Celeste Vane smiled for the cameras and deliberately tore my gown apart on a Hollywood red carpet while hundreds of people watched and laughed.

The boardroom on the thirty-fourth floor was a temple of glass, polished mahogany, and cold cowardice.

Through the floor-to-ceiling windows, the Pacific Ocean was visible in the distance, a gray line beneath a sheet of low marine fog. Around the thirty-foot table sat twelve men and two women—the board of directors of Vanguard Horizon. Between them, they represented nearly twenty billion dollars in capital assets.

Every single one of them was staring at their phone screens.

At the head of the table stood Harold Vance. His jacket was gone, his suspenders strained against his belly, and his silver hair was wild and uncombed. He looked like King Lear wandering across the stormy heath, barking orders to courtiers who were already slipping away into the fog.

"—we issue a convertible debt offering through the Singapore fund!" Harold was shouting, slamming his palm against the mahogany table. "We buy back our own shares at a discount, stabilize the float, and sue the estate for corporate sabotage! We control the distribution infrastructure! Mara Vale has a court order and some stolen audio, but she doesn't have a single theater agreement in North America!"

The double doors swung open.

I walked in, followed by Arthur Pendelton and three forensic auditors carrying reinforced aluminum briefcases.

The boardroom went dead.

A director named Marcus Sterling—an eighty-year-old real estate baron who had backed the studio since the nineteen-eighties—slowly leaned back in his leather chair and removed his spectacles. "Mara."

"Marcus," I replied, nodding politely. "You look well. How are the vineyards in Napa?"

"Better than the balance sheet of this studio," Sterling grunted.

"Get out!" Harold roared, pointing a trembling finger toward the doorway. "This is a closed executive session! Pendelton, you have no standing in an active board governance meeting! Security!"

"Security has been relieved of their posts on this floor, Harold," Arthur Pendelton said smoothly, pulling a leather binder from his briefcase. "Under Section 203 of the Delaware General Corporation Law, any shareholder controlling more than twenty-five percent of voting equity during an active fraud investigation possesses the statutory right to call an immediate emergency quorum. Ms. Vale holds forty-two percent. And as of eight minutes ago, she holds an additional fifteen percent proxy granted by the International Cinematographers and Theatrical Workers Pension Fund."

Harold’s face drained of every drop of blood. "The union? You gave the union a proxy?"

"The union whose retirement fund you shorted by fourteen million dollars to cover your bad bets on the Tokyo currency exchange," I said, walking slowly down the length of the table until I stopped directly opposite him. "They were remarkably cooperative, Harold. All it took was a guarantee that their pension reserves would be prioritized above executive compensation during the restructuring."

"You traitorous little parasite," Harold whispered, his voice shaking with a rage so potent it was practically toxic. "I took your father out of the gutter! He was an uninsurable, neurotic hack! I made him an auteur! I gave him his career!"

"You stole his life," I replied, placing both hands flat on the cool mahogany. "And now I am taking yours."

The boardroom doors opened again.

This time, nobody had knocked.

Celeste Vane stood on the threshold.

She was unrecognizable from the goddess of the red carpet. Her hair was pulled back into a hasty, messy knot. She wore oversized designer sunglasses that failed to hide the swollen, purple bruising around her eyes from a night of hysterical tears. She wore no makeup, revealing skin that looked sallow and paper-thin under the brutal fluorescent office lights.

"Harold," she gasped, ignoring the twelve board members staring at her in horror. "Harold, you have to help me. The District Attorney... two investigators just came to my gate. They have a subpoena for my financial records. They’re seizing my house, Harold! They said the down payment came from an illegal corporate conversion account!"

Harold didn't look at her with sympathy. He looked at her with the cold, venomous hatred of a captain watching a passenger jump into his personal lifeboat.

"Get out of here, Celeste," Harold snarled. "Can't you see we’re in the middle of a board meeting?"

Celeste froze, her mouth dropping open. "What? Harold... it’s me. It’s Celeste. I did everything you told me to do! I signed the contracts you put in front of me! I did the interviews! I took the credit for the script because you said it would make the film easier to sell to foreign buyers!"

A collective gasp rippled around the boardroom table.

Two board members immediately turned their faces away, pulling their personal legal pads closer to scribble notes.

"You stupid, brainless cow," Harold hissed, his veneer of aristocratic composure shattering into a thousand jagged pieces. "You couldn't keep your mouth shut on a red carpet! You had to pick a petty, narcissistic fight with a background actress because you couldn't stand sharing a camera for ten seconds! You destroyed this studio because you couldn't control your own pathetic vanity!"

Celeste looked like she had been struck across the face with a riding crop. Her chest rose and fell in ragged, shallow gasps. She looked around the table—at Marcus Sterling, at the bank representatives, at Arthur Pendelton.

Nobody looked back.

In the high-stakes poker game of Hollywood power, once your stack is gone, you do not exist. You are a ghost before your body is even cold.

"You're blaming me?" she whispered, a terrible, wild laugh tearing through her throat. "I have the emails, Harold. I have every single text message you ever sent me from your private burner phone. I have the pictures of the checks you wrote from the Vanguard Cayman account to pay for my jewelry! You think you're going to throw me to the wolves and walk away with your golden parachute?"

Celeste turned toward me, her hands shaking, tears finally cutting dark tracks through the dust on her cheeks.

"Mara," she pleaded, her voice dropping into a desperate, groveling whine. "Mara, please. It wasn't me. It was Harold. He manipulated me. He told me your father was already dead when he gave me the script! He told me it was an abandoned property! Please... tell your lawyer to drop the civil suit. I have no money left! My sponsors dropped me! My agency dropped me! I have nothing!"

I looked at Celeste Vane—the woman who, twelve hours ago, had smiled into a wall of cameras, torn my gown, and told me that background girls didn't belong at the front.