“Okay.” Vin puts his hands on my chest and shoves for all he’s worth. “Time to go.”
“Don’t go on my account.” Anderson smirks.
“Are you so much of a hack that the only way you know to get some attention is to ride my coattails?” I ask. The shutter repeats again, and what feels like a million phones bob in the corner of my vision. I hold my arms out. “See that? They’re here for me. Without me, no one would even know who you are.”
“Damian,” Vin says urgently, “this is the exact opposite of keeping a low profile.”
“Damian,” the guy with the camera says. “What set you off in France? Was it drugs? Stress?”
“Yes, Damian.” The light in Anderson’s eyes says he’s only too happy to play this game. “What was that about? I still haven’t received an apology.”
“You asshole.” I lunge for him, but Vin gets in front of me. He’s not tall, but he’s big enough and I’m drunk, and I bang into a table instead.
“Okay.” Vin puts an arm around my waist. “Time to call it a night.” He leads me toward the kitchen door as the shutter goes again.
“He’s such an asshole,” I say, shouting the last word over my shoulder.
“Yeah, yeah, I know. I’ve already called the car. Let’s go.”
But someone’s tipped off the press that I’m here, because even as we push open the back door of the bar, shouted questions volley toward us.
“Damian! What’s your relationship with Anderson Lind?”
“Damian! Is it true you’ve been kicked offShadow League 5?”
“Damian!”
I put a hand out so the flashes don’t blind me and barrel through the scrum. Paparazzi are like leeches, practically clinging to me. Vin scrambles to keep up. The car is waiting at the end of the alley, and we dive through the door as reporters continue to shout questions.
“Roberta’s going to murder us.” Vin sighs as the driver pulls away from the curb. “We should have stayed home.”
“She doesn’t need to know,” I say, head spinning.
“Are you kidding? She knows everything. She’ll have called me before we get back to the house, just watch.”
“Let her call,” I say, watching a darkened LA roll by.
She can’t murder us if my career is already dead.
* * *
“I’m sending you to Alaska.”
The next morning, Roberta glares at me from behind her desk. The expression is one hundred percent do-not-fuck-with-me, and I resent it to the core of my being. If anyone’s been fucked with, it’s me.
“Alaska?”
“You’re lucky it’s not somewhere farther,” she says. “After your outburst last night, the studio is very unhappy. A bar fight with your director is not the kind of publicity they want right now.”
“It wasn’t a bar fight. He was being a drama queen. And I’m not exactly tap dancing with joy either.” In fact, I’m pacing on the rug. Sitting still is impossible. My whole body feels electric with anxiety.
“Yes, but you don’t stand to lose three hundred million dollars when this film flops. The premiere weekend box office numbers aren’t good.”
“That’s not my fault. If they hired someone who knew how to write dialogue better than a middle schooler, we’d be in much better shape.”
“That may be.” She knows as well as I do the script forShadow League 4was written and rewritten by no less than nine people over the last two years. Over the course of a bloated nearly three-hour final cut, my character, supposedly a mafia son out for revenge, had done everything from drive a tank through the jungle to perform open-heart surgery on his assassin girlfriend while they were hiding out from the bad guys on a glacier. It was nonsensical. “But you calling your director a”—she glances down at a legal pad on her desk—“‘talentless prick jockey’ in front of the entire world means it’s easy enough to pin the failure on you. And then you decide to pick a fight with him at a dive bar.”
“How many times do I have to tell you it wasn’t a fight? He made it—”
