Chapter 21 Jax
Jax
At eleven that morning, I had a meeting scheduled with Kent.
We were supposed to go over a new line of potions we were stocking on the website—quick solutions for modern problems that mages wouldn’t have to take time to brew themselves.
It was a similar idea to a food delivery service. Sometimes, you wanted kimchi and didn’t want to have to make it. Potions required patience and attention that mages didn’t always have, and Prudence had vouched for these makers.
More and more, I was turning to her for guidance on the magical side of our business. It was one thing to offer ingredients and books to people—to provide microdoses of wolfsbane to shifters whose animal sides were out of control or quick solutions to problems I understood.
If we kept on like this, I’d need to put her on the payroll, and I wasn’t sure she’d like that.
Not that she’d be pissed that I wanted to compensate her for her time, exactly, but I thought she liked the flexibility to live life on her own schedule. As much as she seemed to enjoy her freedom, she’d given a lot of time and energy to Dakota, and had been a reliable ally of ours for years.
I wasn’t expecting her to commit to a nine-to-five or anything. I just felt guilty asking her opinion on so much that was beyond my comprehension. Even if I had a mage nearby to ask for help with this kind of stuff, Dakota was new to magic, and I didn’t want to put that kind of pressure on him.
Anyway, maybe Dakota could convince her to let us pay her as a contractor.
Or no, that was a lot to put on him too.
Jillian was good with people, and as COO, she could rework our contract with Prudence. If Prudence wouldn’t accept payment outright, we could adjust our contract with her so she got a higher percentage of royalties on book sales.
I was sitting at my desk, writing out a checklist of things I wanted to accomplish that day—talking to Jill about Prudence now included—when Kent knocked on my door.
Already, I was halfway through the day and the only thing I’d done was write out a list of stuff I wanted to do.
We were doing great in here. I wasn’t distracted at all.
“Hey, boss. Coffee?” Kent asked. He came into my office with as much confidence and comfort as I hoped any member of our pack would, and went right to the coffee maker at the side of the room.
Most of the time, I went to the break room to grab a coffee if I wanted one. It gave me a chance to catch up with people.
This CEO thing would always be weird—the expectation of hierarchy and pressure to stay locked away in my office didn’t come naturally to me.
Fuck, working in a high-rise didn’t come naturally to me.
If I let my wolf have any say about it, it was no saner to work up in the executive suite than it would’ve been for us to perch on a branch in a high tree and try to get things done.
We were meant to be on the ground, our paws in dirt, and with the wolf riding so close to the surface, it was hard to argue. I was supposed to be out patrolling our territory, keeping the pack safe.
Sure, I trusted Seth to do it, but my wolf was restless in my hindbrain, and all day, sitting behind my desk had been the next best thing to torture.
“Please,” I said. Maybe the caffeine would help me focus.
Kent clearly wanted some, and by the time I responded, he’d already plucked a pack of ground coffee beans from the basket beside the coffee maker to fill the filter.
While he waited for it to brew, he returned his attention to the rest of the basket.
The gift the high fae had sent us—sent me, as much as I refused to think of it that way—was still sitting on the sidebar in my office between the coffee maker and a set of unused tumblers over a small shelf with extremely expensive liquors I kept for client visits.
For better or worse, it was hard to get buzzed as a shifter, so the collection was only for show and hospitality.
I wasn’t sure what to do with that gift basket, even if Prudence had assured me it was safe to enjoy it.
Gifts like this, from clients and business partners, always felt strange to take.
Sure, I was CEO of Crescent, but I had no illusions that the whole place couldn’t run, by and large, without my direct oversight.
I’d brought on great people, and the whole pack was motivated to make this work for all of us. I couldn’t have done it alone.
So why the hell did I get a bunch of fancy snacks?
It made me want to go out and order gift baskets for every employee. Then I figured, well, I could just pay people enough that they could comfortably buy as many gift baskets as they were inclined to buy.
For most of them, I expected they were pretty comfortable with the gift-basket-to-useful-purchases ratio they’d established in their lives already.
Nevertheless, it was probably a good idea to talk to Maia about stocking the break rooms with a little extra, just to thank everyone for a job well done and for most of them holding it together while the pack was under threat.
Almost made a guy wish that we had to handle pack politics or the concerns of modern capitalism, but not both.
Living out in Idaho with next to nothing made a lot more sense after figuring out how to juggle both. It took a lot.
In any case, between Grant’s challenge and the business and now the wedding, I could hardly begrudge anyone a few extra treats.
Actually, it might be time for me to dig into that basket after all. I might’ve seen some cheese twists earlier . . .
I watched Kent rifle through the basket while I fantasized about them.
Gods, Cheri had mentioned some kind of crab puff appetizer for the wedding . . .
I needed to eat lunch, didn’t I?
