“Morning, Greta,” I said, handing my assistant her daily cappuccino.
“Good morning,” she responded, doing her customary scan of me.
She leaned back in her chair and crossed her arms. “What’s wrong?” she demanded, raising a Nordic eyebrow. She was in her early sixties, suffered no fools, and was obstinately loyal. I was fully aware of the fact that I didn’t deserve her.
The one and only time she’d mentioned the word “retirement,” I’d given her a raise so obnoxious she’d agreed to stay with me until she hit sixty-five. We’d cross that bridge in less than six months. And at that point, I was prepared to double my offer.
I didn’t want to have to break in a new assistant. Get to know someone.
I kept my circle small, tight. Greta was a part of that circle and had stayed by my side through thick and thin. Scandal to stable.
She’d worked for me at my old firm, a carryover from my former life and the days when I’d assessed risks and enjoyed the freedom to yell at people. No one took it personally. There were no eggshells under my feet. I was me. They were… well, them. And everything worked just fine.
Now nothing worked, and the eggshells here were sharp enough to draw blood.
But Greta was here. And with that continuity, with someone I could trust implicitly, I was fumbling my way through my father’s former job description. Doing my damn best to prove that Paul Russo’s blood wasn’t poisoning me from the inside out.
“Nothing is wrong,” I hedged. Nothing besides my mother laying into me and filleting me over the incident at the pizza place. In her criticism, she hadn’t said the words outright, but I knew she was thinking them.
It was something my father would have done. Abusing his position of power to have someone who dared stand up to him fired.
That made it worse.
I already hadn’t felt great about it, but I couldn’t seem to stop myself. A year’s worth of pent-up frustration had finally boiled over. Not that the woman had been an innocent victim. There was nothing “victim” about the opinionated, curvy Maleficent.
Minus the firing, I thought we’d both enjoyed the sparring.
“Liar,” Greta said fondly.
We were close but not that close. As a rule, I didn’t spill my guts to anyone. Not to my mother. Not to Greta. Not even to my best friends. It was part of being a Russo. We did what was necessary to protect the family name.
Even if it meant never admitting anything was wrong.
A leggy woman in a fitted sheath dress trotted by, a tray of eye-searing juices in one hand and four Hermès shopping bags in her other. She was making a beeline for the conference room when she spotted me. Her eyes went wide in that deer-in-the-headlights, fearful adrenaline kind of way. She stumbled, the point of her shoe grazing the carpet.
I looked away as a putrid green juice tumbled into one of the bags.
She yelped and sprinted away.
Another day, another terrified employee.
I’d assumed they’d all get used to me. Apparently I’d assumed incorrectly. I was the beast to my mother’s beauty. The monster to the heroine. When they looked at me, they saw my father.
“Maybe if you smiled once in a while,” Greta suggested to me.
I rolled my eyes and pulled out my phone. “If I smile, they think I’m baring my teeth at them.”
“Rawr,” she teased.
“Drink your poison, woman,” I said gruffly.
“Maybe someday you’ll grow up to drink coffee too,” she said, fluttering her eyelashes.
“When hell freezes over.” I was a staunch tea drinker, and the preference had nothing to do with the beverage itself. It had been the first of my many rebellious stands.
She nodded in the direction of the windows. Outside, New York shivered and froze. “Looks like it already has.”
I leaned against her desk, thumbing through my inbox on my phone. “What’s up first today?”
“You’ve got advertising at ten, proofs for approval due by noon, Irvin asked if you could take his place in a budget meeting at two, and Shayla would like five minutes of your time right now.”
Greta nodded behind me, and I knew the beauty editor was standing there. I felt her perpetual cloud of low-level annoyance.
I turned.
The terms statuesque and stern came to mind. Shayla Bruno had earned the Miss Teenage America title at age seventeen and enjoyed a brief career in modeling before moving behind the camera. She was a few years my senior, had exquisite taste in jewelry, mothered three children with her wife, and—in my opinion—her talents were being wasted as beauty editor.
Too bad for her that the position she wanted was the one I currently occupied.
“Good morning, Greta. Is now a good time, Mr. Russo?” she asked, her tone making it clear that she didn’t care if it was or wasn’t.
“Dominic,” I reminded her for the one-hundredth time. “Of course.” I gestured toward my office.
At least with Shayla I didn’t have to pretend to be something I wasn’t. Like kind or caring. Or interested in her life in any capacity. She recognized me as the uncaring bastard I was.
While I hung up my coat, Shayla crossed to the lightboards in the corner and clipped a page layout in place.
So it was going to be one of those meetings.
“These aren’t right,” she said, slapping a long-fingered, ebony hand to the board. Brushed gold rings glittered against the glowing glass.
“In what way?” I joined her in front of the board and crossed my arms. It was a series of product images organized around a shot of two models in a studio. Something did feel off, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. And I certainly wasn’t going to show off my ignorance by playing a guessing game.
“The model shot. It’s too small. It needs to be the anchoring piece, not the cardigan and the belt. The people are always the point, even if it’s the products we’re talking about,” she lectured. “The people are the story.”
I made a noncommittal noise. I’d delegated—dumped—the artistic details to the page designer and let him run with it because I didn’t know what the fuck I was doing.
