Mara waited until the corridor emptied before she touched the projector.
The machine had cooled enough to handle. Its metal casing held the smell of hot dust and old vinegar, and the frozen frame shone in the gate like a trapped insect. Alden’s hand. June’s lap. The envelope between them. FOR MARA.
She lifted the pressure plate and eased the strip free.
The frame tore.
A hairline split ran through Alden’s wrist and stopped at the envelope. Mara held both pieces over her palm, breathing through her nose. The image was not damaged beyond use. It was damaged beyond certainty, which was worse.
She slid the pieces into the paper sleeve Celeste had left on the table. The sleeve bore no label. Celeste had taken the reel, the projector, and Rowan. She had left Mara the smallest possible proof, as if proof were a courtesy.
At the door, footsteps passed. Mara lowered the lights and watched the shadow move beneath the gap.
The guards had taken Rowan toward the old production offices. Not the security wing. Celeste wanted privacy, or wanted him to think she did. The blood on the floor had marked their route plainly enough. Mara followed it with her eyes until the last drop disappeared around the corner.
She put the frame in the inside pocket of her cardigan.
Then she went after him.
The old production offices had been closed since the roof leak, but Celeste had kept one room powered: Alden’s former conference room, where the windows looked across the backlot and the painted town beyond it. Mara stopped at the bend before the door and listened.
“Your employer has withdrawn his protection,” Celeste was saying. “Dorian has no further use for you. I find that disappointing, but not surprising.”
Rowan’s voice came through the thin wall. “You paid me.”
“I paid you to identify a risk. You chose to become part of it.”
“He’s got a name?”
A pause. Celeste’s silence had edges.
“He had one,” Rowan said. “Alden.”
Mara put one hand flat against the wall. The plaster was cold. On the other side, a chair scraped.
“You are in no position to be clever,” Celeste said.
“Then stop giving me openings.”
Mara pictured his face without meaning to: the split in his lip, the stiffness in his left shoulder, the way he checked a doorway before entering it. He had been useful to Celeste because he could read danger in a room. Now he was using the same skill against her.
A dull impact struck the wall.
Mara’s fingers closed around the frame in her pocket.
“Where is the second reel?” Celeste asked.
Rowan laughed once. It sounded dry. “You already know where it is.”
“If I did, you would not be sitting there with your hands free.”
Mara looked toward the stairwell. The nearest fire alarm had been removed, leaving two screw holes and a rectangle of cleaner paint. She stepped back as the conference-room door opened.
Celeste emerged alone.
Her dress was immaculate. Only the small dark mark on one cuff had changed since the screening. She saw Mara at once and did not look surprised.
“You should not creep about abandoned corridors,” she said.
“I was looking for the washroom.”
“Of course. The studio has many conveniences for its staff.”
Celeste moved closer. Her perfume did not cover the faint odour of nitrate film clinging to her clothes.
“Rowan has been offered a choice,” she said. “He can cooperate and leave Morrowglass with enough money to repair his brother’s company, or he can remain loyal to a woman who has not told him the first true thing about herself.”
Mara kept her hand away from the pocket. “How generous.”
“I am offering you the same arrangement.”
“I don’t have a company to repair.”
“You have a claim to a company. The distinction is temporary.” Celeste’s gaze dropped to Mara’s shoes, then rose again. “Sign a statement confirming that you accessed restricted material under Iris Bell’s instruction. You will be dismissed quietly. Your payroll record can be corrected. You will leave with money, a new identity, and no one hunting you through the courts.”
“Corrected to what?”
“Day one.”
The answer landed with the neatness of a blade set on a table.
Mara said, “You have already changed it.”
“Not yet.”
“Why offer me a choice if the record is still clean?”
Celeste smiled. “Because you have until the end of today to make yourself expensive.”
Behind her, Rowan struck the wall again. This time there was no sound from him afterward.
Mara looked past Celeste through the open door. Rowan sat in one of the conference chairs with his wrists bound in front of him. One guard stood behind him. His head was lowered, and one hand hung oddly, fingers loose.
He had put himself between the guard and the room’s only camera. Even injured, he was blocking its view.
Mara could not stop looking at that.
Celeste noticed. “He is not protecting you. He is protecting his bargain with himself.”
“Then you should ask him what he thinks it is worth.”
“I have.”
“Ask better.”
The guard reached for Rowan’s shoulder. Rowan moved first. He caught the man’s wrist, turned it just far enough to make him swear, and used the moment to set his dangling hand against the table. He did not strike. He simply pinned the camera’s sightline with his own body again.
Celeste’s mouth tightened.
Mara knew then that Rowan had not been trying to escape. He was making sure whatever happened in that room could not be recorded cleanly.
It was a stupid, practical act. The kind that cost him pain without producing a witness.
She remembered it.
“I need to speak with him,” Mara said.
“You need to sign.”
“Then you need me alive and capable of writing.”
Celeste considered her for a moment. “You have Alden’s habit of mistaking delay for leverage.”
“I have a clerk’s habit of reading the terms.”
“Clerks are replaceable.”
“So are owners.”
The silence that followed was too complete. On the backlot, a hammer rang against a false storefront, one measured blow after another.
