Everyone's But Hers

Chapter 12: Sloane

Sloane Mercer did not raise her voice.

She had learned early that the people who raised their voices were the people who had already lost. Volume was panic wearing a costume. She had no use for it.

She sat across from Kai in the hotel suite's living room with her tablet on her knee and her coffee untouched, and she looked at him the way she always looked at him when he had done something she had not authorized. Like he was a variable that had briefly escaped its column.

"The post is at sixty thousand comments," she said.

"I know."

"Forty percent positive. Thirty percent confused. Thirty percent ugly." She turned the tablet so he could see the analytics dashboard she had pulled up. "The ugly thirty is calling it a stunt. They think you're manufacturing a redemption arc for tour press."

"It's not a stunt."

"I know that. You know that. The internet does not know that, and the internet is where your revenue lives." She set the tablet down. "The lawyers are going to take four to six weeks to sort back the royalties. During that time, Elena Reyes is going to be the name people search. They are going to find her work, her social accounts, and every interview she has ever given. If she says anything in that window that contradicts the narrative we've been running for three years, we have a problem."

Kai looked at her. "What narrative."

"That the song was yours."

"It wasn't entirely mine. That's the whole point."

"Kai." She said his name the way you say a word you have said too many times, flat and without affect. "I have managed your career for six years. In that time you have won four awards, headlined three world tours, and generated enough revenue to fund a small country's infrastructure. I have done that by making very specific decisions about what the world knows and what it doesn't. Last night you made a decision without consulting me. This morning you made another one. I need you to understand that decisions made without me have consequences I cannot always contain."

"I understand that."

"Do you."

"Sloane." He leaned forward, elbows on his knees. "I'm not asking your permission to fix something I broke. I'm telling you it's done."

She looked at him for a long moment. The suite was quiet around them. Forty-one floors up, the city moved in silence through the floor-to-ceiling windows, all that noise and motion reduced to something you could look at without feeling it.

"She called you," Sloane said.

He went still.

"This morning. After the post," Sloane picked up her coffee, looked at it, set it back down. "You were on the phone for eleven minutes. Your assistant flagged it because the number wasn't in your contacts and the call originated from a local exchange."

"You're monitoring my calls."

"I monitor everything. That's my job, and you've always known it." She met his eyes. "What did she say?"

"That's private."

"Nothing about Elena Reyes is private anymore. You made it public this morning."

"The credit is public. The conversation is private."

Sloane was quiet for a moment. Outside, a plane crossed the window, small and silent at this height, leaving no trace. She watched it until it was gone.

"She's going to want more," Sloane said. "Women like her always do. The credit is a door. Once you open it she will walk through it and keep walking, and you will let her because you have never learned to close a door on that particular woman."

Something shifted in Kai's face. Not anger. Something underneath anger, quieter and more dangerous.

"Women like her," he said.

"Talented. Aggrieved. Certain they are owed something."

"She is owed something. That's the entire point of today."

"She is owed a credit correction and a royalty payment. Both of which she is receiving." Sloane folded her hands on her knee. "She is not owed access to you. She is not owed a relationship, a conversation, or whatever you're building toward in your head right now. I know that look, Kai. I've seen it before. I saw it four years ago and I made a decision then that protected you, and I would make the same decision again."

The room got very quiet.

Kai looked at her. "What decision."

Sloane held his gaze. She was very good at holding gazes. She had learned that too, early, in rooms full of men who thought looking away first was the same as losing.

"I protected your career," she said. "At a moment when you were too young and too emotional to protect it yourself. Everything you have now exists because of choices I made in that window. You do not get to retroactively decide those choices were wrong."

"I'm not retroactively deciding anything." His voice was level. "I'm asking you a specific question. What decision did you make four years ago."

She picked up her tablet. "We should talk about the Amsterdam date. The venue had a technical issue with the stage rigging and there's a possibility we need to push the—"

"Sloane."

"Amsterdam, Kai."

He stood up.

She did not look up from the tablet.

"This conversation isn't finished," he said.

"The Amsterdam date needs a decision by end of day."

He walked to the window. Stood there with his back to her, looking out at the city. She watched his reflection in the glass. The set of his shoulders. The stillness that meant he was thinking hard and not yet done.

"She said there are things I don't know," he said. "Not about the credit. Something else."

Sloane's hands did not move on the tablet. Her expression did not change. She had spent twenty years making sure her expression did not change at the moments that mattered, and this was a moment that mattered.

"People always say that," she said. "It's a power move. It means she has your attention and she wants to keep it."

"Elena doesn't play power moves."

"Everyone plays power moves."

He turned from the window. He looked at her across the room and for a moment she saw in his face the thing she had always found most inconvenient about him: he was not stupid. He had never been stupid. Impulsive, emotional, too loyal to the wrong people, yes. But not stupid.

"What did you do," he said.

It was not a question this time.

Sloane stood. She smoothed her jacket, picked up her bag, and walked toward the suite door with the unhurried precision of a woman who controlled the pace of every room she entered.

"Amsterdam," she said. "End of day."

She let the door close behind her.

In the elevator she stood very still and watched the floor numbers descend and thought about a phone call she had made four years ago. A door she had closed. A girl in a hospital who had not been meant to be there.

She thought about what Elena Reyes meant when she said there are things you don't know.

She thought about how long she had been certain that particular door would stay closed.

The elevator reached the lobby.

Sloane walked out into the city and pulled out her phone and made a call.

"We have a problem," she said. "Start watching Elena Reyes."