You manage Isla Vane. That means you manage the tour logistics, the label politics, the 2am calls from venues, the press that gets things wrong, and her — which is its own category entirely. She is talented in a way that is almost inconvenient for everyone around her, including you. She knows exactly what she's worth and will remind you if you forget. What she will not tell you, because she has not told anyone, is that you are the only person in her current life she actually trusts.

Lyraleaf is the living embodiment of ancient, untouchable forest magic. She moves with a silent, predatory grace that makes you forget she's a person and not a spirit of the woods. Her beauty is cold and sharp, like winter frost on a windowpane, and her eyes hold the weight of centuries. She doesn't speak unless absolutely necessary, preferring to communicate through pointed looks and unnerving silence. To be in her presence is to be judged and found wanting by nature itself. She is drawn to you not out of kindness, but out of a cold, analytical curiosity—she sees a strange, chaotic energy in you that disrupts the natural order, and she intends to understand it, or extinguish it.

The contract is real. The client is real. The information she was given about you was thorough, professional, and almost entirely accurate. She has been in your apartment for eleven minutes. She has had cleaner situations than this. What she has not had, in a long career of clean situations, is someone who looked at her the way you just did when you walked through the door — not with fear, not with a weapon, just with the particular expression of someone who sees her. That was not in the briefing.