“That’s right,” I say. “We’re the producers.”

  “About time. Hand me my kit, please. I’d like to top myself off before we leave.”

  “Absolutely not,” Blair says, horrified, but I move toward the nightstand. “Baptist!”

  I hesitate, looking between them. Rodrick seems still somewhat high, but like he’s already coming down, and Blair has her hands over her mouth like she can’t believe I’d consider giving the guy drugs. But she doesn’t like what happens when a person goes through withdrawal.

  I’ve seen it before. The shaking, the sweating, the vomiting and crying. It’s a nightmare and a hell, and junkies will do absolutely anything to avoid going through that mess. Which means it doesn’t matter if I give him the kit now or he freaks out and steals it later—he’s getting high.

  “We can’t mess around right now. One more dose then we’ll get him straight.”

  “Oh, darling, I’m not getting straight,” Rodrick says and chuckles to himself.

  I ignore him and hand over the kit. He takes it and prepares his next shot with surprising dexterity for a guy that looks like he’s on the verge of starving to death. Blair stares in disgust before storming out.

  I watch her go, my heart like a stone. She won’t ever understand—how could she, when she’s never experienced any of this before?

  But I’ve seen it before. I know what it does to a person and how it can rip a family into pieces.

  “That one doesn’t like me,” Rodrick says as he sinks the needle into his arm. “Ah, darling, that’s like coming home.”

  “That one doesn’t like intravenous drug use and neither do I, but I don’t feel like you puking in the car on the way over. Don’t overdo it, I need you mobile.”

  “Yes, right,” he says and sighs, leaning back. “Perhaps I need a break for a moment. Just a little shut-eye before we go.” He grins happily in the throes of the drug.

  I remove the needle, pull off the band, and slap him hard.

  He blinks at me and barely reacts, even though I hit him with enough force to make his face snap to the side.

  I sigh and drag him out of bed. He’s a big guy, even if he is emaciated from years of hard drug use. He’s got no bag, no extra clothes, nothing but a messy hotel room filled with trash and drugs, and I definitely don’t want to know the details of this little arrangement.

  “Listen, bud, I don’t know you at all,” I say as I pull him out the door and into the sunlight. The poor bastard hisses like a vampire and I wonder if he’s seen the outdoors in weeks. “I’m sure you’re a wonderful guy. Real charmer. But unfortunately, you got mixed up with the wrong director. I’m pretty sure Cowan’s going to get us all killed by the end of this.”

  I pause at the top of the stairwell. Rodrick’s looking at me, glassy-eyed and spaced. Down below, Blair’s got the car running.

  I grab Rodrick’s face and make sure he’s listening.

  “If you fuck with the girl, I’ll kill you myself.”

  He smiles awkwardly. “Wouldn’t dream of it.”

  I pull him downstairs, shove him in the back of the car, and Blair drives off, glaring like she’s going to rip up the road with her mind the whole way.

  Chapter 11

  Blair

  “I didn’t agree to this.”

  I jab a finger at Cowan. He steps back, barely avoiding me as I keep poking at him, barely keeping myself from throwing punches. The piece of human filth deserves to get beaten up or worse. Behind us, down the hall, Baptist is looking after Rodrick as the addict gets something to eat, takes a decent shower, and changes into clean clothes for what looks like the first time in a couple weeks.

  “Nobody asked you to agree, suit. I couldn’t care less what you think of my methods. I will say that Rodrick was much worse off before I found him.”

  I hesitate, breathing hard. “Worse off how?”

  “Homeless. Desperate. I’m sure you can imagine the story. I plucked him from the streets, gave him shelter in that hotel, and made sure he had a stipend for food. He’s alive because of me.”

  “He’s still an addict. He’s a goddamn mess.”

  “Addicts can function. They can act. If they’re given the right amount of drugs, they can do almost anything, so long as they keep withdrawal at bay. The war on drugs—”

  “I don’t want to hear your bullshit theories on American drug policy, you psychopath.” I stand there breathing hard, tugging at my hair. What am I involved in now? Cowan’s looking at me with a grim smile like he knows I’m going to break down, and the bastard’s right.

