Aurora looked beautiful as always from behind the dark glass of the Maybach.

Morning sunlight slid over the capital in great golden sheets, flashing across glass towers, elevated highways and the endless streams of cars flowing between them while giant screens changed from film trailers to fashion campaigns to some handsome middle-aged bastard promising financial freedom through an investment product Park would probably understand the day he became forty, divorced and emotionally attached to golf.

Farther ahead, RoraWood was beginning to take over the skyline, corporate advertisements slowly surrendered their territory to actresses, singers, movie posters and enormous celebrity faces selling everything from watches to shampoo.

Quinn drove while Sloane sat beside her in the front passenger seat, and Park occupied the back alone, enjoying the obscene amount of legroom while occasionally catching Sloane’s reflection whenever her eyes wandered around the cabin.

She had noticed the car; an armored Maybach Guard worth several million Cels wasn’t exactly a vehicle a rookie actor casually produced unless said rookie had robbed a small bank, inherited a larger one, or forgotten to mention that being poor had never actually featured in his backstory.

Park could practically see the questions moving around behind Sloane’s professional expression:

Where the hell had Nathaniel Park gotten it? Why did his assistant drive an armored luxury fortress like she was borrowing somebody’s Honda for groceries? How had a nineteen-year-old with no released movie, no released music and barely 65,000 followers casually walked into Ashbourne, Vale & Crowe and signed up for services most rookies wouldn’t even dare ask the price of?

More personally relevant to Sloane, why had that same rookie heard her salary requirements, thought about them for approximately the lifespan of a mosquito, and agreed?

Her salary wasn’t ridiculous, well, it was not completely ridiculous:

Sloane Mercer had spent years in the industry, knew casting people, studios, agency politics and enough professional snakes to identify most species by the sound of their shoes in a hallway.

Park hadn’t hired some motivational idiot whose career strategy began with believe in yourself.

So, indeed, good managers were expensive as experienced private managers were more expensive while experienced private managers willing to build a career around a nineteen-year-old trying to act, sing, write music, eventually tour and probably create enough scandals to finance several entertainment blogs like her deserved hazard pay.

Park had simply agreed a little too easily.

He sighed and turned back toward the window.

Luckily, he’d handled the most dangerous part before Sloane ever entered the car:

The Bennett family crest had been removed and replaced with an ordinary private license plate; arriving at NX Arc with the Prime Minister’s family insignia mounted on the front would have been only slightly subtler than walking through reception wearing a shirt that said PLEASE INVESTIGATE MY PARENTS. ASK ABOUT THE AFFAIR TOO.

Changing the actual car to a less proactive one, however?

Fuck that.

Park had never understood rich people who discovered secrecy and immediately decided they needed to cosplay poverty.

He wasn’t going to buy some cheap little sedan and complain about fuel prices and pretending instant noodles were a personality trait merely because somebody might wonder where his money came from.

He had access to a Maybach Guard, his ass liked the Maybach Guard; therefore his ass would continue sitting inside the Maybach Guard until somebody produced a legal reason for it to stop.

He wasn’t much of a roleplayer anyway.

’Unless it is the other kind.’

That one, admittedly, deserved considerably more research with volunteers like Jessie, Emmeline and Quinn.

’Preferably not so many night from today.’

By the time Quinn reached NX Arc, the usual crowd had already formed outside the public entrance.

Fans always pressed behind the barriers with phones raised, homemade signs tucked beneath arms and the remarkable patience required to spend half a morning hoping one particular celebrity would forget the building had underground parking.

Park had grown used to seeing them by now everyday outside NX waiting for their celebrities.

Technically, he even had fans of his own, but he wasn’t delusional enough to look at several hundred screaming people and assume the entire population had woken up craving Nathaniel Park.

His ego was healthy and he had no terminal illness of it.

Quinn drove straight past the entrance and down into the basement, and Park watched daylight disappear behind concrete ramps before murmuring, "Very glamorous."

Sloane glanced over her shoulder. "Disappointed?"

"I was expecting flowers. Maybe 3 crying women."

"You’ve released nothing."

"Exactly. Imagine the loyalty if they came anyway."

Park saw Quinn’s mouth twitch in the rearview mirror and immediately leaned forward. "Did you just smile, Quinn?"

"No."

"You did."

"I am driving."

"Human beings have successfully smiled and driven since the invention of cars, Quinn."

"Some of those people haven’t survived."

Park considered that and slowly sat back. "You really a dark, Quinn."

"You started it."

Sloane looked from Quinn to Park, then forward again realizing she’d been hired to manage Nathaniel Park’s career rather than whatever increasingly suspicious relationship existed between Nathaniel Park and his assistant.

Less than two minutes later, they were on the sixth floor and nobody was trying to determine whether he belonged and nobody was waiting to catch him failing some impossible test; mostly everything was soundproofed, glass partitions and long polished halls were there, yet one of the digital studio schedules they passed carried something it hadn’t last time.

NATHANIEL PARK — STUDIO FIVE — 10:00 AM

Park slowed just enough to read it properly.

Damn.

That feels good.

Studio Five’s door opened and the A&R (Viktoria) stepped out, and Nathaniel Park’s historic first appearance on an NX recording schedule was immediately abandoned by its intended audience.

’A good morning indeed.’

Good morning to the music industry. And good morning to whatever bastard designed that body and then put it in charge of other people’s careers.

Park had seen Viktoria’s beauty during the audition and signing his contract; he wouldn’t miss it for the world... he possessed functioning eyes, nineteen-year-old hormones and absolutely no religious vows requiring him to lie about either.

What he hadn’t appreciated enough during the chaos of those days was precisely how hot the woman became when his attention wasn’t being divided between microphones, producers and her repeatedly asking him to demonstrate another impossible thing.

Today, Viktoria looked really hot!

The A&R was somewhere in her thirties and considerably shorter than Quinn, perhaps only a little above Park’s shoulder in heels, which made it almost funny that this compact, beautifully assembled woman happened to oversee A&R across NX Arc’s entire music operation.

There was something deeply charming about the contrast:

She looked like somebody a careless stranger might underestimate right up until she listened to their album, puckered those pretty lips and quietly said, "There isn’t a single here", thereby murdering 8 months of work without raising her voice.

Her hair was dark brown, nearly black where the hallway light missed it, and today she’d twisted the whole long mass into a neat professional bun.

Park knew how long her hair actually was, he’d seen her release it once during the audition:

When released it fell toward her lower back when loose, thick and smooth enough that several strands had brushed dangerously close to the top of her ass when she’d turned. Today it was imprisoned again.

A small tragedy... those strands deserved freedom.

’And that ass deserves an audience.’

Her face was longer than round but her face carried enough softness through her cheeks to make her surprisingly cute whenever her executive expression slipped and straight fine nose sat above thin pink lips that naturally seemed a little pursed, especially whenever somebody said something stupid and she paused to decide whether employment law permitted murder.

Her high cheekbones gave the rest of her face a sharper elegance, while those ash-brown eyes kept everything from becoming harmless

Park had spent an unreasonable amount of time during the audition wondering what those eyes would look like genuinely flustered.

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