The Audition He Wasn’t Supposed to See
The elevator smelled like old coffee and desperation. Lyra Reyes adjusted the collar of her blazer for the seventh time, watching the floor numbers climb past four, five, six. Her reflection in the brushed steel doors looked like someone playing dress-up—a woman who’d spent the last three years teaching community college theater theory, standing in line for auditions that went to nepo babies and Instagram models.
The doors slid open on eight.
Evergreen Studios had kept its seventies architecture the way some people kept inherited furniture—out of obligation rather than taste. Orange shag carpet ran the length of the hallway, flattened by decades of footsteps. Headshots lined the walls in cheap frames, actors whose names Lyra had never heard, playing roles she’d never seen.
Room 812. The casting office.
She pulled the door open and stepped into a waiting room that contained exactly four folding chairs and a receptionist who looked old enough to have worked here since the shag carpet was new.
“Lyra Reyes?”
“That’s me.”
The receptionist checked a clipboard. “They’re ready for you. Down the hall, last door on the left.”
No waiting. No sitting in the chair that had a suspicious stain on the cushion. Just—straight in. The kind of treatment that meant they were either desperate or had already made up their minds.
Lyra walked the corridor, counting her steps the way she did before every audition. *One, two, three. Breathe in. Four, five, six. Hold it. Seven, eight, nine. Out.* The technique was supposed to calm her. It mostly just made her aware of how fast her heart was beating.
The door was partially open. She could hear voices inside.
“—lighting test ran long. We’ll start in five, give the readers a chance to look over the sides.”
Male voice. Deep. Familiar in a way that made her stomach drop before she could place why.
She pushed the door open.
The room was a standard casting suite—table with scripts, camera in the corner, two chairs facing a desk. The man behind the desk was looking down at a tablet, scrolling through something. Dark hair, cut short. Broad shoulders under a charcoal sweater. The way he held his jaw when he was reading, slightly tilted to the left—
He looked up.
The world didn’t stop. That was a lie people told themselves about moments of profound shock, that everything froze. Time didn’t freeze. It just moved wrong, like a record skipping, leaving her standing in the doorway while her brain tried to catch up.
Killian Ashby.
Six years. Six years since she’d watched him walk out of her apartment, duffel bag over his shoulder, saying he had a shoot in Vancouver for three weeks. Six years since he’d stopped answering her calls. Six years since she’d found out she was pregnant, two weeks after he disappeared, and spent the next nine months trying to reach him through numbers that no longer worked, emails that bounced back, social media accounts that had been deleted.
And here he was. Behind a director’s table. In Los Angeles. Looking at her like she was a stranger who’d walked into the wrong room.
“Ms. Reyes?” His voice was calm. Professional. Like he’d rehearsed this moment a thousand times and had finally gotten the performance right. “I’m Killian Ashby. Thank you for coming in.”
Lyra’s mouth opened. Closed. The silence stretched.
“I’m sorry,” she managed. “I—I thought the director was—”
“Eric Whitmore.” Killian set the tablet down. “He’s producing. I’m directing. The project shifted during development.”
The name hit her like a second shock. Eric Whitmore. Son of Silas Whitmore, who owned half the studio lots in Los Angeles. The Whitmores were Hollywood royalty, the kind of family that had been in the business so long they’d started believing they were the business.
And Killian Ashby was directing for them.
“You’re directing *Beneath the Ice*?”
“That’s right.”
The survival film. Six weeks of shooting in Patagonia, half of it below freezing. The script was brutal—four climbers stranded on a glacier, forced to make impossible choices. The role Lyra was auditioning for, Dr. Elena Vasquez, was the one who held the moral line while everyone else lost theirs.
It was the best script she’d read in three years.
And Killian Ashby was the man who would decide if she got it.
She walked to the chair across from his desk and sat down. Her legs felt like they belonged to someone else. “The sides are for the third act confrontation. Page sixty-seven.”
“I know.” He picked up a copy of the script, flipped to the marked page. “Whenever you’re ready.”
No preamble. No acknowledgment of the history crackling between them like exposed wire. Just the work.
Fine. She could do the work.
Lyra centered herself, found the character’s breath, and began.
The scene was a monologue—Elena trying to convince the group’s leader not to sacrifice the youngest climber for the sake of the rest of them. Lyra let herself feel the cold that wasn’t there, the desperation, the moral clarity of someone who knew she was going to lose but had to try anyway.
When she finished, the room was silent.
Killian’s pen had stopped moving halfway through. He was watching her with something unreadable in his eyes, something that might have been recognition or might have been calculation.
“That was good,” he said.
“Thank you.”
“The vulnerability in the third paragraph—where did you find that?”
Lyra met his gaze. “I imagined losing something I couldn’t get back.”
Something flickered across his face. Guilt? Regret? It was gone before she could name it.
“We’ll be making decisions by end of week,” he said, standing. “My assistant will—”
The door behind her opened.
“Daddy!”
Lyra turned.
A boy stood in the doorway. Six years old, maybe seven. Dark hair, cut the same way as Killian’s. Eyes that were brown, like her own. He was wearing a miniature version of the crew jacket Killian had draped over his chair, the sleeves rolled up three times.
And on his left wrist, just visible beneath the cuff, was a birthmark.
Three small dots in a triangle. Like a constellation.
Lyra’s breath stopped.
