By three a.m., the gas station hummed like a fluorescent coffin.
The lights buzzed overhead, washing everything in the same sickly blue: lottery tickets, beef jerky, my reflection in the scratched plexiglass of the counter monitor. My eyes were red-streaked; my ponytail was losing a slow, inevitable fight with gravity. Somewhere in the back, the slush machine coughed to itself like an old smoker.
I pulled my hoodie tighter and watched the security feed: four dead pumps, an empty lot, my own hunched shape framed in grainy black-and-white.
Perfect. My kingdom.
The register drawer thunked shut as the last customer of the hour shuffled out, arms loaded with beer and regret. I checked the time—3:07 a.m.—and exhaled a breath I hadn't realized I was holding.
“Okay,” I muttered, reaching under the counter. “Showtime.”
My laptop slid out from its hiding spot between bulk paper towel packs. I set it on the narrow ledge behind the register, fingers moving on muscle memory: power button, earbuds in, browser up. The store camera above me stayed pointed at the doorway, because whoever installed it was an optimist.
The Shadow Script logo pulsed to life on screen: stark white text over black, the anonymous mask graphic Cassie had mocked when I first designed it.
"Too dramatic," she'd said, laughing, before the studio made sure she stopped laughing.
Now three hundred thousand people waited to see what that mask would say next.
I skimmed the comments flooding the placeholder post for tonight's episode:
shadowqueen_21: SHE’S GOING AFTER HART AGAIN I CAN FEEL IT
hartattackxx: leo did NOTHING wrong omg let him breathe
filmnerd98: drop the receipts already i have class at 8
A jittery pulse of satisfaction threaded through my exhaustion. They were here. They were listening. It was stupid and parasocial and the only time I felt like anything I did mattered.
I opened the export folder. Tonight's video waited: "Golden Boy, Rotten Studio: The Leo Hart Silence Problem." Fifteen minutes and thirty-two seconds of sliced interview footage, contract leaks, and my voice—pitched lower, run through a filter—cutting through the PR gloss like a scalpel.
I clicked upload.
Status bar: 4%... 12%... 37%...
The automatic doors sighed open.
I jolted, snapping my gaze up.
A man stepped in from the night, and for a second my brain filed him as just another LA insomnia victim. Baseball cap. Dark hoodie. Joggers. A face mostly shadowed.
Then he pushed the hood back.
The image snapped into focus the way it did a hundred times a day on movie posters and autoplay trailers: sharp jaw, straight nose, that particular arrangement of features that casting directors and algorithms agreed meant "bankable." Leo Hart, scrubbed of red carpet but still somehow lit from the inside.
My stomach dropped like I'd just missed a step.
No. No way.
He shouldn't be here. Not in my graveyard-shift purgatory where the coffee is burnt and the chips are stale and my whole life fits behind a plexiglass counter.
His gaze swept the aisles in one practiced, casual glance—restless, assessing—and then landed on me.
I became hyper-aware of everything: the hum of the cooler, the sticky spot under my left sneaker, the way my Shadow Script logo glowed traitor-bright from the laptop behind me.
He walked up to the counter.
"Hi," he said.
It was so normal I almost laughed. Like we were strangers. Which, technically, we were. He had no idea who I was.
I knew entirely too much about him.
"We close in ten," I lied, because I wanted him gone and also because I wanted to see what he did with being denied anything.
One corner of his mouth tugged up, a half-smile his publicist probably hated. "You close at five. According to the sign." He tilted his head toward the door.
Damn it.
I folded my arms. "Then what do you need at three a.m. that you can't DoorDash to the hills?"
His eyes—lighter than on screen, a hazel that caught flecks of the neon—flicked over my shoulder. To the laptop. To the paused upload bar.
Upload complete: 100%.
The progress box winked out.
Then, abruptly, a red error banner flashed across the top of my screen.
"Upload blocked due to copyright claim."
