The marble floor of the Arrangement Desk agency lobby felt exceptionally hard under my heels, vibrating with the residual exhaustion of a fourteen-hour shift. I had spent the entire day wrangling a pop star who thought throwing a matcha latte at a grip was an acceptable form of creative expression. My brain was a bruised, over-caffeinated pulp. All I wanted was to crawl into my bed, pull the duvet over my head, and pretend the Los Angeles entertainment industry did not exist until at least noon tomorrow.
I hit the button for the elevator, my thumb pressing it three times in rapid succession. It was a useless gesture, but the mechanical click grounded me. I just needed the doors to open. I just needed to escape.
“Not so fast, Desk.”
The voice was perfectly modulated, entirely devoid of urgency, and completely immovable. I froze, my hand hovering over the elevator panel, and closed my eyes for a fraction of a second. I mentally drafted a press release for my own demise: ‘Desk Morales, hyper-competent publicist and exhausted human, tragically collapsed in the agency lobby after being denied exit by upper management.’
I turned around. Locked stood a few paces away, his hands loosely clasped in front of him. He wore the standard Arrangement handler uniform: a flawlessly tailored dark suit that managed to look both expensive and entirely unremarkable. He was the kind of man who could blend into a shadow or command a boardroom, depending on what the agency required. Tonight, he was requiring my continued presence.
“Locked,” I said, keeping my tone light, heavily armored with my usual sarcasm. “I’m officially off the clock. My phone is going in the ocean. I am legally dead until tomorrow morning.”
“Graham needs you for a consultation,” Locked said, his expression not shifting a millimeter. “Contract conference room three. It will be brief.”
“Brief is never brief in this building,” I countered, shifting my weight to my less aching foot. “If it’s a crisis, Naomi is on call. Hand it to the junior agents. I fixed the matcha incident. I’ve paid my dues for the week.”
“Naomi is not equipped for this,” Locked replied, stepping forward. He didn’t physically block my path, but he didn’t have to. The sheer weight of Arrangement’s authority radiated from him. He gestured toward the glass-walled corridor that led deeper into the belly of the agency. “It requires your specific skill set. And your specific discretion.”
I bristled. I hated that word. Discretion usually meant cleaning up a mess that was legally actionable. My hand went to my pocket, my fingers finding my favorite metal pen. I clicked the top of it. Click, click, click. A precise triplet.
“I am going home, Locked.”
“You are going to conference room three,” he corrected smoothly. He didn’t raise his voice. He just looked at me with that unreadable, placid stare. “It’s in your best interest, Desk. Consider it a favor.”
A favor. The word tasted like ash. I knew how favors worked at Arrangement. They were never gifts; they were currency, and I was already heavily overdrawn. My chest tightened, the familiar, suffocating weight of my obligations pressing down on my ribs. The massive debt I owed Graham Adler and this agency—the debt that kept me chained to the worst graveyard shifts and the most impossible clients—pulsed at the back of my mind.
I stared at the closed elevator doors for one long, bitter moment, mourning the sleep I was about to lose. The quiet of the after-hours office suddenly felt less like peace and more like a trap snapping shut.
“Fine,” I muttered, dropping my hand from the elevator panel. “Lead the way. But if this is another actor who forgot to pay his taxes, I’m charging double overtime.”
Locked turned without a word, his polished shoes silent on the marble. I followed him down the sleek, dimly lit hallway, the glass walls reflecting my own tired face back at me. The office was dead quiet, stripped of the daytime hum of ringing phones and frantic assistants. We reached conference room three, a sterile glass box that always felt too cold, illuminated by a harsh overhead light that turned the mahogany table into an interrogation space.
I walked in and dropped my bag onto one of the leather chairs. “Alright. I’m here. What’s the fire, and how many buckets of water do I need?”
Locked did not immediately answer. He walked to the head of the table, reached into the inner pocket of his suit jacket, and withdrew a single piece of paper. He placed it flat on the table and, with two fingers, slid it across the polished wood until it stopped directly in front of me.
I looked down. My breath hitched, catching sharply in my throat.