Finally, Kent landed on something he wanted, snatched it out, and carried it over to my desk as he tore open the packaging.
He picked out a piece of chocolate for himself before offering the tray to me with a raised eyebrow.
“Thanks,” I said and took one, and damn if it weren’t worthy of the fae high court.
With a happy groan, I sank back in my seat and let the chocolate melt on my tongue.
He left the chocolates on the edge of my desk as he went to pour us a couple mugs of coffee. He brought them over with cream and sugar, and if I was a little generous with both, whatever. It’d been a long day and we hadn’t even hit lunch yet.
For the past few weeks, I’d been leaning on Kent pretty hard to look after the day-to-day runnings of the executive suite while I had been twisted up about Grant’s power play.
He wasn’t the first guy I’d turn to for looking after our business partnerships.
Kent’s brand of charisma worked on some people, and very much did not work on others, so it was better to keep him within Crescent.
Jillian handled most external relations, but Dakota had taken point with Igarashi. On the rare occasion they had to interact with someone that wasn’t him, they’d seemed acutely dissatisfied. Well, with the exception of Igarashi Minori, who seemed to like Jill and me just fine.
Nevertheless, Kent had a Wolf of Wall Street vibe that worked for keeping things rolling up here.
“So we’re ready to roll out the new lineup. Just need to get an okay from you and set a date.” He took a big slurp of coffee, and I lifted my cup for a sip too.
“Everything all at once?”
Kent shrugged. “We were thinking we’d keep it small, to start. Half a dozen potions—for luck, sleep, the basics.”
“And nothing that’d get us in trouble?”
Mages across the globe did more than take the edge off the hardest parts of life with their potions. Sometimes, they caused those same problems they were usually trying to solve.
Curses, plagues, you name it.
Crescent didn’t need the liability for that kind of thing.
“Nope!” Kent confirmed with a grin. “We’re not helping anybody turn anybody else into a toad. Not yet.” He wiggled his eyebrows.
“Not ever.”
“You’re no fun at all, bossman.” He took another sip, looking at me seriously over the rim of his cup.
“There’s money to be had here, you know?
If what we’re selling is harmless without human intervention and intention, we’ve got a fair amount of plausible deniability.
Humans get away with that shit all the time, right?
Guns aren’t the issue; it’s what people do with them. ”
I took a deep gulp of warm coffee to stop myself from telling Kent to fuck right off with that. With my wolf riding so close to the surface, it’d be all too easy to lash out at people who didn’t deserve it.
Even if Kent maybe deserved it, a little.
“I’m not interested in selling guns, Kent.”
He held up his hands in front of him. “I’m just saying, there’s not a whole lot of difference in selling ingredients and in selling the potions outright. Maybe somebody wants to turn all the slugs in their garden into toads.”
“How are toads better than slugs?”
“I don’t know. They, like, eat mosquitoes, right? I’m just saying, we don’t know what people are going to use it for.”
I sighed. “Let’s move on. I’ll look at the offerings list again.”
Kent grinned like he’d won.
“And think about it,” I finished firmly. “I’m serious, Kent. We have a duty of responsibility here not to make the world a worse place.”
“Whatever you say, boss. But what we do have, we can take global. The wedding will be a good opportunity to explore diversifying our offerings in the eastern markets. If this rollout goes well over here, maybe we could try it over there too. Mix things up and see what they can have us ship out too.” Kent leaned forward, eager as ever to grow the business.
I grimaced. “I’m not having Dakota work around our wedding, Kent.”
He shrugged. “Igarashi will be here anyway, right? Might as well make the most of it. Shit, they might think it’s weird if you drag them out here and don’t talk business.”
Would they? They were . . . invited for our wedding. That seemed like justification enough to make the trip.
I’d have to ask Dakota what he thought. I didn’t want to make them feel like we weren’t taking our partnership seriously—
“I could handle it,” Kent offered.
I blinked at him and kept my mouth shut firm. No, I didn’t think Minori was one of the people charmed by Kent’s whole . . . Kent thing.
I shook my head. “Let’s see what Dakota has to say. Might be every bit as offensive to have them travel here for personal reasons and dump a bunch of work on everyone. We can always handle this later. Kent?”
All the sudden, his eyes had gone hazy and kind of crossed. His face was pale, like all the blood had rushed out of it.
“Kent, are you okay?”
He tipped oddly in his chair, and I’d swear it was in slow motion if not for the way that I couldn’t move fast enough to catch him.
He fell forward and slipped to the side.
I rushed out of my chair, but the second I stood, the world tilted. I watched, horrified, as Kent slipped sideways onto the floor and realized with a horrific, gut-churning lurch, that I was about to be right down there with him on the carpet.
I tried to catch myself with a hand on my desk, but I staggered, and the world went dark.