The Hollywood Handshake
The travel from motel hideout to secure safehouse consumed the next hour. Headlights cut cold through the gathering dusk.
The safehouse sat in the shadow of Soundstage 14, a whitewashed bungalow that had once housed a sitcom cast for a network special two decades dead. Now it held the Voss family—what was left of it—behind windows that Reid had already lined with privacy film and temporary locks.
Julian stood at the kitchen counter with a burner phone pressed to his ear, the device slick in his palm. He’d dialed the number from memory, a sequence of digits he’d never imagined using again.
“Mariana Reyes,” said the voice on the third ring. Flat. Professional. The voice of a woman who’d learned to keep her tone neutral in every negotiation.
“It’s Julian Voss.”
A pause. The kind that carried weight—whether surprise or calculation, he couldn’t tell.
“I heard Covington put a price on your head,” she said. “Figured you’d be in Mexico by now.”
“I need a meeting. Off the record, off any grid. You still keep an office in Burbank?”
“I keep an office in a parking garage with a card table and a router that doesn’t exist. Same difference.” She exhaled—not slowly, just a sharp release of air. “Two hours. The old Santa Monica lot, warehouse seven. Don’t bring anyone with a visible weapon.”
The line went dead.
Julian set the phone down and looked at Isabella. She sat on the couch with Eli asleep against her shoulder, one hand resting on the boy’s hair, the other gripping a half-empty glass of water. The television had been muted, but the closed captions still scrolled: *Covington Entertainment stock rises amid investor confidence.*
“Who was that?” she asked.
“Someone who hates Covington more than I do. She used to be his distribution partner before he buried her company in a contract dispute. Now she runs a boutique production house out of a storage unit.”
“You trust her?”
“I trust her self-interest.” Julian picked his jacket off the chair. “She needs content. I need protection. That’s a deal, not a friendship.”
Isabella shifted Eli carefully onto the cushion and stood. “I’m not letting you go alone.”
“Reid stays here with you and Eli. That’s non-negotiable.”
“Julian—”
“If Owen finds this address while I’m gone, you’ll need someone who can put a body between him and our son.” He said it plainly, without drama, because the math was that simple. “I’m not taking risks. I’m hedging them.”
She held his gaze for three seconds, then nodded once. The kind of nod that meant she understood the strategy, not that she liked it.
—
The Santa Monica lot had been a film factory in the nineties, a place that churned out rom-coms and action B-thrillers with the same assembly-line rhythm. Now it was a ghost of soda-stained concrete and empty parking spaces where weeds pushed through the asphalt cracks.
Warehouse seven had its roll-up door cracked just enough for a man to slip through. Julian did, stepping into a space lit by a single overhead work light and furnished with a metal desk, two folding chairs, and a coffee maker that looked like it had survived a fire.
Mariana Reyes sat behind the desk in a tailored suit that cost more than the furniture around her. She was fifty-two, with silver-streaked hair pulled into a braid and eyes that had spent thirty years reading scripts and people with equal precision.
“You look thinner,” she said.
“You look richer.”
“Appearances.” She gestured to the chair across from her. “Sit. We’ve got twenty minutes before my assistant calls the cops if I don’t check in.”
Julian sat. The chair wobbled on an uneven leg.
“Covington put a reward on your kid,” Mariana said. “That’s a special kind of play. Jasper’s always been a bastard, but dragging a seven-year-old into it? That’s either desperation or a message.”
“It’s both. He wants me to come out of hiding. He wants to make an example.”
“Of you or the script?”
“Same thing, at this point.”
Mariana leaned back, the chair creaking under her. “Let me guess—you want me to hide you. Put you in one of my projects, give you a producing credit under a pseudonym, keep the Covingtons off your trail.”
“I want more than that.” Julian pulled a folded document from his inner pocket and slid it across the desk. “I want a four-picture deal. Exclusive. Full creative control, backend points, and a security rider that covers my family.”
Mariana picked up the document. She read the first page, then the second. Her expression didn’t change, but her thumb tapped twice against the paper—a tell Julian remembered from their old negotiations. She was calculating.
“You’re asking me to declare war on Jasper Covington,” she said.
“I’m asking you to hire a writer who just delivered the best script of his career. The war is already happening. I’m offering you a better position.”
She set the document down. “Your script. The one Covington is bleeding over. What’s in it?”
“A hundred and seventeen pages. A story about a man who builds a machine to talk to the dead, but the machine starts talking back in voices it shouldn’t know. It’s a thriller. It’s a tragedy. It’s the best thing I’ve ever written.”
“And Covington has a copy.”
“He has the first draft. I have the final revision. Every change is a locked door he doesn’t have the key to.”
Mariana was quiet for a long moment. The warehouse hummed with the distant buzz of a failing fluorescent tube.
