CHAPTER 72 – Bleeding Love

Sony’s limo moved in long, unhurried loops around the Staples Centre’s outer ring road, the way an orca circled a seal before going for the kill.

Kelvin Grant, nineteen, Grammy nominee, zero awards, sat across from the three wise men glaring at him in various states of calculated disappointment. Of the three, he felt genuine respect for Trent Davis, who had engineered Kel’s career. He felt fear toward the lawyer, Andrew Whitfield, who even now meticulously worked his BlackBerry. The last man was Carey Fielding, the producer who had discovered Kel at fifteen.

Trent had been pleasant for the first three minutes of the ride.
The pleasantness was what made Kel more terrified than anything.

“You know what I like about you, Kel?” Davis asked him.

Kel did not answer the loaded question.

“I find that, despite everything, you have respect for the craft,” Davis continued. His CEO spoke with the typical cadence and accent of the well-to-do Manhattanite, though Kel could absolutely imagine his boss speaking with a Sicilian accent. They were, after all, in a dimly lit limo. There was a BlackBerry on Davis’ lap which he stroked. Outside, distantly, were the sounds of the city. You come to me, Kel’s imagination said, on the night of my daughter’s Grammy…

“Kelvin,” Fielding called him out.

Kel’s mind snapped back to reality.

“You’re a talent, Kel,” Davis continued. “I appreciate that. In your place, some artists show up late, who sleep through sound checks, who don’t take care of their bodies, who indulge excessively. People who lose their passports before flying out to a concert.”

Then the hammer dropped.

“But punching our title artist on the night she wins the Grammy. That’s a first.”

“I am very… very sorry, Sir,” Kel could only find the words he used for his old Principal. “I think you should know, sir, that I didn’t hit Kellie. I never struck her.”

Davis exhaled.
Kel’s heart sank. Was that NOT the right answer? Should he confess to a crime he didn’t commit?

Sony’s CEO put his face in his hands, then stayed like that for a long, torturous second. The other two men shook their heads. Davis pulled down his hands slowly, then looked at the ceiling of the limo as if he was asking for advice from a higher, more benevolent power than he could ever be.

Kel felt his insides shrivel. Should I act like a bitch? That’s the only thing these old bastards want.

“Mr Grant.” Davis’ voice was the temperature of a windy, icy moor in winter. “I am not here to ask you for your version of the truth. Where you’re going, the truth doesn’t matter.”

Kel said nothing. His suit was still damp with the truth.

“Before I explain, I should apologise for thinking that you understood, because, clearly, you do not. I guess if you did, you wouldn’t have tried to break Euphemia Fontaine’s arm.”

The green-eyed monster stirred. Fontaine, again?

“Whatever Will Be, Deer-re-mi, Starry Starry Night, Doves Cry,” Davis rattled off a list of songs Kel had never heard or known. ‘Starry Starry Night’ was licensed to the Met for five months. It will soon be playing in 22 internationally renowned museums, each with its own Van Gogh Tour, over the next 6 years. Euphemia’s sponsor is Juliana Vaughan, the headmistress of the Met, though that’s beside the point.”

Kel had no idea who or what this Juliana Vaughan was, but Davis clearly cared.
He nodded. What else could he do?

“Eppie gave us three Grammys tonight.” Davis did not begrudge his ignorance. “And in the next hour, Sony will release In the Pines and Dream a Little. The first is an Appalachian blues ballad exploring violence against young women of colour. Euphemia Fontaine has never written a dud, but that’s not the point either.”

“Sir…” Kel now spoke with greater sincerity than when he was signed by Trent at sixteen. “If you give me a chance, I’ll make Sony more money than ever. More than Fontaine. Even if it kills me.”

Carey Fielding, Kel’s producer, made the hand signal for Kel to shut the fuck up.

“Money? You think this is about money?” Davis looked pained. “Drew, tell him.”

“The Fontaine ‘Karmatronic Trust’,” Whitfield read from the Blackberry in a toneless voice, “has a float of around 8 million, 63% of which is Sony’s contributions. The rest is accrued investment growth. Her charitable disbursements to St. Martin’s Children Hospital and the Reedley Community Church amount to half a million dollars. We’ve written off about $3.7 million from our gross earnings. She accounts for 0.4% of our 10% maximum taxable offset. Her personal pay packet for everything is a mere $147,000.”

“The Trust is anonymous. Miss Fontaine has never taken to the press, or reported it.”

His producer patted Kel on the knees to settle his nerves. “She started four months ago, Kel.”

Kel went very still. His math was very good when it came to money. The colour of Kel’s expression shifted through several registers as the rationale behind Davis’ upset finally arrived at home base.

“So… assuming you understand—” Davis speed-dialled a number, then slid his personal phone across the seat. It was unlocked. Kellie’s name was already up on the screen. “Then be the professional we need you to be. Tell Kellie it’s over, that you need to work on yourself—. Tell her that you’re going to a Zen camp for her. Tell her that until you’re ready, you’re not fit to be near her.”

Kel looked at the phone. His pride growled.
The phone rang.
Once
Twice.
Three times.

“Failing that,” Sony’s Chief Legal Officer said without looking up, “we sell your contract to EMI.” The old orca paused, selecting a word like a man picking the right scalpel. “At a bargain bin price.”

Four times.
Six times.

The call connected on speakers.

Kellie’s voice came through, small and careful, a girl opening the door at midnight to see who was banging on the security gate. “… Sir?”

Kel—to his credit—really was professional.

He apologised sincerely. He said he was wrong. He said he was sorry it happened. He felt terrible. He wanted to make it up to Eppie. He told Kellie their relationship was over. He told her he was going to be better. He did not cry, but his voice was shaken.