It was a copy of my debt note. The original was locked in Graham Adler’s safe, but the numbers were burned into my retinas. The staggering sum, the impossible terms. But that wasn’t what made my stomach drop. At the bottom of the page, the due time for the next catastrophic balloon payment was circled in thick, red ink. Tonight.
“What is this?” I asked, my voice suddenly stripped of its sarcastic edge. “That’s not due for another month. We agreed—”
“The terms of your arrangement allow for acceleration at the agency’s discretion,” Locked said, his voice a cool stream over jagged rocks. “Graham feels it is time to reassess your standing.”
Before I could explode, the glass door of the conference room swung open so hard it nearly shattered.
“Where is she? Tell me you have her!”
A woman practically vibrated into the room, clutching a tablet like a life raft. It was Playing, a manager whose reputation for high-strung, catastrophic panic preceded her. She looked like she had sprinted all the way from Burbank, her hair fraying out of a messy bun, her eyes wide and bloodshot.
“I’m right here,” I said, taking a step back as she invaded my personal space. “Playing, take a breath. What is going on?”
She didn’t explain. She just shoved the tablet directly into my face. “Look at this! Look at it, Desk! It’s over. The franchise is dead. The studio is going to drop him. We have three hours before it hits the main feeds!”
I grabbed the tablet to stop her from hitting my nose with it. I looked at the screen. It was a grainy, chaotic video shot on a phone, illuminated by the harsh flash of paparazzi cameras. I recognized the broad shoulders and the dark-blond hair instantly. Wes Nash. The brooding, reluctant action star who looked like he’d rather eat glass than walk a red carpet.
In the video, Wes was surrounded by a swarm of photographers outside a restaurant. The audio was a mess of shouting, but the visual was damning. Wes lunged forward, his arm extending, and shoved a paparazzo hard enough that the man stumbled backward into a trash can. The video looped, freezing on Wes’s face—furious, aggressive, completely unhinged. Below the video was a countdown clock on a notorious gossip site: ‘EXCLUSIVE: Action Star’s Violent Rampage. Full story drops at midnight.’
“He assaulted a photographer,” I said, my professional brain automatically kicking into gear despite the panic in my chest. “Okay. Was he provoked? Did the guy touch him?”
“It doesn’t matter!” Playing shrieked, waving her hands wildly. “The studio is looking for an excuse to pause his contract negotiations. If this drops as an unprovoked attack, he’s a liability. They’ll recast the sequel. We need a spin. We need a miracle.”
“You need a statement about privacy and a generous donation to a charity for injured journalists,” I said, sliding the tablet back to her. “It’s messy, but it’s survivable.”
“No,” Locked interrupted, stepping up to the table. “A statement is defensive. We need an offensive narrative. A complete reframing of the event.”
I looked at Locked, my eyes narrowing. “What are you suggesting?”
“Wes was not attacking a photographer,” Locked said smoothly, his eyes locking onto mine. “He was defending his fiancée.”
I stared at him. The silence in the room stretched out, thick and heavy. I clicked my pen. Click, click, click.
“His what?” I asked. “Wes Nash doesn’t have a fiancée. He barely has a personality in public.”
“He does now,” Locked said. He tapped the red circle on my debt note. “The paparazzi were aggressively crowding his secret partner. He reacted instinctively to protect her. It changes the narrative from an unstable, violent actor to a fiercely devoted, protective partner.”
“That’s… actually not terrible spin,” I admitted begrudgingly. “But who is the girl? We have three hours. You can’t just pull an actress off a roster; the internet will tear her apart, find out she was at a pilates class during the incident, and we’ll look worse.”
“We are not using an actress,” Locked said.
The realization hit me like a physical blow. The air rushed out of my lungs. I looked from Locked’s impassive face to Playing’s desperate, pleading eyes, and finally down to the red circle on the paper.
“No,” I said, backing away from the table. “Absolutely not. I am a publicist. I am a fixer. I am not a prop.”
“You are the only one who fits the timeline,” Locked countered, his tone perfectly reasonable, which only made it more infuriating. “You were unaccounted for during that hour. You are not a public figure, which explains the secrecy. And, most importantly, you know exactly how to handle the press when they inevitably swarm.”