“Four pictures,” she said finally. “I get first look on every draft. You deliver on schedule, no extensions. Security costs come off your backend. And I want a co-writing credit on the second film.”
Julian felt the system’s notification before it appeared—a subtle pressure behind his eyes, like the moment before a headache takes shape.
**Negotiation skill: Level 4**
**Check passed: DC 18 vs 17**
**Outcome: Favorable terms secured**
**Rival studio pact established. Protection status: ACTIVE.**
“You get a story by credit,” Julian said. “Not co-writer. And the security rider covers my wife and son for the duration of all four productions.”
Mariana smiled, and it was the first genuine expression she’d let slip. “Fine. I’ll have the papers drawn up tonight. You and your family move to my Santa Clarita lot tomorrow morning. Secure bungalow, private school options, full perimeter team.”
She extended her hand.
Julian shook it. The grip was firm, deliberate, the handshake of someone who’d learned that contracts meant nothing without a human seal on the deal.
—
Back at the safehouse, Isabella had made a meal from the canned goods in the pantry—soup that tasted like salt and tin, crackers that crumbled at a touch. They ate at a card table while Eli drew dragons on a napkin with a crayon Reid had found in a drawer.
“A dragon,” Julian said, sitting down beside his son. “That’s a good one.”
“It’s a fire dragon,” Eli said without looking up. “He breathes fire and guards a castle. The castle has a princess, but she’s not trapped. She just lives there because she likes the view.”
“Smart princess.”
“Yeah.” Eli finished the tail and looked up. “Are we going to stay here forever?”
Isabella’s hand paused over her soup spoon.
“No,” Julian said. “We’re going to a different house tomorrow. A safer one. And there’s a school there, with other kids.”
“Will there be dragons?”
Julian glanced at Isabella. She gave him the faintest nod—permission, or encouragement, or both.
“Yes,” he said. “Actually, there is a dragon. Want to see it?”
Eli’s eyes went wide. “A real one?”
“Come on.”
He took his son’s hand and led him out of the bungalow, across the studio lot under the sodium-vapor lights that painted everything in amber. Soundstage 14 stood dark and silent, but Julian had a key card that Mariana had slipped him during the handshake.
The door groaned open. Inside, the stage was a cavern of shadows and catwalks, the air thick with dust and the smell of old wood and paint. Julian found the light panel and activated the worklights.
In the center of the stage stood a dragon.
It was a prop from a fantasy film that had gone straight to video a decade ago—fiberglass and latex, painted in deep greens and golds, its wings spread wide and its jaws open in a frozen roar. It was chipped and faded, missing a few teeth, held up by steel cables that disappeared into the darkness above.
But to a seven-year-old boy, it was real.
Eli stopped at the edge of the light. His mouth fell open. “Is it… is it going to wake up?”
“No,” Julian said. “It’s just a prop. A costume, really. Someone built it so they could tell a story about it.”
“Does it have a name?”
Julian looked at the dragon. He’d never named it. It had been a piece of set dressing, a background element in a film no one remembered. But Eli was waiting, and the moment mattered.
“His name is Ember,” Julian said. “And he used to guard a mountain full of treasure, but he got bored. So he retired to Hollywood.”
Eli laughed—a bright, unguarded sound that cut through the silence of the soundstage. “Dragons don’t retire.”
“This one did. He’s an actor now. He does commercials for car insurance.”
“No he doesn’t.”
“You’re right. He’s too famous for that. He only does feature films.”
Eli stepped closer, reaching out to touch the dragon’s snout. His fingers brushed the cold fiberglass, tracing the painted scales. “Can we come back tomorrow?”
“We can come back anytime you want. This is our studio now.”
**Relationship update: Eli Voss**
**Bonding event: Dragon prop introduction**
**+15 relationship points**
**Father-son affinity: Warming**
Isabella appeared in the doorway of the soundstage, her arms crossed, watching them. She didn’t say anything. She didn’t need to. The look on her face was enough—relief, gratitude, and something fragile that Julian recognized as hope.
He didn’t deserve it. Not yet. But he held onto it anyway.
—
The night settled over the lot. Reid patrolled the perimeter, checking locks and sightlines. Isabella read Eli a story from a dog-eared paperback they’d found in the bungalow’s bookshelf. Julian sat at the kitchen table, reviewing the contract Mariana had emailed, every clause a thread in the net he was weaving around his family.
At 11:47 PM, the system pinged.
**Security status: Nominal**
**Threat assessment: Elevated but contained**
**Next check: 06:00 AM**
He almost believed it.
A knock at the door. Reid opens it to find a courier with a single envelope. Inside: a photo of Eli at the park, circled in red. On the back: ‘You can’t hide your bloodline, Julian. —Owen.’