Karl looked at the card she held out but didn't take it. Not yet.
His gaze dropped to the moonstone embossing—clean, deliberate—then lifted back to her face. He took in the tight set of her jaw, the way her blue eyes fought to stay still and betrayed her anyway.
He reached out. Not for the card.
For her wrist.
His fingers closed around the bone—warm, firm, absolute.
Riva went still for a heartbeat. Her pulse thudded hard against his thumb, a frantic, trapped rhythm.
"One question," Karl said, his voice dropping into a lazy, dangerous register. "After all this time, your first line is a congratulations. Your second is a pitch."
He gave a slight pull, bringing her in a single step. Close enough that she could feel the heat radiating off him.
"And that makes me," he added, his eyes tracing the line of her throat, "as a man whose interest in you is hardly professional, feel a little under-serviced."
He said it like a joke. It didn't land like one.
"I—" Riva started, then the sentence withered. The move, the sheer directness—so unlike the restrained version of him she'd been reading all night—threw her completely off-balance.
She tried to reclaim her hand.
His grip held, with the steady. infuriating weight of an anchor.
"You want Gray Sparrow?" Karl watched her scramble to pull her composure back into its mask. He let out a low laugh—soft, easy, and entirely unfair.
His fingertips slid over her inner wrist, traced the raised moonstone embossing with a deliberate, silken touch, as if he were caressing a lover's skin.
"Fine," he said. "It's yours."
"Moonstone Capital," he repeated, his eyes boring into hers. "Pretty name. It fits the armor."
Then his voice dropped, losing every ounce of social grace. It was clean. It was plain. It was a threat.
"But, Riva—don't pitch me." His mouth barely moved. "Don't feed me the rehearsed lines about strategy and creative freedom. I'm not an investor rep you need to charm."
He held her wrist as if he had all the time in the world to wait for her to open up.
"Tell me what you're actually building in the dark."
Something in Riva went ice-cold.
For a second, it felt like those blue eyes were peeling her back—layer by layer—past the custom silk, past the polished script, down to the raw, jagged thing she'd been forging since the day she lost everything.
Karl saw the way her pupils spiked. He felt the way her body locked. He smiled like he'd just been handed a confession.
His grip eased. His thumb slid once over the thin skin of her inner wrist—a light, deliberate caress that raised a shiver she couldn't suppress.
"I'm not looking for an ordinary partner," he said. "I have no use for people who follow the rules."
He leaned in, not to be romantic, but to occupy her space.
"I need someone willing to flip the table," Karl said, quiet and sure, "and someone with the nerve to remain standing when the room goes silent. Someone who knows that to build something new, you have to burn the old world down first."
He paused, letting the smoke of that thought settle.
"A co-conspirator."
Riva's heart kicked—a hard, frantic thud.
He knew. Not just the project, not just the math—he knew the war she was walking into. And he wasn't repelled by the scent of blood.
He was hungry for it.
The shock faded, replaced by something sharp and clinical: relief.
The heavy lifting of pretending was over. She didn't have to play the reasonable producer with spotless hands anymore.
She stopped pulling away.
Instead, she met his stare head-on, and the corner of her mouth lifted into a smile that matched his—cold, bright, and a little lethal.
"Then, Mr. Winters," Riva said, "you can stop watching from the sidelines."
She flipped her hand, catching his—warm, steady—and pressed the card into his palm. It wasn't a gesture. It was a contract.
"Gray Sparrow," she said, her voice level, the authority back in her marrow, "is just the opening move."
Karl looked at her—at the fire in her eyes, at their joined hands—and this time his smile was stripped of every polite lie.
It was approval. It was recognition.
"Of course," he said, his hand closing over the card—and her hand with it. It wasn't a handshake. It was a lock. "I'm looking forward to it. My… partner."
Riva held his gaze for a beat, then turned. No lingering. Just the sharp, retreating line of her back.
Karl Winters watched her go until the last sliver of white silk was swallowed by the terrace entrance.
When he finally looked away, his assistant had already materialized at his shoulder. Quiet. Indispensable.
"I want the deep-dive on Marcus Grey," Karl said, his voice a low, level rasp. "Not the PR version. I want the bone. Anything connecting him to the Lawrences, and everything he's spent the last decade trying to bury under the rug."
The assistant gave a curt nod and vanished back into the noise.
Karl turned back to the glass. Below, the city was a glittery, indifferent mess. He swirled his whiskey. Ice clicked against the crystal—a sharp sound that usually cleared his head.
Except tonight, memory was unspooling anyway.
Seven years ago. Not a premiere, not some glassy gala. It was a basement screening at USC—stale air, mismatched chairs, and a room full of film students pretending they were the next big thing.
Back then, Karl was the family's resident fuck-up, "sent to L.A. to learn the business," which really meant exiled with a black card and an expiration date.
Riva Lane was the lead in a raw little short called Summer Echoes. No polish. Just nerve and heat.
She played a girl cornered by life who didn't beg and didn't break; she just learned how to fight dirty. There was a beauty to her, sure—but it wasn't the polite kind. It was the kind that made you want to check your pulse and watch your back.
At the end, alone on a bare stage, she delivered the final monologue with eyes that looked wrecked and defiant at the same time: "If I'm going down anyway, I'm going down like I have feathers."
From the shadows in the back, Karl felt it like a physical hit to the gut.
Not lust. Not some cheap celebrity crush.
It was recognition. Two predators spotting each other across a crowded room.
He'd meant to find her after—just to say something—but his phone had buzzed with that East Coast area code. His father. A heart attack. The big one. He was on the private jet to New York before the credits finished rolling, ascending straight into a power vacuum that had been yawning open for him since birth.
By the time he made it back to L.A. months later, Riva had drifted into a new orbit: Marcus Grey. The golden-boy director with the soulful eyes and that quiet, pathological need to possess the things he admired.
Karl saw the control masquerading as devotion. He watched her light shift—from fearless to careful—until it was sanded down into something the market could swallow without choking.
For a long time, Karl figured that was the ending. Another interesting soul polished until it fit the mold.
Then tonight happened.
She showed up cold and razor-sharp, like she'd finally stopped trying to be easy to handle. Whatever Marcus had done to her—whatever version of the truth the world had sold her—it hadn't tamed her.
It had only given her an edge.
She wasn't a star staying in her lane.
She was a collision.
Tonight wasn't some spur-of-the-moment move. It was the continuation of a look from seven years ago—something he'd let slip then, finally getting his hands on it now.
The memory drained out of him. What snapped back in was the part of him that never blinked.
He pulled out his encrypted phone and typed one clean order.
Loop in our people at Lighthouse International and Mackin & White. Full cooperation. Top priority. Anything Riva Lane asks for in the Prism audit—she gets. I want Prism's raw numbers. The unsanitized version. Don't miss a thing.
He hit send.
He tipped his glass back and finished the whiskey in one swallow. The heat went down hard, and when it passed, all that was left was a cold, bright kind of clear.
The game just leveled up.
And he and his co-conspirator were about to kick up a storm that would rip Hollywood apart.
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