If there was one thing I hated more in this life than being wrong, it was not knowing what the hell I was doing in the first place.
“It needs to be laid out again. Dalessandra won’t okay it as is,” she said.
“Do you have any other suggestions?” I ventured.
“I would think the creative director of the world’s second-largest fashion magazine wouldn’t need any input.” She didn’t say it snidely. Didn’t have to. It was fact.
We glared at each other for a long beat.
“Say what you need to say,” I told her.
“You shouldn’t be in this office,” she said. “You didn’t earn it. You haven’t spent years of your life working in this industry, reading these magazines, and living and breathing fashion. Now, someone else has to make it their job to babysit you.”
“And that someone is you?” I ventured cooly. “It’s in your job description to advise on fashion layouts?”
“No. But it’s in yours. And if you can’t do it, then it falls on someone who can.”
I wished that she was wrong. Wished that she hadn’t landed a direct hit to my already dented ego. I was struggling with this job, and it irked me that others could tell.
I hated not being good at something.
I hated failing.
And I really hated being called out on it.
“I do a thousand things a day that don’t fall within my job description. We all should,” she continued, her words coming out at a fast clip. The cool finally giving way to the angry heat beneath. “We’re a team with the goal of making every piece of content as valuable and as eye-catching as it can be. You shouldn’t be making these decisions when you’re not equipped to make them. You shouldn’t be at that desk.”
I met fire with ice. “I’ll take that under advisement. Is there anything else?”
I got the feeling Shayla was fantasizing about pushing me into my chair and shoving it through the windows at my back.
Ambitious. And rightfully angry. But being pissed off didn’t change what was. I was Label’s creative director. And I would find a way to do this job.
“Redesign this before your mother sees it.” She’d added the “your mother” as a jab.
I knew it because I would have done the same.
I was about to press her for suggestions or at least a recommendation on a designer who would have better instincts than the first when there was a knock on my open door.
“Dominic, my boy. Have you got five minutes for an old man?”
Managing editor Irvin Harvey strolled into my office in suit and tie, a smile on his face. The man was the sole surviving crony from my father’s unceremonious ousting. He’d been with Label for fifteen years after my mother—heavily influenced by my father—poached him from a fashion house. At sixty-five, he was the stereotypical Manhattan executive. Well-compensated, he excelled at schmoozing and golf and was a master at maintaining relationships. He knew everyone worth knowing in the industry from designers to photographers to buyers and advertisers.
My father had been Irvin’s best man in his third wedding.
The only reason he was still here was because there had never once been a complaint made against the man, and he’d sworn to my mother that he had no idea what his old pal Paul had been up to.
I wasn’t as inclined to take him at his word. But I understood that replacing another title so high on the masthead would have only added to my mother’s nightmare.
“Are we done here?” I asked
“Sherry, get me a coffee, will you?”
“Shayla,” she said crisply.
I felt the punch of anger that radiated off her.
The man probably snapped his fingers at servers in restaurants.
I flashed back to my pepperoni pizza and the woman who’d served it, then winced.
“Help yourself to the machine,” I said to Irvin, nodding in the direction of the beverage bar just inside the door. Until recently, its primary function had been to display bottles of champagne and scotch. It was now home to a tea station and espresso machine. Though, I still kept it stocked with my mother’s favorite white wine and a bottle of bourbon for particularly frustrating days.
“Never could figure those monstrosities out,” Irvin said cheerfully, winking at Shayla then grinning at me.
“I’ll speak with you later, Shayla,” I said, dismissing her. I’d make the damn coffee if it meant I didn’t have to figure out how to get blood stains out of the carpet.
She gave us both a cool nod and left.
“What can I do for you, Irvin?” I asked, starting an espresso for the man.
“I had drinks with the buyers from Barneys last night. Catching up, gossiping like teenage girls.” He wandered over to the windows to study the skyline. “You know how Larry is,” he said conversationally.
I didn’t know who Larry was. But this had been the hallmark of my relationship with Irvin since taking over the position. I was his stand-in for my father. I imagined the two of them had shared many a scotch in this very room.
But I wasn’t my father, and I didn’t have time for gossip. I handed him the coffee.
He seemed to recognize that I wasn’t Paul. “Anyway, after a few gin martinis, Larry gets loose. Runs his mouth. He mentioned hearing some rumors about your mother, the divorce. Is she seeing someone new?” His silver-tufted eyebrows raised suggestively.
I had no idea. I wasn’t sure if I should know if she was seeing someone or not.
“I see,” I said, pointedly ignoring the question. Whether I should know if my mother was dating again was entirely different than if Big-Mouthed Guess-What-I-Heard Irvin should know.
My mother, this magazine, didn’t need the shadow of Paul Russo to cause further harm. Every inquiry, every interview question about the situation had been met with stoic silence. The Russo Modus Operandi. Protect the name at all costs.
Even if it meant sheltering a villain.
“Anyway. Thought you’d like to know. They’re just rumors,” Irvin said, taking a dainty sip of his coffee. “They’ll blow over as soon as something more scandalous comes along.”
“I’ll take it under advisement,” I said.
