“She just signed a new act.” I cracked open my laptop. “Have you heard of Last Rites?”
“Sounds familiar, but I can’t quite place it.” Piper came up behind my chair. “Who are they?”
The first result on Google was their site. I clicked on the link. Their name was spelled out in embellished gothic-like font on a dark background.
“There’s gotta be a page with their bio,” Piper said, leaning over my shoulder.
I scrolled through the site. “I don’t see one. Music, Store, Socials. I guess I should go through each page.”
“Are they on Wikipedia?”
That page was even more bare. “A rock duo formed in LA, California,” I read out. “Not much to go off.”
Piper straightened back up. “Why don’t you ask Trinity? She’s gotta have more than that on them.”
Looking over my shoulder, I met her eyes. “And make her think I’m an idiot? No way. This is probably a test.”
My friend didn’t even bother arguing. She knew I could be right. Trinity had little patience for incompetence, and she tended to see it in nearly everything.
“’K. I’ll leave you to it. We still on for lunch? We can grab our food and listen to these guys in the car.” She jerked her thumb in the direction of my screen.
“Sounds like a plan. I’ll see you at twelve?”
“Deal.” She slapped her palm on my shoulder and walked away.
Last Rites’ online store was barebones—a few T-shirts with their logo and a sticker pack. So were their socials. They’d registered accounts on most of the platforms but didn’t post a lot of content anywhere, with the exception of S Wire, a short-form video platform that had blown up in the past two years. When I scrolled through the videos, I got my first hint as to why Trinity was interested in them.
A number of snippets of their songs had become viral hits, with people making videos and reposting the same sounds over and over again. On the original videos that the band had made, thousands of people were asking for more music and wondering who was behind the band. Not a single video contained the musicians’ faces—they were all just simple animated graphics or still photos.
I frowned. Was this anonymity strategic or accidental? Whatever the reason for it, I had a feeling Trinity would insist they show themselves sooner rather than later. People wanted to be able to connect to the artists behind the music, and that was hard to do if they didn’t know what the artists looked like.
When I pulled up their streaming numbers, my jaw dropped. Trinity wasn’t kidding. They were doingreallywell. Tens of millions of plays on every single they’d put out to date. For an independent band without much of a marketing budget, this was seriously impressive.
I wondered if Ade had heard of them. For a moment, I considered calling her, but I decided against it. When I first started at Hyperion, everyone thought I’d gotten the position because of my connection to my famous sister. Getting a job at one of the top talent agencies in the world wasn’t an easy feat, but despite what everyone had thought, I’d gotten here on my own. I’d never ask Adeline to help me with something like that. I was my own person, and I was determined to succeed on my own merits.
The rumors had dissipated once everyone saw how hard I worked, but it had all left a bad taste in my mouth, and now I felt weird asking my sister for help, even for something as small as this.
Plus, she was busy on tour. Bleeding Moonlight had released a new album a year ago that had gone straight to the top of the charts, and now they were on the European leg of a very long tour. She had more important things to deal with than unnecessary calls from her little sister.
* * *
“I can’t get enough of this chipotle sauce,” Piper said with her mouth half full. We were sitting inside of her ten-year-old Toyota in the parking lot outside the office. “It’s honestly better than any orgasm I’ve ever had.”
I laughed. “Manny’s not doing it for you?”
My friend rolled her eyes at the mention of her illicit work lover. “Hooking up with him was a mistake. He doesn’t fucking get that I don’t want anyone on the team to know we’re sleeping together. Last week in New York, he tried to pull me into a hotel bathroom for a quickie. Lucassawhim, and I had to endure a very awkward coffee chat while my boss tried to suss out whether Manny was being too handsy with me. I swear, Lucas was ready to call in HR, but I finally convinced him he read the situation wrong.”
“I think you’re making too big a deal out of it,” I said between sips of my Diet Coke. My sandwich sat half-finished on my lap. This lunch wasn’t in my budget, so I’d have to make up for it by having instant noodles for dinner, but Piper was in the office so rarely, I couldn’t pass up on lunch with my friend. “Everyone sleeps with each other in this industry. We don’t even have anything about it in the employee handbook.”
Piper cocked a brow. “You read that thing? I swear, Mol. Only you. But, hey, that’s good to know.”
I winked at her. “You have to know the rules before you break them.”
This made her laugh. “When have you ever broken a rule?”
I gave her a self-conscious shrug. “I don’t know.” After my parents died, breaking rules seemed like a luxury I couldn’t afford. What if I did something stupid, got caught, and the state took me from my sister? Yes, in retrospect, I indulged in a lot of catastrophic thinking, but losing my parents in a car accident had been catastrophic and very real.
No, I wasn’t much of a rule breaker. The worst I’d done was crash a pit party meant for seniors as a junior, and even then, I’d only stayed for thirty minutes before my nerves got to me and I went home.