I stared at it. My skin went ice-cold.
It wasn't possible. I'd scrubbed the footage, transformed it, layered it. The algorithm usually whined after a video went live, not mid-upload.
Behind me, Leo said mildly, "You might want to refresh that."
I looked at him sharply. "Excuse me?"
He set something on the counter with a soft clink. Not a wallet. Not keys.
A phone, face-up, open to an email thread. The sort of lawyer-heavy header I'd learned to recognize when a studio tried to bury one of my exposés.
Subject line: "Urgent: Shadow Script – Preemptive Takedown Authorization."
My anonymous mask logo stared back at me from the attached screenshot.
My pulse roared in my ears.
He watched me, posture relaxed, hands in his pockets. The calm, controlled presence of a man whose every public second had been choreographed since he was nineteen.
"Who are you?" I asked, even though I knew.
"That's the question I'm supposed to be asking you," he said. "But technically we've met." That half-smile again. "Hi. I'm Leo."
"Yeah," I said. My voice came out drier than the jerky rack. "I recognized you from all the times I've called you a moral coward."
Something flickered across his face—offense, amusement, I couldn't tell. If it bothered him, he hid it better than most.
"You have a talent for phrasing," he said. "Among other things."
I glanced at the security camera. "If you're planning to sue me, I'd appreciate it if you did it somewhere that doesn't have nacho cheese permanently fused to the floor."
"I'm not here to sue you."
"Could've fooled me," I muttered, eyeing the email.
He followed my gaze. "That was my idea. Sort of."
"Wow. Honesty. Is that allowed?"
The faintest exhale left him—almost a laugh. He leaned an elbow on the counter, closing a fraction of the distance between us. He smelled like clean laundry and night air and something expensive I couldn't name.
"Look," he said quietly. "Before you decide I'm the villain of your next episode, can we actually talk?"
"You blocked my video." The words came out flat. "That's not exactly an icebreaker."
"I asked the studio to hold it," he corrected. "There's a difference."
"Semantics." I snapped the laptop partially closed, like that would retroactively protect me. "You had no right."
His gaze sharpened. "You had no right to splice privileged contract screenshots into a monetized hate essay, but here we are." He paused. "You were right about most of it, by the way."
That threw me for a beat.
"Most," I repeated.
He nodded. "You connected dots that weren't public. Which, from a legal standpoint, is…" He made a so-so motion with his hand. "But from a talent standpoint? It's impressive."
I stared at him. "Are you… complimenting my defamation?"
"It's not defamation if it's true." His mouth pulled tighter. "Believe me, I know."
My heart rate ticked up. He was too calm. Too prepared. This wasn't a coincidence; he'd come here with a plan, and the worst part was, I wanted to know what it was.
"You could've gone through YouTube," I said. "Or sent your lawyers. Why show up yourself?" I gestured at his face. "You're not exactly low-profile."
For the first time, a crack showed. His shoulders dipped, fatigue etching fine lines at the corners of his eyes.
"Because I'm tired," he said simply. "Of other people talking for me. Of my name being a product line item. Of pretending I'm oblivious while people like your friend get chewed up."
My grip on the counter tightened.
"Don't," I said, voice dropping. "Don't say her like you know her."
His eyes flicked to mine, quick and intent. "Cassie Monroe," he said quietly. "Brown eyes. Laugh that made everyone on set shut up just to hear it again. You were in the background of her wrap party photos."
The world narrowed to the space between us.
"How—" My throat closed around the word.
"I wasn't oblivious," he said. "I was a coward. There's a difference. You don't have to forgive it. But don't mistake it for not seeing."
The way he said it—the flicker of something like shame under the polished delivery—hit a nerve I didn't know was exposed.
I forced my hand to unclench. "So what," I said, reaching for anger because it was safer. "You came down from Mount Oscar to confess in my snack aisle?"
"I came," he said, "to make you an offer."
There it was. The twist in the script.
