The message came on a Tuesday, midway through a session on track six.
I was in the booth working through the second verse when Mael's voice came through the talkback: "Take five."
His tone was the same as always. Flat. Steady. I pulled off the headphones and came out, and he was standing by the board with his phone in his hand, reading something. He didn't look up when I walked in. He just turned the phone and held it out.
I read it.
It was three short paragraphs. Professional language, clean and careful. A consulting opportunity. One song. Competitive compensation. Full discretion guaranteed. The intermediary's name meant nothing to me, but the request was written in a voice I recognized—smooth and reasonable on the surface, the way Damien always sounded when he needed something.
I stood there and read it twice.
Then I handed the phone back.
"They're out of material," I said.
"Yes."
"Both of them."
"Kaiya's album rollout starts in six weeks," Mael said. "Her label is already pushing back the single date. And Damien hasn't filed anything with his publishing house in four months." He set the phone down on the board. "They're not coming to you because they want to. They're coming because they have no one else."
I crossed my arms. Looked at the glass. In the booth, the mic was still live, the little red light still on.
Eight years. Eight years of writing every song that mattered and disappearing afterward like smoke. And now they needed one more. Just one more. No public credit required.
Of course not.
"Mael."
"I know."
"I want to—"
"I know," he said again. He looked at me steadily. His voice dropped a fraction. "You know exactly what to do with this."
The room was quiet. The hiss of the board. The city thirty floors down.
I held his gaze for a moment. Then I nodded once.
---
We sat at the kitchen table until three in the morning.
Mael made coffee. I had a legal pad and three different pens and I kept switching between them for no real reason except that my hands needed to move. The Hudson was invisible out the windows—just darkness and the scattered lights of the opposite shore.
We went through the mechanics slowly. Carefully. The way you go through something that has to work.
Silas Wren. I'd known his catalog since I was twenty-two, back when he was releasing EPs on Bandcamp and his fanbase was small and ferocious and exactly the kind of people who noticed everything. He was indie in the original sense—no label, no management, total ownership of every note he'd ever recorded. And his legal team had a reputation. When someone came for his work, they didn't send a letter. They filed within forty-eight hours.
I wrote his name at the top of the legal pad and drew a circle around it.
"It has to be close enough," I said. "The melodic structure. The chord progression in the chorus. Close enough that his team can identify it immediately."
"But finished enough that she doesn't look twice." Mael set down his coffee. "Kaiya won't check. She'll hear a polished track and move."
"That's the arrogance I'm counting on."
He looked at me across the table. Something moved in his expression that I couldn't fully read.
"We contact Silas's team first," he said. "Before you write a single bar. We document everything. Timestamped files. The handoff chain. Every step."
"Agreed."
"He has to be ready to move the moment she publishes."
"He will be." I tapped the pen against the legal pad. "He's been waiting for someone to do something like this for years. Silas hates what's happened to this industry."
Mael nodded slowly. He looked at the legal pad, then at me. "You're sure."
It wasn't quite a question.
I thought about the bench outside Nordstrom. I thought about Kaiya's voice through the phone—pathetic little helper—and Damien's hand connecting with my face and his eyes afterward, cold and unbothered. I thought about the message sitting in Mael's phone, clean and professional. One song. No credit required.
"I'm sure," I said.
---
I spent two weeks building it.
I worked mornings, mostly. The studio before Mael came in, the piano and staff paper and the part of Silas's catalog I knew by heart. I preserved the things that mattered—the ascending figure in the chorus, the rhythmic DNA of the verse, the particular harmonic move in the bridge that was unmistakably his. Then I dressed it up. Polished the production notes. Smoothed the edges until it sounded like exactly what Kaiya would want to hear: commercial, clean, effortlessly cool.
Beautiful wrapping paper on a lit fuse.
Mael sat with me through two of the late sessions. He didn't touch the work. He just listened, head tilted, the way he always listened—with his whole body. Once, around midnight, he said quietly, "The bridge. Don't change the bridge." I hadn't been planning to.
Silas Wren's team confirmed in writing on a Wednesday. They had the documentation. They were ready.
I wrote the delivery email myself. Three sentences. Professional. Warm, even. The kind of warmth that costs nothing.
I hit send and closed my laptop and sat for a moment in the quiet.
The bait was in the water.
Now we waited.
