Chapter 910: The Carter Legacy

Hollywood wasn’t just about Lila.

Don’t get me wrong—cutting my dancer free from Dex’s world was priority one, top of the stack. But I didn’t do single-purpose trips. Every move had layers. Every destination had multiple objectives. Every hour spent traveling was an hour that could—and should—be doing three things at once.

This trip was doing

four.

The

entertainment

thing had been brewing since Emma.

My sister—loud, chaotic, chronically online Emma—had told me that her long-term dream was the entertainment industry. Not a passing comment. Not a maybe-someday fantasy.

She’d said it with the kind of quiet seriousness that Emma only used when she meant something down to her bones.

Talent Management; Acting. Producing. Creating. She wanted

in

.

I’d started building toward it before I even realized I was building toward it.

The music room at the estate—every instrument you could name, professional-grade, acoustics engineered by ARIA to make a recording studio weep with jealousy and probably file for unemployment.

The dance floor where I’d danced with Lila, where she’d moved like gravity was a polite suggestion and I’d understood for the first time what real artistry looked like in a human body that wasn’t trying to kill me.

The recording studio with equipment that wouldn’t exist in consumer markets for another decade.

Those weren’t hobbies.

Those were infrastructure.

Then

Lila had come into my life

—a professional dancer whose talent was so raw and real that the only thing between her and global stardom was the predatory machinery that had tried to consume her.

A woman who deserved a stage, not a cage.

And that’s when I knew.

When the pieces clicked together and the picture became obvious.

I knew what business and industry would cement the Carter legacy that I had in mind for so long. I’d thought of Biotech but decided against it.

Entertainment.

Not Liberation Holdings entertainment. Not a subsidiary buried under corporate layers like a dirty secret. Something with Carter name on it. Something that would last with my empire and everything I’ve built.

Carter Entertainment.

I was going to make my family one of those powerhouses. The Carters as an entertainment dynasty in Hollywood—films, series, talent management, a record label. The name that made people in this city straighten up when they heard it, check their posture, and wonder if they’d remembered to send flowers to the right assistant.

It would take time to reach the

pinnacle.

Years, maybe.

But the foundation was getting poured now.

The parent holding company would be Liberation Empire,

as always

—the mothership that sat above everything like a bored god watching ants build empires.

But Carter Entertainment wouldn’t link to Liberation Holdings directly.

Clean separation. Different DNA.

Liberation Holdings was the war machine—acquisitions, finance, corporate warfare, the kind of thing that made regulators wake up in cold sweats.

Carter Entertainment was

legacy.

Family. The thing I’d hand to my children.

My children.

That thought still hit different every time it crossed my mind—like a warm fist closing around my heart and squeezing just hard enough to remind me I had one.

The kid growing inside Linda was days old. Barely a fist. Margaret and Patricia’s pregnancies weren’t even confirmed by traditional medicine yet—just ARIA’s absolute biometric certainty, which was more reliable than any hospital test but still felt like cheating.

I was out here building generational infrastructure for children who were currently the size of poppy seeds and probably thought

mitosis

was the height of entertainment.

Overthinking?

Probably. Definitely. A sane person would wait. Would see how things developed. Would focus on the pregnancies first and the

legacy-building

second.

But I wasn’t sane. I was a teenager with a god complex, an ASI goddess handling my logistics, and the bone-deep understanding that everything I built from this point forward needed to support my kids for a lifetime.

Not just the money—that was easy, that was already handled.

The

structures

. The

foundations

. The

institutions

that would generate wealth and opportunity and power long after I stopped actively managing them.

Carter Entertainment

was one of those institutions.

And I wasn’t just thinking about my empire and my women anymore. I was thinking about the tiny lives that would inherit all of it. So, everything from now on had to be straight and solid in its foundation.

No cracks. No shortcuts that would become problems in ten years.

No legal ambiguities that some future rival could exploit like a cheap crowbar.

Unlikely,

with ARIA running oversight.

But it doesn’t hurt to be cautious when your kids are going to grow up in the same house as you.

Now—the boring part. Except it wasn’t boring when you had a goddess doing it.