I laughed, a harsh, disbelieving sound. "An offer."
"Your video wasn't wrong about the studio," he went on, as if we were in some clean, neutral conference room and not surrounded by impulse-buy candy. "It just wasn't complete. There are things you can't see from the outside." He tilted his head. "And there are things I can't see from the inside."
I folded my arms again, my hoodie tugging at the elbows. "You going to start quoting Plato at me next, or…?"
"I want to hire you," he said.
Silence slammed down between us.
The cooler hummed. A car whooshed past outside, headlights streaking across the grimy floor. My brain, apparently, had decided to take a brief vacation.
"Sorry," I said after a second, blinking. "I think the carbon monoxide from the hot dog rollers is messing with my hearing. It sounded like you said—"
"I want to hire you," he repeated. "As a consultant." A beat. "Off the books. Off the radar."
I stared at him, then at the email on his phone, then at my still-blocked upload.
"You try to shut me down," I said slowly, "and when that doesn't scare me you… offer me a job? Are you even hearing how that sounds?"
"You think I'm trying to buy you," he said. "I'm not." He hesitated. "I'm trying to weaponize you. There's a difference."
"Wow," I said. "Very reassuring."
He exhaled, looking past me at the wall of cigarette cartons like they might offer better conversation. When he spoke again, his voice was quieter.
"You see what they do," he said. "You cut through the spin like it's film you're editing. Clean, precise. No mercy. You call out my silences and you're right." His jaw worked once. "What if, instead of yelling from the outside, you applied that skill from inside my team?"
I shook my head, a humorless sound catching in my throat. "You think I want to become what I expose?"
"I think you're already in it," he said. "Shadow Script isn't a hobby vlog anymore, Avery."
My name in his mouth hit me like a physical thing.
I went very, very still.
"How do you—"
"Your voice modulation is good," he cut in, "but your rhythm is the same in your student film edits on Vimeo. You reuse phrases. And you can't help flinching every time someone mentions that studio by name on your personal Twitter." He held my gaze. "You were careful. Just not enough for people who are paid to be paranoid."
Heat flared up my neck. Shame, fury, fear. "So what, you stalked me?"
"I asked someone to run pattern analysis." He didn't bother sugarcoating it. "If I could find you, Victor can. The studio can. They won't come here first. They'll go for Cassie."
The air thinned. My hand found the edge of the counter again like it might steady me.
"Leave her out of this," I said. My voice shook, and I hated that he could hear it.
"I can't," he said. "Because they won't. Not if they think hurting her will shut you up."
My heart hammered unevenly. Images flashed unbidden: Cassie on our couch in sweatpants, scrolling through casting calls she pretended she didn't care about; the voicemail from her agent that had started with "I'm sorry"; the headlines that had followed, phrases like "unstable" and "unprofessional" thrown around like confetti.
"You think working for you protects her?" I asked. "You are them. You're the face on the poster."
"I'm not them," he said, and for the first time there was steel behind the smooth tone. "I'm their product. There's a difference."
I met his eyes. There was something raw there, quick and then gone—the way someone looks when they're balanced on a ledge you can't quite see.
"Here's the deal," he said. "You don't have to like me. You don't have to forgive me. You definitely don't have to stop dragging me on your channel."
"Wow," I said faintly. "So generous."
"But," he continued, "if you come on as a ghost consultant—for me, not the studio—I can push for things you can't get from out here. I can get Cassie's name in rooms again. I can make sure Victor doesn't steamroll the next girl who reminds him of a liability."
"And in exchange?" I asked, because there was always an exchange.
He looked at my half-shut laptop. "In exchange, you help me rewrite my narrative before they do it for me. You script interviews. You flag the landmines. You tell me what the hell 'authentic' even looks like when a billion dollars is on the line."
I let out a shaky breath that almost counted as a laugh. "You want me to help you lie better."
"I want you to help me stop lying in ways that matter," he said. "And, yeah, sometimes spin the parts that don't."