“I won’t do it,” I snapped, my heart hammering against my ribs. “Find someone else. I’ll draft the talking points, I’ll coach them, but I am not playing pretend for the cameras.”
“If you do this,” Locked said, his voice dropping a fraction of an octave, “Graham will forgive the balloon payment due tonight. He will also strike twenty percent of your total remaining principal.”
I froze. Twenty percent. That was years of my life. Years of graveyard shifts, of cleaning up vomit and drafting apologies for monsters. It was freedom, dangling right in front of me, wrapped in barbed wire.
“And if I refuse?” I asked, my voice barely a whisper.
“Then the payment is due at midnight,” Locked replied softly. “And we both know you do not have it. The agency will seize your assets, Desk. Including the house your parents live in.”
A cold, creeping terror washed over me. He had me. He had boxed me in perfectly, using my own failure and my own family as leverage. I looked at the debt note, the crisp black numbers blurring as my eyes burned. The guilt of my past—the young actress I couldn’t save, the catastrophic failure that put me in this debt in the first place—roared in my ears. I couldn’t fail my parents too.
“Fine,” I choked out, the word scraping against my throat. “I’ll do it. But I want it in writing. The twenty percent. Before I leave this building.”
“Already drafted,” Locked said, producing a second sheet of paper.
I signed it without reading the boilerplate. My hands were shaking. I was officially crossing the line from handler to handled.
“Good,” Playing gasped, nearly sagging to the floor in relief. “Okay. He’s at the airport. VIP terminal. He’s booked on a red-eye to London, but it’s delayed. The paparazzi are already swarming the perimeter. You need to get in there, get on his arm, and let them get the shot of the ring.”
“He knows about this, right?” I asked, grabbing my bag.
“He knows we’re handling it,” Playing deflected, avoiding my eyes.
“Oh, God,” I muttered, storming out of the conference room. “I’m going to have to explain to an action hero why I’m his new bride-to-be, aren’t I?”
The drive to LAX was a blur of frantic phone calls and heavy traffic. Playing drove like a stunt double, weaving through lanes while screaming in half-Spanish, half-English into her Bluetooth. I sat in the passenger seat, furiously typing up a cohesive timeline of my fake relationship with Wes Nash on my phone, trying to memorize my own fabricated love story.
By the time we pulled up to the discreet side entrance of the VIP terminal, my nerves were completely frayed. The Los Angeles night air was thick and humid, a storm brewing off the coast. Flashbulbs were already popping in the distance, a barricade holding back a dozen shouting photographers.
Locked was waiting for us at the door, having taken a separate car. He ushered us inside, past security, and down a quiet, carpeted hallway that smelled of expensive cedar and floor wax.
“He’s in the holding room just outside the main lounge,” Locked murmured to me. “The lounge itself has glass walls facing the tarmac, but more importantly, it has an open sightline to the terminal’s upper mezzanine. That is where the cameras are waiting. Once you step into that lounge together, the narrative is set.”
He opened a heavy oak door.
Wes Nash was pacing the length of the small room like a caged panther. He was taller in person than he looked on screen, his shoulders impossibly broad beneath a worn-in black T-shirt and a leather jacket. His storm-gray eyes snapped toward the door as we entered, his jaw tight, a faint scar visible along his brow. He looked furious, exhausted, and incredibly dangerous.
“Riley,” Wes barked, using Playing’s actual given name, though I barely registered it in the tension of the room. “Tell me you killed the story.”
“We’re reframing the story, Wes,” Playing said, shrinking slightly under his glare. “Meet Desk Morales. She’s your fiancée.”
Wes stopped dead. He looked at me, his gaze dragging from my sensible flats up to my messy hair and the dark circles under my eyes. He didn’t look impressed. He looked insulted.
“You have got to be kidding me,” Wes said, his voice a low, gravelly rumble that vibrated in my chest. “This is your fix? A fake engagement to a handler?”
“Nice to meet you too, Hollywood,” I fired back, my exhaustion overriding my filter. I stepped forward, refusing to be intimidated by his size or his scowl. “For the record, I don’t want to be here any more than you do. But unless you want your studio to drop you for using a photographer as a bowling ball, you’re going to put a ring on my finger and smile for the cameras.”