She knew that birthmark. She’d seen it in a photograph, taken moments after her son was born. Stillborn. Wrapped in a white blanket, the nurse’s gloved hand holding his tiny wrist for the camera, capturing the only physical proof that he had existed at all.
She’d kept that photograph in a drawer for six years. Had memorized every detail of it. Had imagined a thousand times what it would feel like to watch him grow up, to see the birthmark shift and stretch with his skin as he became a man.
“Jace.” Killian’s voice was sharp. “I told you to wait with Rosa.”
“I got bored.” The boy—Jace—walked into the room, completely unafraid, and wrapped himself around Killian’s leg. “Who’s that?”
“A woman auditioning for the movie.”
“Is she going to be in it?”
“I don’t know yet.”
Lyra was still staring at the birthmark.
Her mouth formed words she didn’t authorize. “What’s your name?”
The boy looked at her with the direct, unblinking gaze that only children possessed. “Jace.”
“Jace what?”
“Jace Ashby.”
Killian’s hand landed on the boy’s shoulder, a gesture that looked casual but felt like a cage. “Ms. Reyes, I think we’re done here.”
She couldn’t move. Couldn’t look away from the small face that held pieces of her own, pieces of Killian, pieces of a ghost she’d been mourning for six years.
“He’s alive,” she heard herself say.
Killian’s expression went cold. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“I held him. I held a baby in my arms and they told me he was dead. They showed me a photograph of his wrist, and I—” Her voice cracked. She didn’t care. “That’s the same birthmark. That’s the same *exact*—”
“Ms. Reyes.” Killian stepped between her and Jace. “I think you’re confused. Jace is my son. His mother passed away during childbirth.”
The words were practiced. Smooth. A story he’d told so many times it had become true.
“No.” Lyra shook her head. “No, that’s not—”
“Daddy, is she okay?” Jace’s voice was small. Scared.
“She’s fine, buddy. She’s just upset because she didn’t get the part.” Killian lifted the boy into his arms, settling him on his hip like he’d done it a thousand times. “Why don’t you go find Rosa? Tell her I’ll be out in five minutes.”
Jace hesitated, looking at Lyra with something too knowing for a six-year-old. Then he nodded and ran out the door.
The moment it closed, Killian’s demeanor shifted. The warmth drained out of him like water from a cracked glass.
“You need to leave,” he said.
“I need the truth.”
“The truth is that Jace is my son, and you have no claim to him.”
“I’m his *mother*.”
“You were told he was stillborn.” Killian’s voice was flat. Clinical. “I don’t know what you think you saw, but that birthmark—millions of children have similar markings. It’s not proof of anything.”
“Then let me see his medical records. Let me—”
“No.”
The word hit like a door slamming shut.
Lyra stood there, shaking, the audition forgotten, the role forgotten, everything reduced to the single impossible fact that her son was alive and the man who had taken him was standing three feet away.
“Why?” she whispered.
Killian looked at her. For a moment, the mask cracked. She saw something desperate underneath, something that looked almost like fear.
“Because if you push this,” he said, “you won’t just lose him again. You’ll lose yourself.”
“What does that mean?”
“The Whitmores don’t leave loose ends.” He glanced at the door, checking for eavesdroppers. “Silas Whitmore controls this industry. He controls the hospitals. He controls the records. If he finds out you know—”
“Know what? That you stole my son?”
“That *he* stole your son.” Killian’s voice dropped so low she had to lean forward to hear. “You think I chose this? You think I wanted to watch you grieve a child who was still breathing?”
Lyra’s knees gave out. She caught herself on the edge of the desk.
“I was in Vancouver when you called,” Killian continued. “Silas’s people picked me up at the airport. Told me Lyra Reyes was dead. Car accident. They showed me a fake death certificate, a fake burial notice. I spent six months believing you were gone.”
“That’s not—”
“When I found out the truth, Jace was already a year old. Already living with me. Already bonded. And Silas made it very clear what would happen if I tried to contact you.” He paused. “What would happen to Jace.”
Her son. His name was Jace. He had Killian’s hair and her eyes and a birthmark shaped like a constellation on his left wrist.
And he was a hostage.
“Why are you telling me this?” she asked.
“Because you saw him. And I know you won’t let this go.” Killian ran a hand through his hair, and for the first time she saw how tired he was, how thin, how close to breaking. “So I’m giving you a choice. Walk away. Go back to your life. Pretend this never happened.”
“And the other option?”
“We can try to figure something out. But it’s dangerous. For you. For Jace. For me.” He met her eyes. “Silas has people everywhere. Lawyers. Private security. People who make problems disappear. If he finds out you’re asking questions—”
“I don’t care.”
“You should.”
“I don’t.”
The silence stretched. Somewhere in the building, a clock was ticking. Lyra could hear it now, cutting through the thick air between them.
“I have Jace at a school event next Saturday,” Killian said finally. “The Botanical Gardens. Ten in the morning. If you want to meet him properly—if you want to start figuring out how we fix this—be there.”
“And if I don’t come?”
“Then we never had this conversation.” He picked up his tablet, the gesture dismissive, final. “Your choice, Lyra. But if you make it, you’d better be sure. Because once you step into this, there’s no going back.”
She turned toward the door.
Her hand was on the handle when he spoke again.
“You’re his mother, Lyra. I know. And if you breathe a word, we’re all dead.”