Forty-seven floors above Hollywood Boulevard, two men were laughing like they'd just robbed a casino and the house was still counting chips.
Gerald Ashworth—silver-haired, mid-sixties, founder of Ashworth-Mead Pictures—sat behind his corner-office desk with a scotch in one hand and a signed contract in the other, shaking his head like a man who'd just found a winning lottery ticket in the pocket of a coat he hadn't worn since the Clinton administration.
Beside him, Dominic—Gerald's son-in-law, VP of Development—was doing the math on his phone and cackling harder every time another zero registered.
$85 million.
That's what the kid had paid. A teenager.
Walked into their office three hours ago with a woman who looked like she bench-pressed Buicks for cardio and another who looked like she'd been 3D-printed in a law firm's future wing. Sat across from Gerald with the posture of someone ordering coffee and said, calm as death: "I want the Celestial Widow."
