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Before I could respond, Ryan emerged from backstage and jumped down to the aisle. He stormed up the theater and out the back door. Andy came out of the curtain a moment later.
“He was just fired,” Andy told me. “Atkins is blaming him.”
I flinched at the news. “Why? That’s not fair!”
Atkins appeared and grabbed Andy by the arm. “Where do you think you’re going?”
“I was going after Ryan. And I assumed… since you fired him, that I…”
Atkins scowled. “He was the one who set up the cameras. You configured the cloud storage. Right? The blame is his. I need your help looking at the camera footage. We have to see if anyone was seen going down the stairs…”
While he and Andy came up with a plan, I stared after Ryan. He had wanted to get to the theater early to check on everything, but I’d distracted him at the townhouse. If he had had more time, he might have discovered the trap.
It was all my fault.
“Excuse me?”
I turned to find the Times writer staring up at me, notepad at the ready.
“Are you Nadia, the understudy to the lead?” His grin was feral. “I’d like to ask you a few questions.”
I leaped from the stage. “I have to go,” I said over my shoulder as I ran to the back of the theater and out the door.
The street outside was crowded this evening. I scanned to the right, then the left, before spotting Ryan’s hulking shape up the street.
I chased after him, which was mostly a fast walk while trying to shoulder through the crowd on the sidewalk. He turned down another street, and I panicked that he would get away from me until I rounded the corner and caught sight of him again.
I followed him for two more blocks before he finally turned into a bar.
The bar I worked at.
I was breathing heavy when I finally reached it and went inside. There wasn’t much of a crowd tonight, and the regulars who normally lingered at the bar weren’t there. Robbie was pouring shots from a bottle of tequila, and frowned when he saw me come inside. I put a finger to my lips.
Carefully approaching Ryan at the bar, I put my hand on his back and whispered, “Looking for a good time, big boy?” into his ear in a sultry voice.
He flinched, then relaxed when he realized it was me. Then he tensed again. “I don’t want any sympathy, Nadia. I’m here to drink.” To prove the point, he downed two shots of tequila and then bit into a lime.
I held up a finger to Robbie. “Put these on my tab.”
“You got it, Nadia,” he replied.
Ryan frowned at the exchange. “You a regular here or something?”
“I like to come here and help men get drunk.” The joke went right over his head, so I added, “This is the bar where I work.”
Ryan chuckled. “Small world. For some reason I assumed your bar was on the upper east side.”
“Bars on the upper east side can afford to hire bartenders who aren’t struggling actresses.”
Robbie returned with the bottle of tequila and looked a question at me. I nodded, and he added a shot glass in front of me and then filled them both with amber liquid.
“Robbie, this is Ryan. Ryan, Robbie.”
Ryan shook his head. “Pleasure.”
Robbie glanced at me and mouthed the word wow silently. Then he said, “So you’re one of Nadia’s four hunks from the show, huh?”
“I was, up until tonight.”