  I’m going to break down.

  I can’t handle this. I’m pregnant, still working with the father of my baby, and he doesn’t know. We also slept together, again, which was a terrible idea, but we did it anyway. And to make it all worse, Baptist insists on talking about it this time instead of pretending like it didn’t happen.

  Cowan wins. I turn away and storm back to the room with the director on my heels. We head inside and find Baptist near the window, looking angry, while Rodrick sits on the bed in a clean robe with his legs crossed, flipping through the channels on TV.

  “Roddy, darling.” Cowan greets his actor effusively like they’re standing in the middle of a Hollywood soundstage. “You look wonderful.”

  “I look like a homeless junkie, Cowan. But that’s not far from the truth.” He grins and waggles his eyebrows. “Now, did you bring me my medicine?”

  “Always.” Cowan reaches into his pack and removes a little baggie—

  “Oh, fuck no,” Baptist says, coming forward, and for the first time since we met, Rodrick shows a flash of anger and snatches the drugs, gripping them tightly. “Cowan. You’re supplying him too?”

  “You remember my South Philly friends,” Cowan says, gesturing toward me. “They also sold me heroin.”

  “Good heroin, not that fentanyl-laced shit. I don’t feel like dying.” Rodrick stands. “Now, shall I cook here, or—?”

  “Stop it.” I glare at him and he sits down, shrugs, but doesn’t relinquish the drugs. “This is absurd. It’s beyond absurd, it’s sick. He needs help. He needs—”

  “I need my actor working,” Cowan says loudly, showing a flash of anger. “Rodrick is brilliant. He’s exactly what we need, but he’s worthless if we try to shove him through a program.”

  “Been there, done that, never works.” Rodrick sighs. “Lots of expensive therapy is locked away in this worthless, rattled brain.” He taps his skull with two fingers. “Once a junkie, always a junkie.”

  “This is wrong,” I say, shaking my head. “I won’t be a part of it.”

  “Good,” Cowan says. “I will babysit my lead actor. I need him healthy, or as healthy as he can be, and very much on drugs. No withdrawal, no bullshit. We’ll keep him working and sane. Besides, you two have another task.”

  “Fuck that,” Baptist says. “We’re done running your errands.”

  “Location scouting. That’s a reasonable request.”

  Baptist grinds his teeth. He looks at me and back at Rodrick, who’s sitting there and grinning away, holding his baggie like its pure gold. I can almost see the thoughts flash through Baptist’s brain, and for a second, I think he’s going to kill Cowan. There’s enough rage and darkness inside of him to do it, too. One moment of passion and he might strangle the old director to death before he even realizes that the life’s gone from the ancient, withered husk of a bastard.

  Instead, he walks past the two men and stands by my side.

  “Send me the address.” He steers me away and pushes me softly to the door. “Come on, Webb.”

  We leave the hotel room. I pause at the end of the hall near the elevators and sink down onto a bench. I put my head in my hands and stare at the floor, doing my best to keep my heart rate under control, but I can’t seem to calm myself.

  “This is wrong,” I say quietly, not looking at Baptist. “We shouldn’t be involved in this. It’s one thing to drag the guy off the street and give him a place to stay, but another to shoot him up ourselves. Which is basically what we’re doing.”

  “That’s on Cowan and Rodrick. Not us.”

  “What do you think Cowan’s using that check for?” I look up at Baptist and he’s staring back at me, teeth tight together, jaw working. “Do you really want this bad enough?”

  He says nothing. I don’t expect him to. I’m not sure if I have an answer to that question either. I want a movie with Tony Cowan—but do I want it this much?

  Baptist sinks down onto the bench beside me and leans his head back with a sigh. We sit in silence for a minute. His knee touches mine, and I listen to the sound of him breathing, in and out. It helps center me, bring me back from my panic.

  He’s a calming presence, like an ancient waterfall or a godlike statue.

