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There was nothing too jarring.

Until the end.

“Coming in dead last, if you’ll excuse the pun,” the man read off, making me sit up straighter in my seat because there was only one more (un)dead host to mention, “we have: The Midnight Frequency.”

“Silas Ashford’s new show?” Mr. Lane asked, brows shooting up.

Uh-oh.

That was not a good look.

“Yeah. He had a decent first show. But it has been a downward trend ever since.”

There was no good reason for the way my stomach sloshed at that. So I went ahead and blamed the fact that I hadn’t eaten anything since the one burnt cookie from the night before that I luckily noticed was overcooked before the smoke alarm went off. Nothing else made sense.

“That is incredibly disappointing,” Mr. Lane said. Which was basically his way of cussing and throwing a mug across the room just to watch it shatter. Beside me, the shifter straightened.

“It’s a very new show.”

Why the heck was I trying to defend him?

I had no stake in his show.

Except…

Except Silas Ashford was—whether I wanted to admit it or not—the only reason I’d had a killer writing session after being hopelessly blocked for weeks.

Was it selfish to want to protect his show from cancellation just because I’d started writing again? Sure. But it was also, you know, a nice deed.

“We paid Mr. Ashford a handsome advance,” Mr. Lane explained.

That wasn’t standard practice.

Why would they bend the rules for Silas?

Maybe it was time to do a little digging.

If it was anyone else, I would sic Tess and Margo on the case. Those girls could give any three-letter government organization a run for their money. Once, Margo had been approached in a coffee shop by a hot guy whose last name she didn’t know. By dinner, they knew his full name, his mother’s maiden name, where he’d gone to school, who he voted for in the last election, and where he worked.

They were incredible. In a mildly terrifying way.

But since it was Silas, and since Tess already had the idea in her head that I should hook up with the vampire, I would have to fall back on my own research skills.

Seeing as I once wrote a historical romance about a frontier woman and needed to not only learn how people spoke back then, and the weather patterns in Wyoming in the 1800s, but also how to cure meat and store vegetables for the winter, I figured I could find some information on a radio show host and why my boss paid him up front for the job.

“All the more reason to give his show a chance to see if you can recoup that investment.”

Why was I still speaking? No one asked me.

Mr. Lane exhaled and nodded at me.

“She has a point. How long until he starts costing us money if this continues?”

“It takes one to three weeks to get these kinds of results in,” the other man replied. “I say three weeks is a fair place to reassess.”

I went ahead and didn’t remind them that they would also be able to see the streaming numbers almost immediately. For all I knew, those were in a nosedive as well. I didn’t want to give them any more rope to hang Silas with.

If he couldn’t get his ratings up in three weeks, then, well, he kind of deserved cancellation.