The honesty of that—that last grudging admission—was somehow worse than if he'd tried to dress it up.
"If I say no?" I asked.
He straightened, putting a little distance between us. The absence of his nearness hit colder than I expected.
"Then I'll rescind the takedown on your video," he said. "You upload, you burn me, you keep doing what you're doing. And you wait for the studio to decide how much of a threat you are."
"And Cassie?"
His throat worked. "I can't promise anything for her if I'm not in the room."
Silence again, but different now—thick, crowded with all the things I couldn't say without unraveling.
My fingers dug into the counter. I imagined Cassie finding out I'd even considered this. Imagined myself on the other side of the glossy machinery, whispering suggestions into the golden boy's ear while other kids like us got flattened.
I hated him.
I hated that part of me, the cold, strategic part that had gotten me this far, was already moving pieces on an invisible board.
"How long?" I heard myself ask.
He blinked. "What?"
"Your… offer." The word tasted like ash. "How long a contract?"
A slow, careful breath left him, like he was afraid any sudden movement would snap this fragile moment.
"Three months," he said. "We reassess after awards season. You get an alias in the paperwork, burner email, encrypted calls. Harper—my publicist—will know you exist, not who you are. Cassie's name stays out of it."
"And my channel?" I asked.
His mouth tightened. "You'll have to cool it. On me, at least. Conflict of interest."
The idea of going silent about him when he'd been my favorite effigy to burn made something in my chest twist.
"This is blackmail," I said quietly.
"It's a bargain," he countered, just as soft. "A shitty one. But it's the only one I can offer without losing the little leverage I still have."
Our eyes held. For a second, the store fell away—the buzzing lights, the chipped tile, the racks of gum. It was just me and him and the invisible camera that had been on both of us for years in different ways.
"Think about it," he said, stepping back. The air seemed colder where he'd been. He slid a plain white card across the counter. "That's a secure contact. Text that number if you want to talk somewhere that doesn't smell like burnt coffee."
"I like burnt coffee," I lied.
He gave me a look that said he didn't buy it but respected the attempt.
"They won't wait forever to make a move on you," he said. "Shadow Script is a problem they want to solve. I'm offering you a way to turn that problem into protection." His gaze softened, just for a breath. "For you. For Cassie."
Heat pricked behind my eyes, and I blinked it away angrily. I would not cry in front of Leo Hart. I would not give him that shot.
"You don't know anything about protection," I said.
"No," he agreed. "But I know about surviving long enough to learn." He paused at the door, hood half-up, cap back on. The mask of the movie star slid into place with terrifying ease. "You have forty-eight hours before the studio follows the same breadcrumbs I did. Use them."
The automatic doors sighed open. Cool night air washed in, carrying the faint smell of exhaust and jasmine from the strip of sorry plants by the curb.
"Why me?" I asked, the question escaping before I could swallow it.
He glanced back, profile cut sharp against the darkness.
"Because," he said, "you're the only person who's ever talked about me like I'm both guilty and still capable of better." A beat. "And because you scare the hell out of them."
Then he was gone, swallowed by the empty parking lot.
The doors whispered shut.
I stood there, hand curled around the card he’d left, feeling the weight of it like it was made of lead instead of cheap cardstock.
On my laptop screen, the error banner still glared red.
Forty-eight hours.
Somewhere, very far away, my phone buzzed in my apron pocket. A text from Cassie, timestamped 3:29 a.m.
u alive or did the slush machine finally kill u
I stared at her name until the letters blurred.
Then I looked back at the door Leo Hart had just walked through, the offer burning a hole in my palm.
I had never felt more trapped between the truth I believed in and the power I’d never had.
For the first time since I hit upload on my very first Shadow Script rant, I hesitated.
And in that hesitation, the entire trajectory of my life tilted—just enough that I knew, no matter what I chose next, nothing would go back to the way it was.