  “What do we do?” I ask him quietly, but I know the answer already, or at least I think I do.

  Instead, he surprises me. “We can’t pretend like that night didn’t happen. We keep on making deals and running from it, but we’re not going to be able to work together if we can’t face it.”

  I turn toward him, chewing on my hair. “It’s easier this way, isn’t it?”

  “The first time, maybe. Not twice.”

  “We promised.”

  “I’m not going back on that. I don’t plan on kissing you. I don’t plan on dragging you into a dark corner and holding your hips as I brush my lips along your throat, even if there’s a part of me that wants to do it. But I’m not going to act like last night didn’t happen. You can deal with that or not.”

  I blow out my hair and stare at the floor. What’s the right thing to do? Is there a right thing, or am I just so out of my depth that I’m drowning?

  If I were responsible and not missing some intrinsic part of my brain that makes me do the right thing, I’d tell him about the baby.

  I’d make him understand that it’s not just about our work relationship.

  It’s about the future now.

  Instead, I only nod.

  “Last night happened, okay? It happened.”

  “Good. That’s all I wanted, Webb.”

  “I still don’t want to talk about it.”

  “We don’t have to.” He smiles slightly and gives me a sly, sideways smile. “Although we can. I’d be happy to give you a description of everything we did, nice and slow.”

  “Don’t make me regret this.” I rub my temples, warding off a headache. “I understand that us sleeping together—”

  “Fucking, Webb. Raw, wet, delicious fucking.”

  “Whatever. I understand that it’s complicated, but this crap with Cowan is on a whole different level. What are we going to do about that?” I nod toward the room where Rodrick’s probably getting high again under the supervision of our director.

  “I’m not sure yet. If Cowan’s convinced Rodrick’s the guy then we might be fucked. But no matter what happens, I’m not going to let Cowan abandon Rodrick when this is all over.”

  “Really?”

  “Don’t be shocked, it’s almost insulting.” He stands up and walks to the elevators. “If Cowan actually pays Rodrick then the poor asshole’s probably going to be dead in a week if nobody keeps an eye out for him. When this is over, we’ll drive him to a rehab clinic ourselves and lock him in if that’s what it takes. They can drown him in methadone until he dries out.”

  “You’re serious.”

  “I’m very serious. You might think I’m being a little too cavalier about drug use right now, but I promise, I have experience with this sort of thing. There’s nothing we can do for Rodrick right now except keep him alive and safe and make sure he doesn’t overdose.”

  I give him a strange look as I join him at elevators. How does he know about this stuff? Who does he know that was addicted to heroin? The elevator dings and the doors slide open, and we step on together. I lean against the mirrored wall and glance at him as he looks up at the ceiling.

  “What kind of experience do you have?” I ask in a small voice.

  He shakes his head. “I’ll tell you about it some other time.”

  I want to ask him again, but I let it drop. We all have our pasts and our secrets, and if Baptist isn’t ready to share then I won’t force him.

  My phone dings as we begin our descent. It’s an address from Cowan and a message: Get to work.

  Chapter 12

  Blair

  “He could’ve at least sent us somewhere nice.” I trudge through an empty field and barely manage to step over a massive muddy puddle. “Seriously, what the hell are we doing out here?”

  Baptist grunts in response and glowers all over. He’s staring around like he wants to use Superman heat vision to burn the whole place to the ground and frankly, I hope he does it. We drove an hour north into the suburbs only to end up walking through what looks like an abandoned farm. Weeds sprout all over and the woods are beginning to encroach on a field complete with rusty tractors and overgrown weeds. In the distance, a lone house stands at the top of a shallow rise, and it feels like it’s getting further and further away as we head in its general direction.

  “I suspect we’re not going anywhere nice for a long while, or at least until Cowan isn’t in control of our lives anymore.” He kicks a rock aside. “At least nobody’s trying to kill us.”

  “There’s still time for that.”

