Chapter 1
✦RICHARD TURKISIAN✦
Royal City does not sleep. That is perhaps the first thing anyone learns about it — the billboards never dim, the camera flashes never stop, and the conversations on every entertainment channel run twenty-four hours without pause, seven days a week, three hundred and sixty-five days a year. I have lived here my entire life, and still, every morning when I step out of the Turkisian Tower’s private elevator and face the city spread below like a kingdom waiting to be claimed, something inside my chest tightens with the particular weight of a man who has inherited everything and chosen nothing.
My name is Richard Turkisian. At twenty-eight, I am the heir to the Turkisian Group — publishing, film production, script development, three award-winning streaming platforms and a quarterly literary magazine that has featured on the cover of every major cultural review in the world. My father, Victor Turkisian, built this empire from the bones of a single printing house. I was born into the finished product. The difference matters more than most people admit.
I also write novels. Romance novels, specifically, which is the detail that never fails to produce an interesting reaction when mentioned in interviews. The interviewer always pauses. Their expression rearranges itself from professional interest into something that wants to say but you seem so cold, and then they remember the camera is on and they smile instead and say fascinating. I write about love because I understand its architecture. The way longing builds, the way tension accumulates, the way two people orbit each other before the inevitable collision. I understand all of this the way an engineer understands a bridge — structurally, mechanically, with complete respect for the forces involved and zero personal experience of crossing it.
Three bestsellers. Four international translation deals. One adaptation currently in pre-production at our own studio, which Ethan says is both a conflict of interest and the most efficient pipeline in entertainment history. Ethan finds everything amusing. It is one of the things I tolerate about him.
This particular Tuesday morning begins the way most of my mornings begin: with my phone already full before I have finished my coffee. Ethan Vale is the first name on the screen, because Ethan is always the first name on the screen, because Ethan has the sleeping schedule of a person who has decided that rest is for people with less information to distribute.
“Turkisian Entertainment pulled the new streaming numbers. You’re welcome. Also the Florita campaign released overnight. It’s everywhere. She looks — look, I’m not saying anything, I’m just saying the algorithm is burying our promo.”
I put the phone face-down on the marble counter. I finish my coffee. I turn the phone over again.
Florita. The name sits in my awareness the way a splinter sits in a fingertip — too small to be a real problem, too persistent to ignore. The Florita Group is Royal City’s other dynasty, the one that occupies the other half of every cultural conversation the city has been having for the last decade. Where Turkisian is words — stories, scripts, the architecture of narrative — Florita is image. Advertisements that stop traffic. Campaigns that define seasons. And at the center of all of it, the face that their entire empire is currently organized around: Aria Florita.
I have never spoken to Aria Florita directly. We have been in the same room at approximately fourteen industry events in the last three years. I know this because I counted them once, in the middle of writing a chapter about two people who keep not quite meeting, and realized with professional irritation that I was drawing on experience I wasn’t aware I’d accumulated.
She is exactly the kind of woman who makes a novelist’s brain take unauthorized notes. The way she moves in a room — like someone who has decided the space belongs to her not out of arrogance but out of the simple confidence of a person who has never been given a reason to doubt her right to occupy it. The way she smiles for cameras versus the way her expression settles when she thinks no one is watching. I have noticed the difference. I have written it down. I have not examined the fact that I noticed it.
I shower. I dress. I consider my schedule: morning at the studio reviewing the adaptation script, lunch that I will skip in favor of working through it, afternoon at the publishing house for the quarterly review meeting that my father will want to chair even though I chair it, and this evening — the Meridian Cultural Awards. Royal City’s most photographed event of the spring season. Every significant name in entertainment, fashion, media, and commerce in one ballroom.
Including, inevitably, Aria Florita.
I button my jacket in front of the mirror. The face that looks back is what the entertainment press calls impossibly composed — a description I’ve always found revealing, because it suggests that composure is an achievement rather than a baseline. I have a baseline. I maintain it because the alternative is the kind of story I watch other people’s careers become, the kind with paparazzi on hospital steps and tearful press releases about personal journeys.
I have no interest in becoming that story.
My phone lights up again. Noah Crest this time, which means something has actually happened rather than simply being Ethan’s morning entertainment report.
“Have you seen the Billboard list? Your new release is sitting at number two. Guess what’s number one.”
I already know. A lifestyle collection tied to the Florita summer campaign — a coffee table book, technically, a genre that barely counts — has charted above my new literary fiction release for the third consecutive week. The book is beautiful. I’ve seen it. The photographs are exceptional. It is not competing with my work in any meaningful sense and it is also, in every measurable commercial sense, beating it.
I put the phone in my pocket. I pick up my manuscript notes from the desk — the new book, chapter twenty-two, the part where the two leads are finally in the same room and one of them has to speak first. I’ve been stuck on this chapter for eleven days.
It occurs to me, briefly, that I have no idea what it would feel like to be in a room with someone and not know what to say. I have always known what to say. I have always had the next sentence. It is the one reliable thing about me.
Tonight is the Meridian Awards. I will be composed. I will be gracious. I will receive the Literary Excellence commendation that the committee has been telegraphing for two months and I will give the short, precise speech I have already drafted and I will not think about Aria Florita at all.
I close the manuscript notes.
Chapter twenty-two can wait.
