Peerless Perverted Actor Has a Celebrity Harem?!

Once again, Park had to cross a ridiculous amount of Aurora Imperial City just to do something normal.

Exercise.

People on Earth could walk five minutes to some neighborhood gym that smelled like old rubber, cheap deodorant, and one deeply committed man grunting in front of a mirror trying to bench-press his divorce away.

Park, apparently, needed an armored car, a security detail, several elevated highways, and enough secrecy to make cardio feel like an illegal meeting between foreign governments.

He knew the place. Technically.

The memories in this body knew the route and the entrance and enough of the building’s insides to tell him he’d been there once before. The agency had paid the membership and booked the training, so for the original Park this would have been visit number two.

For Park himself it was the first.

And this time he didn’t need Mick to take him.

Mick, the Runner and the agency’s grunt who’d been driving Park around without the faintest idea who he was driving and Park had worked annoyingly hard to keep that lie breathing.

They could have run it again today, in fairness. One of his guards drives him to the fake apartment. He waits for Mick. Mick takes him to the Foundry. Afterward Mick brings him back to the fake apartment, Park performs the walking-inside bit a second time, loiters in a lobby he has no business standing in, waits for the man to leave, then calls his guards.

Two car swaps. Two stops in the same place. All of it wrapped around whatever Jim intended to do to his body in between.

No, gracias.

Just running the logistics in his head was already burning energy he’d been planning to spend on the treadmill.

So when the schedule came through, Park told Mick he’d handle his own transport.

Come to think of it, Mick hadn’t sounded like a man planning to drive him anyway. He’d simply told Park not to be late like last time, dry as a form letter like warning a child who’d already missed the bus once and still seemed to think time was a matter of opinion.

Just don’t be late again.

Which translated fairly cleanly to: figure it out yourself, Pretty Face. I’m not your damn mother.

Fine. Park didn’t need him — and not because he was folding, or because Mick had won some argument neither of them had technically had.

Park simply had other transport now, most of it armoured, heavily tinted, and operated by men who carried concealed weapons while maintaining the emotional range of expensive furniture.

Quinn would normally have driven him but she become extremely busy organizing his new wardrobe.

Park knew avoidance when it put on a tailored suit and refused to make eye contact.

He didn’t know exactly what she was avoiding, though he had several beautiful theories, most of them involving a song sent at an indecent hour, a very short lift ride, and the fact that her little finger had stayed hooked around his for one entire second before the doors opened.

Maybe she’d finally worked out that her young master wasn’t joking anywhere near as much as she needed him to be.

He didn’t push, Quinn deserved room to retreat, reorganize, lie to herself in private, and come back pretending nothing whatsoever had occurred.

Park was generous like that.

So he went with Jacobs instead — one of the three men on his personal detail, and mercifully the quiet one. Jacobs said perhaps eleven words the entire drive. He was tall and heavy through the shoulders, early thirties, shaved head, beard trimmed to the millimetre, settled and calm in the manner of somebody who had seen several genuinely ugly things and ranked city traffic well beneath them.

The drive took them out of the Crown District and down into Aurora proper.

Park had crossed this giant whore of a city three times today already, and it still kept producing skylines from behind other skylines, like a capital that had spent two centuries collecting districts and refusing to throw a single one away.

Office blocks gave way to luxury residential. Residential became entertainment streets — hotels, theatres, private hospitals, restaurants, galleries, studios, screens the size of buildings running trailers for films that hadn’t finished shooting.

Jacobs pulled over two blocks short of the gym.

Park glanced at him. "You’ll wait somewhere nearby."

"Yes, Young Master."

"Try not to look like you’re preparing to abduct a minister."

Jacobs looked through the windscreen. Then, briefly, around the interior of the armoured vehicle he was sitting in.

"I’ll do my best."

Which meant no.

Park climbed out in and jogged the last two blocks.

Not far, but the short run helped settle something in his chest. The late-afternoon air came warm across his face with the first cool edge of evening cutting into it.

Above Aurora, the sun of the Celestial Empire had begun its slow retreat west.

The hard yellow of afternoon had gone rich and gold, spilling between skyscrapers and catching along their glass faces until entire buildings looked lit from somewhere deep inside themselves. The sky at the horizon was warming toward orange.

In a few hours the night would come crawling over the capital and try to swallow all of it.

Aurora was already getting ready to tell it to go fuck itself.

Digital walls brightened. Streetlights blinked awake underneath the elevated roads. Signs came up over cafés and cinemas and clubs and galleries and places Park couldn’t identify but suspected charged admission purely for having doors.

Windows climbed the towers in endless grids, waiting to turn the whole capital into its own artificial constellation the moment the last of the sun let go.

He slowed near the corner and looked around at it.

He genuinely had no idea when he’d started stopping to admire sunsets. Maybe dying once had done something to him. Maybe getting handed a second life made ordinary things stop being ordinary.

Or maybe Aurora was just showing off again.

And wedged in between those giants like an afterthought, stood the building he’d come for.

Only ten storeys.

And in Aurora Imperial City a ten-storey building was almost adorable — the architectural equivalent of turning up to a royal banquet in clean white sneakers and insisting they counted as formalwear.

Nobody could have called it unimpressive, though.

It had been built out of dark concrete, smoked glass and weathered metal panels, giving it the heavy industrial look of an old factory that had been dragged into the future, scrubbed down, and taught how to charge celebrities criminal sums of money.

Wide windows ran across several levels, showing equipment and hard bright light and the occasional flash of a body in motion behind the glass.

Above the entrance, one name had been cut into black steel.

THE FOUNDRY

The Foundry. A place where raw material went in and something useful got beaten out of it.

Actors arrived soft and left able to survive an action sequence. Actresses came in for historical dramas and walked out carrying themselves like queens who had personally executed three husbands and regretted none of them. Idols trained there before tours. Performers built the lungs for live stages.

Action stars and stuntmen prepared for roles that required them to run, fight, climb, swim, ride, fall, and generally look convincing while gravity did its best to beat the shit out of them.

Calling it only a gym was like calling the Imperial Park Royale three large buildings.

’Technically correct but spiritually stupid.’

The Foundry belonged almost entirely to Aurora’s entertainment industry.

Most celebrities could afford enormous home gyms and private trainers, but training alone in a mansion didn’t prepare a body for every role.

Agencies sent their artists here whenever a project demanded something specific out of them, because a soldier needed one build and a dancer needed another, a boxer couldn’t move like a prince, and a sickly prince dying beautifully in the final episode of a historical romance really should not arrive on set looking ready to compete in a bodybuilding final unless the writers had suffered a very strange week.

The Foundry handled all of it. Endurance, strength, mobility, stunt prep, fight choreography, dance conditioning, physical recovery, nutrition, role-specific development — even camera movement training, because it turned out a person could build a perfect body and still stand like absolute shit under professional lighting.

The upper floors did more than bodies. Private rehearsal rooms. Performance laboratories. Stunt spaces. Medical recovery suites. Motion capture. Lounges where actors and agents and directors and choreographers and every other species of entertainment creature gathered to discuss projects, trade rumours, build friendships, make connections, and smile warmly at people they privately hoped would miss their next callback.

Like-minded artists under one roof.

Also enemies sharing a physical therapist, which had probably enforced more peace treaties than the government ever managed.

Park was nowhere near those high floors.

The building ran on rank. Public fame, agency status, career level, privacy requirements, and — he assumed — the number of scandals currently attached to a person’s name all decided how high they were permitted to go.

Major celebrities used private lifts and restricted rooms where no ordinary trainee would ever accidentally watch them sweating through lunges.

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