary platform that gives the story reach and credibility that a legal filing wouldn’t achieve.” Adriana met Sienna’s gaze and held it. “Between us, we have everything necessary to expose Burty Howarth completely. Separately, we each have enough to be dangerous but not enough to be conclusive. Your documentary without my documentation is a compelling story that his lawyers will tie up in court for years. My documentation without your platform is evidence that will disappear into a legal filing that no one outside the profession will ever read.”
Adriana watched Sienna absorb this. Twenty years of reading people across negotiation tables, and Sienna Ramirez gave away exactly what she chose to. Everything else stayed behind that gaze.
Sienna leaned back in her chair, arms loose, thinking visibly. She was comfortable with silence and used it the way Adriana used words.
“At the gala you told me to abandon my investigation,” Sienna said finally. “At the Palomar you threatened legal action against my sources. Now you’re offering to be one of my sources.” She tilted her head, and the movement exposed the line of her neck in the warm light, and Adriana’s gaze tracked the movement before she could redirect it.
“I don’t trust you,” Sienna said. The words were direct, spoken without malice, in the voice of someone stating a fact she wished were different.
Adriana let the words land. She pressed her palms flat against the tablecloth.
“I know.”
“You’ve spent nine years protecting the man I’m trying to expose. You have every strategic reason to offer this alliance and every personal reason to sabotage it.” Sienna’s gaze was unflinching. “Why should I believe this isn’t a more sophisticated version of what you’ve been doing all along?”
“Because I’m here.” Adriana’s voice dropped. Not to a whisper, but to the low, unadorned register she used only when she meant every word. The careful version of herself she had arranged before Sienna arrived was gone, stripped away by her own honesty, and she could feel its absence like cold air against bare skin. “I’m sitting in a restaurant that isn’t in Hollywood with a woman I’m supposed to be fighting, offering to hand over documentation that could end my career. I don’t have a strategic reason for that, Sienna.”
The first name slipped out. It was the first time she had used it, and the sound of it between them changed the temperature of the table by several degrees.
“I have a reason,” Adriana continued, because stopping now would be worse than finishing, “and the reason is that continuing to protect Burty Howarth is wrong, and I’ve known it was wrong for a while now, and you’re the first person who made me stop pretending I didn’t.”
The silence that followed was not the strategic kind. It was the silence of two people sitting across from each other and recognizing that the conversation had moved past boundaries into territory neither of them had planned for and neither was willing to retreat from.
Sienna’s jaw worked. Her gaze held Adriana’s with an intensity that was no longer assessing but closer to searching, looking for the lie, looking for the angle, and finding, instead, a woman who was sitting very still with her hands folded on a white tablecloth and nothing left to hide behind.
“Conditions,” Sienna said.
“Name them.”
Sienna straightened in her chair, her shoulders squaring.
“Everything you share goes through my legal team before it enters the documentary. Chain of custody documented. Your name stays off the sourcing credits unless you authorize its inclusion. And if at any point I determine that you’re feeding me selective information to protect yourself or the firm, the alliance ends immediately and I publish everything I have, including the fact that you approached me.”
“Agreed.”
The restaurant’s ambient music shifted, a quieter song filling the pause.
“And one more thing.” Sienna leaned forward. The distance between them narrowed. The faint crease between her eyebrows deepened, the slight tension in her jaw that appeared when she was concentrating, the way her lips parted slightly before she spoke. “This doesn’t change what happened. You spent years protecting him. Whatever you do now doesn’t erase that.”
“I know.” Her hands were still on the table, motionless.
“Do you?”