Lights, Camera, Payback!

39 ch49m

In Halcyon City, every frame is a lie and every contract hides a knife. Nora Kass has spent three years buried in rewrites and overnight script sessions to develop Dawnfall, the one series that could finally put her name on the screen as an executive producer. The streaming giant Lumina+ is ready to sign, the buzz is building—and then, overnight, the deal dies. Her cutthroat colleague Dex Harrow “forgets” to lock down the director, sabotages the pitch, and walks away with her project, her credit, and her future. Her mentor quits in disgust, her actor friends are being pimped out at industry “parties,” and the company’s golden reputation is rotting from the inside out. Nora was hired to quietly fix other people’s messes. This time, she’s going to burn the whole playbook. With a ruthless investor-actress who hates Dex even more than she does, a sweet but desperate nearly-famous actor who keeps getting used as bait, and a deceptively chaotic junior assistant who’s secretly a fangirl of Nora’s work, Nora starts rewriting the script of the entire production—contracts, cash flow, casting, and all. The industry thinks she’s just another exhausted development girl. They’re about to find out what happens when the “little” producer runs the show—and decides it’s payback time.

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Lights, Camera, Payback!

Revenge Completed

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CHAPTER 1

Kill Notice

The email lands in my inbox at 9:02 a.m., subject line in all caps like a death certificate. PROJECT STATUS UPDATE – DAWNFALL Corporate-speak for: we’re about to kill your baby, please remember to smile. I read it three times, hoping the words will rearrange into something sane. They don’t. By 9:03, my coffee tastes like ash. By 9:05, my boss pings me: conference room b. now. No punctuation. Julia Crowe only forgets punctuation when she’s about to set something on fire. I stand up from my corner desk in Development—aka the Basement of Broken Dreams—and nearly trip over a box of rejected pilot scripts. Someone has scrawled “RIP SEASON ONE” over the cardboard in Sharpie. Half the writers on this floor have taken photos with it like it’s a tourist attraction. I shove my laptop under my arm and head down the hallway, marching past posters of the shows that didn’t tank. At Lumina+ Studios, the walls are coated with lies. Giant glossy frames of hit series with serious actors staring into the middle distance, awards shining in fake sunlight. Duskfall. Borealis. Crimson Harbor. Shows that exist because someone in my position got bulldozed and another producer stepped over the wreckage to collect their Emmy. Conference Room B is all glass and no soul. Julia is at the head of the table, blazer off, sleeves rolled, earbuds twisted in one hand like she wants to strangle someone with them. Beside her sits Dex Harrow

9 Chapters

CH 1

Lights, Camera, Payback!

Lights, Camera, Payback!

Kill Notice

Table of Contents

Kill Notice

Office Coup

The Coffee Trap

The New Girl in Development

Investor with a Grudge

Notes in the Dark

Afterparty Fallout

Cutting the Producer Out

Wrap Party, New War

Blurb

Kill Notice