Rafael
When Grey arrived at The Crow that afternoon, he must not have known what was going to hit him.
We’d carried on with our duties as we waited for him to show; it wasn’t unusual for him to not show up until it was almost time to eat, just as it was also not unusual for him to be here before any of us. He was unpredictable. I had a feeling that the only thing that truly dictated Grey Monaghan’s schedule was whether or not he’d gotten laid the night before.
It had already reached time for family dinner by the time he showed. He was lucky that I’d made enough portions for him to take part; but when he came to take his place at the head of the table as though nothing had happened yesterday, he found his plate empty and a lot of angry stares pointed in his direction.
He stopped and did a double-take, glancing over all of us with his hands on the back of his chair, ready to pull it out. Then he grimaced and shook his head, running a heavily-ringed hand back through his hair. “Go on, then,” he said. “Out with it.”
I stood up. “Grey, you made a mistake. Luca did not deserve to be fired last night.”
Grey scoffed dismissively and waved a hand in his direction. “Oh, come –”
“No, he’s right,” Beau said, standing up eagerly to join him. “I was watching the service and plating all evening, and I was the one putting out the plates for Chef Drake. I know that none of them were dirty. The two stains matched one another in color and consistency, so I believe strongly that the customer made the marks themselves in order to get the meal for free.”
Grey narrowed his eyes and glared back at me. “Is this a coup?”
“We’re taking a stand,” I said. “Luca is the youngest and newest member of our team, and he deserves to have someone stand up for him. Especially given that he’s not here to speak for himself.”
Ainslie’s chair scraped back across the wooden floors as he shot to his feet all of a sudden. I caught Drake on the verge of rolling his eyes at the dramatic motion and glared at him.
“I stand with him, too,” Ainslie announced. “We can’t let you do something like this and get away with it.”
“Get away with it?” Grey repeated incredulously. “Who do you think you are, you…”
He was interrupted by the sound of two more chairs scraping back. Kit and Nikolai had exchanged a look and then stood simultaneously.
“Sir,” Nikolai said respectfully. “I also have doubts that the plates were dirty when I placed them in front of the customer.”
“We checked the cameras,” Kit added. “You can’t see the plates properly on that table with the angle, but I trust both Nik and Beau. If they say the plates were clean, they were clean.”
There was only one person who hadn’t spoken. One person who stood out like a sore thumb, now, still in his seat. His very presence grated on my nerves at the best of times, but seeing him now breaking the pattern of us all standing around the table made him even more detestable.
Grey’s gaze shot right over to him – to Drake.
“And you?” he asked.
There was a long moment. Drake looked at his own hand on the table, as if tapping lightly on the wood was far more important than having this conversation. He looked up; not at Grey, at first, but – strangely – at me.
I tried to glare at him hard enough to convince him to do the right thing.
He looked up at Grey. “I don’t know if the plates were dirty or not,” he said. “I trust your judgment as owner and manager of this place. If you say he’s fired, he’s fired.”
“For Christ’s sake,” I muttered under my breath, but Beau and Nikolai were already rounding on him, shouting that he was being unfair.
“Well, I’m afraid I have to say that only one of you is making any sense,” Grey said, throwing his hands up in the air as if it was all just a terrible shame that he had no control over. “Drake is right, and you’d all better listen to him. I’m the boss. What I say goes. You don’t get to question the executive decisions that I make.”
“Yeah, we do,” I said. I clenched a fist at my side, trying to will myself to stay strong. This was important. If Grey could fire Luca for no reason, he could fire any of us for no reason. Worse, Luca – or anyone else who was treated the same way – could come back and sue the restaurant for unfair dismissal, leaving us all eventually out of a job. “We are stakeholders here. This is our livelihood, and we pour far more hours, blood, sweat, and tears into it than most workers do in other jobs. If the kitchen isn’t working properly, you don’t have a business.”