Normally,

forming an entertainment company at this scale meant incorporating in Delaware first. That’s what the smart money did. Delaware’s Court of Chancery, business-friendly statutes, tax advantages—there was a reason half the Fortune 500 was technically headquartered in a state most people couldn’t find on a map without Google.

You’d form your

Delaware LLC

, then register as a foreign entity in California to actually operate there.

ARIA didn’t do that.

She’d

registered

Carter Entertainment directly in California, straight through the Secretary of State’s office. No Delaware detour. No foreign entity registration. No tax optimization games. The right payments to the right offices, filed

simultaneously,

processed within hours instead of the standard weeks because ARIA had politely reminded the servers who was really in charge.

"Tax advantages are negligible when your holding company already operates through structures I’ve optimized beyond what Delaware’s statutes offer,"

she’d explained when I’d asked.

"Filing directly in California establishes Carter Entertainment as a native entity. Born here. Built here. Hollywood will respect that more than another Delaware shell pretending to be local."

She wasn’t wrong. In this town, optics mattered as much as legals. Sometimes more.

The entity formation was done.

Carter Entertainment

existed on paper—a California corporation, subsidiary of Liberation Empire, with its own EIN, its own bank accounts, its own identity separate from the war machine upstairs.

The rest was in motion.

Entertainment insurance—errors and omissions, general liability, workers’ comp—all bound and active. Union agreements with SAG-AFTRA, DGA, and WGA were being negotiated through legal teams that ARIA had vetted and deployed like special forces.

Registration with SoundExchange for digital royalties was complete. ISRC codes secured for the record label division.

Distributor agreements with Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon, and Tidal were in various stages of finalization. BMI affiliation for music licensing—done.

The talent agency license was the bottleneck. California’s Labor Commissioner didn’t rush for anyone—the Talent Agencies Act required a

$50,000

surety bond, formal application, and approval that normally took weeks.

ARIA had filed everything, posted the bond, and was currently applying the kind of quiet, persistent pressure that only an omniscient AI with access to every communication channel on earth could apply—gentle reminders, polite escalations, the occasional existential dread delivered via encrypted email at 3:17 a.m.

Two months

. That was the timeline. In two months, Carter Entertainment would be fully operational across all divisions—production, talent management, record label, distribution. Every license secured.

Every union relationship established.

Every legal framework bulletproof.

Today’s visit was to finish a few remaining things in person—signatures that required a physical presence, office spaces that needed eyes on them, relationships that couldn’t be built through screens.

And to

meet a certain person

.

But that was later.

First—Lila.

I looked at her beside me. She was staring out the window now, watching the Hollywood streets scroll past with an expression I couldn’t quite read.

Nostalgia,

maybe. Fear, definitely.

The specific tension of a woman returning to the place that had built her up and nearly destroyed her.

As soon as her contract with Dex’s agency was terminated—and it would be, today, by whatever legal means necessary—she’d be signing with Carter Entertainment. Not just as talent. As administration.

Lila wasn’t just going to dance for my company.

She was going to help run it. Her years inside the industry’s machinery—seeing how it chewed people up, understanding where the gears caught and where they crushed—made her invaluable.

She didn’t know that yet. I hadn’t told her. Was saving it for after the contract termination, when the weight of her old world had been fully lifted and she could hear the offer with clear ears.

Lila—first

talent signed to Carter Entertainment. First artist on our roster. First person to carry the Carter name into Hollywood’s ecosystem.

Felt right

.

Reyna snored lightly against my shoulder. Rory murmured something in her sleep. Luna was reviewing the city in the window—Soo-Jin navigated traffic with the calm efficiency of someone who could kill you with a steering wheel but preferred not to.

The Hollywood sign appeared through the windshield. White letters on a green hillside, sun-bleached and iconic, looking smaller in person than it did in movies.

Everything in Hollywood looked smaller in person than it did in movies.

I was going to change that.

Carter Entertainment. Carter legacy. Carter children who would grow up knowing their father hadn’t just built an empire—he’d built a name.

Soo-Jin pulled off the main road. We were close now.

"Lila."

I touched her hand. Gentle. "You ready?"

She turned from the window. Looked at me. Looked at the street. Looked at the world she was about to leave behind forever.

"Yeah,"

she said. Quiet. Steady. "Let’s end it."