Celeste stepped aside.
“Five minutes,” she said. “If he gives you the location of ROOK—2, I will forget you were insolent. If he does not, you will sign before midnight.”
Mara entered the room.
The guard left with Celeste, pulling the door shut. Rowan watched the latch settle. He did not look at Mara until the footsteps had gone.
His left hand was swelling across the knuckles. The right was tied more tightly than the left, the rope cutting into the skin.
“Your mother?” he asked.
“Not here.”
“That wasn’t what I asked.”
“No.”
He nodded as if she had confirmed a measurement. “You got the frame?”
Mara took it from her pocket. The two torn pieces lay inside the sleeve, one edge curled.
Rowan looked at the words without touching them.
“FOR MARA,” he said.
“Yes.”
“Could be a trap.”
“It is a piece of film, Rowan.”
“Everything here is a trap if someone has had time to edit it.”
Mara sat opposite him. The chair smelled of damp upholstery. “Where is the second reel?”
His eyes flicked to the camera.
She followed the glance. “It is not recording.”
“Doesn’t mean the wire is dead.”
She rose, crossed to the camera, and removed the small brass plate beneath the lens. The cable had been cut cleanly. She held the plate up for him to see.
“Happy?”
“No.”
“That is becoming repetitive.”
He leaned his head against the chair. “Celeste knows about the reel?”
“She knows its label.”
“She knows more than that.”
Mara waited.
Rowan tested the rope with his fingers. “When she took me out of the projection room, she said the second reel was not in the archive. She said it had been kept off-site until the day you completed the ordinary requirement.”
Mara’s attention went to the torn frame in her hand.
“Who told her?”
“Your mother.”
The room seemed to narrow by one careful inch.
“She said June told her where it was?”
“No. She said June told her what it was for.”
Mara sat again. “What did she say?”
“Not enough to be useful.”
“Try me.”
Rowan looked at her then. His face had gone pale under the blood. “The reel is proof of the codicil’s condition. Not the existence of the trust. The condition. Alden filmed himself explaining why the heir had to serve the payroll days under an ordinary name.”
Mara heard the old building settle around them.
That was the significant thing. Not another witness. Not another accusation. Alden had made the requirement visible. He had anticipated the exact argument Celeste and Dorian were now using to bury her: that the condition was a legal invention, that the ordinary identity was evidence of fraud rather than protection.
If ROOK—2 existed, it could make the trust enforceable.
It could also make her impossible to hide.
“Where?” she asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Celeste believes you do.”
“She believes numbers are a form of intimacy.”
“Rowan.”
“I don’t know.” He flexed his injured hand and winced. “But I know who might.”
Mara waited for the name.
He looked toward the door. “Iris.”
“Iris has been suspended.”
“She was suspended after she gave you the drives. That does not mean she left the lot.”
Mara thought of Iris’s office stripped to the walls, the desk drawers open, the dust where equipment had stood. Iris did not leave evidence behind unless she wanted someone to find it.
“Why would she keep the reel from me?”
“Because she keeps everything from everyone.”
“That is not an answer.”
“It’s the only one we have.”
The guard’s footsteps returned in the corridor.
Rowan leaned forward as far as the rope allowed. “Do not sign anything.”
“You are in no position to give orders.”
“I’m not ordering you.”
“What are you doing?”
“Trying to make one useful decision before they break my other hand.”
He lowered his voice. “The payroll office has a service lift behind the old casting board. It opens onto the costume warehouse. Get to Iris before Celeste moves her.”
“And you?”
“I’ll stay here.”
“Convenient.”
“For you.”
The latch moved.
Mara cut the rope with the small continuity scissors from her pocket. Rowan stared at the blades, then at her.
“You carry those everywhere?”
“They are studio property.”
“Good. I was worried you had a dangerous side.”
She freed his wrists. He stood too quickly and caught the edge of the table. Mara reached for his elbow before she could stop herself. His weight came against her for one second, solid and hot through the sleeve of her cardigan.
He steadied himself without pulling away.
“Your hand,” she said.
“Still attached.”
“That was not the question.”
“It’s the answer I have.”
The door opened.
Mara stepped between Rowan and the guard. “He needs a doctor.”
The guard looked to Celeste.
Celeste looked at Rowan’s freed wrists, then at Mara’s scissors. “You have three minutes.”
Mara turned to the service corridor. Rowan followed, one hand pressed against his ribs. He did not ask her to wait. He simply matched her pace, even when the pain made his stride uneven.
At the casting board, Mara pulled aside a painted panel showing a young woman in a crown. The service lift waited behind it, narrow and unlit.
Rowan stopped her hand on the gate.
“What?” Mara asked.
He pointed at the floor.
A fresh line of black dust crossed the concrete from the lift to the costume warehouse. Film cement, not dirt. Someone had opened a canister there recently.
Mara crouched and touched the powder. It stained her fingertip.
From inside the lift came a faint metallic ticking.
Not machinery.
A reel turning on its spindle.
Rowan looked at her. “We’re not alone.”
The lift gate began to slide open.
In the dark behind it, a strip of film hung from the spindle like a black ribbon, and on its first exposed frame, written in white grease pencil, was one word:
ROOK.