Wes scoffed, running a hand through his tousled hair. “The guy shoved his camera into my face and clipped a kid walking behind me. I pushed him back. I didn’t assault him.”
“The internet doesn’t care about the truth, they care about the footage,” I snapped. “And the footage makes you look like a thug. If you were protecting your secret fiancée from getting trampled, however, you’re a hero. It’s basic PR math. Try to keep up.”
Wes took a slow step toward me. The air between us suddenly felt entirely too thin. He smelled like jet fuel, sandalwood, and pure, unfiltered irritation. “I don’t do stunts, Morales. And I don’t lie to the public about my personal life.”
“You’re an actor,” I said, tilting my chin up to meet his eyes. “Your entire job is lying. Consider this the performance of a lifetime. It saves your franchise, and it pays off a debt I can’t afford. So we are doing this.”
Locked stepped smoothly between us, holding out a small velvet box. “The ring. Three carats, vintage cut. Put it on, Desk.”
I took the box, my fingers trembling slightly. I pulled out the ring. It was heavy, cold, and entirely too flashy for my taste. I shoved it onto my left ring finger. It fit perfectly, which only made me feel more sick.
“The delay on your flight has been extended,” Locked informed Wes. “You will proceed into the main VIP lounge. You will sit together. You will look intimate. The cameras on the mezzanine will get the shot, and we will leak the story to intercept the midnight deadline. Understood?”
Wes stared at me, his jaw working. I could see the fight in him, the desperate urge to tell us all to go to hell. But he also looked tired. Beneath the brooding anger, there was a deep, bone-weary exhaustion that I recognized instantly. It was the same exhaustion that lived in my own bones.
Before Wes could argue further, Harper Kline, the senior VIP lounge supervisor, pushed open the door. She looked completely unflappable in her crisp uniform.
“We have a problem,” Harper said, her tone dry. “Severe weather alert just upgraded. Lightning struck the outer grid. The airport authority just threw a hard lockdown on the VIP wing. Nobody boards, nobody leaves. The electronic doors to the main lounge are dropping onto emergency reserves.”
“How long?” Playing gasped.
“Three hours, minimum,” Harper said, eyeing Wes and me with a knowing, unimpressed look. “If you’re going in there to be seen, you’re going to be stuck in there until the storm passes. Choose wisely.”
Locked checked his watch. “The deadline remains. Go.”
He pushed us out of the holding room and down the short corridor toward the frosted glass doors of the main lounge. Beyond those doors, the space was lit by warm ambient lights, and I could already see the silhouettes of other high-profile passengers and staff. More importantly, I could see the flash of a lens from the upper mezzanine through the skylight architecture.
We stopped just shy of the sensors. The doors remained closed, waiting for us to trigger them.
My heart hammered against my ribs like a trapped bird. This was it. The irreversible threshold. Once we walked in there together, wearing this ring, the story was out. I would be tethered to this man, to this lie, and there would be no taking it back. My career, my debt, my entire life was about to be hitched to Wes Nash’s temper.
Wes looked down at me. The anger had drained out of his expression, replaced by a sharp, calculating intensity. He saw my hesitation. He saw the slight tremor in my hands.
Slowly, he shifted his stance. He lifted his right arm and bent it at the elbow, offering it to me.
The electronic lock on the doors clicked loudly, a harsh mechanical sound that echoed in the corridor. A red light flashed above the frame, signaling the lockdown protocol was engaging. We had seconds before the doors sealed.
Wes leaned in, his mouth brushing dangerously close to my ear. The warmth of his breath sent an involuntary shiver down my spine.
“Ready, fiancée?” his low voice murmured, vibrating with a dark, challenging edge.
I swallowed the lump of panic in my throat. I looked at the red light, then at the heavy ring on my finger. I shoved my resentment down into the dark box where I kept all my other survival instincts, forced a brilliant, bulletproof smile onto my face, and threaded my arm tightly through his.
“Action,” I whispered.
We stepped forward. The glass doors glided open, and as every camera and eye in the room swiveled toward us, the doors slid shut behind us, the lock engaging with a final, echoing thud that trapped us inside the performance.