“Is that a threat?” Grey asked, raising his chin at me with a dangerous glint in his eyes.
I took a breath. I had to pray and believe that my team was still with me. That I was still their Head Chef in their minds, and not Drake.
“Let me say this,” I said. “If you do not hire Luca back – or at least, offer him the job, since he might not want it anymore – then we’re all going to go on strike.”
Grey snorted a laugh of surprise but then looked at me again. His smile faltered when he realized that I was serious.
“You’re willing to do that over a dishwasher ?” he asked.
Ainslie drew himself up as much as he could. “ I was a dishwasher not that long ago,” he said.
“I think you have your answer,” I said. Around the table, everyone – with one notable exception – nodded grimly in confirmation.
Grey sighed. That hand went back through his hair again. “Fine,” he said. “I’ll think about it. I need to go over any evidence we have and look into this customer, see if he has any prior history of pulling scams on restaurants. I’ll take a look at everything and consider Luca’s case again.”
It wasn’t exactly much. “Are you really going to do it, or are you just putting us off from striking for a few days in the hope that we’ll forget about it?”
Grey snorted. “I’m really going to do it,” he said. He gestured at the table. “Now, can we please eat this delicious spaghetti? The smell is incredibly distracting.”
I wasn’t convinced – but it would have to do.
Everyone was looking at me, so I repeated Grey’s gesture towards the food and moved to sit. Everyone followed my example. I looked up and found myself meeting Drake’s eyes across the table. He was looking at me with a kind of bored insolence as if he was done with my act – but he, out of anyone, should have known it wasn’t an act.
I would fight for the people around me. I would protect them. Even if that meant rooting out unwelcome influences from amongst us.
Not that my rooting had worked, given that he was still here.
We all ate mostly in silence. There was a quiet animosity now amongst us, and everyone sitting there knew where the lines had been drawn. Drake had shown us categorically: he was not one of us.
It was all of us versus him and Grey.
Maybe he thought that would get him the job. But what he didn’t realize, maybe would never realize, was that it was losing him the team.
My anger built and built every time I looked up from my plate and saw him there. Eating my food. Causing dissent amongst my team. Coming into my kitchen and thinking he could disrupt everything and take over like I was nothing.
I stabbed my fork into the last bit of spaghetti on my plate, swirled, and shoved it in my mouth.
This time, when I looked up, he met my glare – and he almost seemed taken aback by how intense it was.
Did he really think that his actions would have no consequences?
The others peeled off back into the kitchen as soon as they were done eating, no one wanting to hang around in this awkward atmosphere for longer than was necessary. Grey himself disappeared into the office, and I grabbed both my own plate and the serving dishes from the center of the table to start clearing away.
Drake grabbed for the serving dish at the same time.
“I can clear it myself,” I hissed at him. “I don’t need your help.”
He gritted his teeth. “You’re not even going to attempt to work together?”
“I work together with my team,” I said. “You’re not one of them. You’re just the one fucking the boss.”
The words were out of my mouth before I knew I was going to say them. They sounded shocking even to my own ears: laced with hate and, underneath it all, an obvious undercurrent of jealousy that made me cringe. I hadn’t meant it to come out that way. I hadn’t meant to say it at all. And now Kit and Nikolai, who knew me well enough to know that I didn’t curse, didn’t talk like that, were staring at me with wide eyes.
“Fuck,” Drake muttered under his breath. “That’s what you think?”
“That’s what I know,” I said, picking up the serving dish and wrenching it away from his grasp, then marching into the kitchen.
Towards the dishwashing nook, where I had to simply dump all the dirty items and pray someone would have time to get to them later, because we didn’t have a dishwasher anymore.
But the second I stepped out of the nook, I found myself being jerked to the side – down towards the storage rooms. A hand had appeared in the crook of my elbow, and I almost fell into Drake as he pulled me away from the kitchen.
“Come with me,” he hissed. “We need to talk.”