When he hung up, Kellie’s relief was palpable through the speakerphone.

Kel set the phone, now placid with a background picture of Davis’ kids, on the tiny table between them. Outside, the city moved against the tinted glass, liminal against the frozen pocket of time inside the palatial vehicle.

“Well done,” Davis retrieved his phone. “You’ve saved your career. That said, we’re delaying your next album. All marketing will be put on hold.”

Kel’s fist clenched.
Fielding shook his head in warning.

Davis exhaled through his nose. “It’s for your own safety. Mr Grant.”

“My safety?” Kel’s voice rose. The green-eyed monster roared.

“Kelvin,” his CEO’s eyes seemed to glow under the ambient light of the limousine’s interior. “You know who the fuck Fredrick Curon is?”

Silence. Kel understood Curon’s immense influence, but he had never worked with Curon.

“You young fellers only know Frederick as our Creative and A&R Director,” Davis said calmly, ignoring his anger completely. “You don’t know SHIT. Curon was there in the beginning, in a basement in the Bronx. The ‘popular music’ you peddle began from that basement. Jump Street, Public Menace, Common Enemy, KK Cool, Dr T. He built and sold Raw Jam Records… to Universal. All of your predecessors had sat in that humid basement, watching Curon mix their tape in his mismatched Adidas sweats, on loaned equipment.”

Kel felt a chill in his back like a sliver of ice, a living needle of it, moving up the length of his spine, stabbing every nerve as it went. Finally, clarity dawned.

“And this is the man whose adopted daughter you tried to put back into the hospital—”

The limo looped around another corner. The lights of the city grew liminal.

Kel stared at the floor. His knuckles were bruised. Lord, she was so strong.

“Fred never called in any of those favours, not after thirty-two years.” Davis’ voice sounded like a whisper in a dream. “One wonders what might happen if he did. Or if someone took it upon their salvation to, as you boys might say—do him a solid.”

“What…” Kel never knew breathing could be so difficult. “What can I do?”

“Find someone who might help,” Davis leaned back. The CEO’s history lesson, it seemed, was done. He picked up his phone. The man was now scrolling through his Grammy congratulations.

Kel said nothing. But the trembling in his jaw said everything.

He wasn’t that stupid.

He knew who could help, but why would she?

In Chinatown, another limo from the Sony stable pulled into the park, filling the alley almost wall to wall.

The Wang Yip Ming Clinic sat at the tail end of a narrow service alley off Hill Street, the kind of street Google Maps rendered as a grey hairline. The front was all glass and festive Chinese posters, together with pictures of the staff and their accreditations. The back was wedged between a shuttered seafood wholesaler and a herbalist’s loading dock, both dark at this hour, both reeking faintly of rotting shellfish and diesel.

A single security light hummed above a grated door, throwing a cone of sodium-orange onto cracked concrete, flanked by a stack of collapsed cardboard boxes soaking up the fish-juices.

The driver didn’t comment as he opened the door for the girls.

Zara exited, more paranoid than Mr Biscuit before his demise. She scanned the alleyway for signs of paparazzi. Naturally, there was no one. Chinatown at this hour belonged to delivery trucks, stray cats, and starlets needing emergency treatments from a Chinese physio.

Eppie followed her out, holding on to Zara’s arm because the concrete was still slick from an earlier hose-down, and the pain had now taken solid form.

The door opened after the sound of jangling keys.

Lim’s father met them at the threshold before either of them could call out. Wang Sifu looked older than Eppie expected and yet was not old at all: his body was compact and hale, with the kind of stillness that spoke of martial experience. His beard was thin and wispy, more showmanship than habit, advertising his love of classical Hong Kong Wuxia cinema. He wore a man’s changshan—a high-collared, single-breasted tunic the colour of jasmine tea over loose trousers.

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He looked at the girls.
He looked at their dresses.
His lips twitched.

“Come in,” he mumbled.

Inside, the smell hit first. Aniseed, ginseng, herbs, sweet-bitter and faintly smoky, fungi and dried citrus peels and something made from roots and barks of trees Eppie could not name. It was a clinic, but also a medicinal kitchen that had been simmering for two decades.

The waiting room had four seats, each with a different design.
The till was from the 1960s.

Glass-front cabinets lined the back wall, floor to ceiling, each drawer the size of a shoebox, each labelled in brushwork, a catalogue for a pharmacy that predated pharmacies. Dried roots curled in jars like fossilised hands. Strings of desiccated, red-tinged material hung from a ceiling hook. A faded anatomical chart, the kind with the little glowing meridian lines running up and down a human silhouette, hung next to an OSHA poster about handwashing.

They stumbled into a side room, Eppie wincing the whole while.
A banged-up arm after an hour was NOT the same arm that sustained the injury.

Past a curtain of jade beads, a single padded table dominated a back room, its surface punctuated with neat rows of pinholes worn pale from decades of use. A jar of slim silver acupuncture needles sat beside a UV steriliser box.

“Sit… sit…” Wang Sifu popped the lights.

Eppie sat in a red wood chair beside the padded table, worn smooth at the armrests, its worn plane offering as much comfort as concrete. Lim’s dad crouched to adjust the right armrest’s height with a small brass thumbscrew before she’d even finished sitting down.

“Place your arm there, slowly,” Wang Sifu spoke with a perfect, second-generation Californian accent, despite his halting English. “No tense muscle.”

Eppie lowered her arm onto the wood, and the relief of not holding her own weight made her exhale audibly. Senior Wang did not react to the sound, her ruined Miu Miu, the smeared mascara, or the conspicuous absence of certain structural undergarments.

“Excuse me,” he said, respectfully inspecting her bruised exterior.