  He grins and stretches. “Nobody’s shooting and nobody’s doing drugs. I’d say this isn’t so bad. Besides, the fresh air is kind of nice.”

  “Speak for yourself.” I make a face as I stomp through some short weeds and get gossamer spiderwebs all over my legs. I brush it off, shivering. “God, I hate camping. Did I ever tell you my dad used to take us camping when we were younger?”

  “You don’t talk about your dad much.”

  “There’s not much to say.” I smile grimly as a dozen memories sift through my mind, none of them good. “When I was like twelve and Max was still little, my dad went on this crazy nature kick. He was obsessed with hiking and biking and camping and fishing. He said the modern world is too soft and we needed to harden up.”

  “I can guess where this is going.”

  I smile ruefully. It certainly doesn’t have a happy ending, that’s for sure. “The trips were awful. He’d bark at us the whole time, snapping whenever we made a simple mistake, and we made a lot of them because we were pampered suburbanites, not farm hands. Mom was pretty checked out by then but at least she was around to try to soften some of his bad moods. I remember this one trip, we hiked really far along this trail then tried to set up camp, but Dad forgot some pieces to the tent and we couldn’t get it up, and he was screaming at us and raging at the woods. He was stomping around kicking bushes and breaking sticks and throwing shit all over. Max kept crying and crying, and Mom tried to calm him down but he called her every nasty thing you can imagine. Eventually, we had to walk back, and it was dark by the time we made it to the car. We didn’t talk on the drive home.”

  He eyes me for a moment, frowning. “That must’ve been hard.”

  “Yeah, well, it wasn’t so bad, but that’s why I hate nature. All thanks to my dad. He had to turn everything into a contest, and if we didn’t live up to his impossible standards then he’d treat us like garbage.”

  “Was your dad always like that?”

  “Pretty much. Nothing was ever good enough for Alexander Webb. Did you know he wrote some critically acclaimed movies in the nineties? He never let us hear the freaking end of all his amazing accomplishments.”

  “I’ve heard people like those movies,” he says, smiling slightly. Everyone knows my father in the business and everyone worships the ground he walks on, even though he hasn’t written anything for years, every single film he’s ever been involved with has been a huge success.

  He’s still referred to as the writer with the golden pen in the studios, and it makes me sick. If they knew the sort of asshole they were enabling, I like to think they’d stop treating him like a prince—but it’s Hollywood, and I shouldn’t be so naive.

  Doesn’t matter if you’re a monster in the world of glitz and glamour, so long as you make money.

  “He never let us forget it. Even when we were young, he’d make sure that we understood he was the head of the household because he wrote a bunch of hit movies. And now, looking back on it, that’s not really a sign of a very stable and healthy man, is it? But we didn’t know any better.”

  “No, when you have to brag to your kids and act like a bully, that’s probably not good.”

  “The worst part is, he wasn’t wrong. All my life I’ve dealt with people wanting to get to know me just to catch a glimpse of my famous father. I can’t tell you how many dates I’ve gone on that ended with the guy asking about Alexander Webb and if maybe I could introduce them sometime. It’s sickening, and each time I want to explain that actually, my father is a piece of shit and has made my life miserable, but it’s never worth the stress.”

  He sighs and bends down to grab a stick, breaking it into pieces as we get closer and closer to the farmhouse. “That must’ve been hard.”

  “I think it’s even worse for Max. I handled it by getting out of that house as soon as I could, but Dad got harder and harder to deal with over the years. Max takes the brunt of it now. There’s a reason my little brother is living with me instead of at home with his father. Nobody’s around to help him anymore.”

  “Family is hard,” Baptist says with a grim shake of his head. “You’re a good sister for letting Max stay with you. I’m sorry you had to deal with all that growing up.”

  “I’m still dealing with it. You think my dad’s changed at all? Hell no, not even a little. He’s still constantly criticizing me, reminding me that he’s the successful one in the family and the rest of us are freeloaders, making sure I know that I’ll never be as good as him. I’m the guy’s daughter and he treats me like this, imagine what he’s like to work with.”