1. Chapter One #2
My lips peeled back over my teeth. Everything inside of me wanted to slam the door on this woman, go back inside, curl up between Yukiko and Samantha and go back to sleep. Leaving her to twist in the wind was no less than what Jessamyn Fawkes deserved.
But Victoria had something she thought could blow the Avery Company sky-high.
Something that involved Marcie’s father.
God damn it, Jessamyn, I thought. I’d better not regret this.
“Foyer,” I grunted, looking her in the eye. “Not the living room. You don’t sit, you don’t take your coat off, you don’t make any noise besides what is absolutely necessary. Five minutes.”
“Understood.”
“If you wake anybody in this house, then may God have mercy on your soul,” I said. “I will not save you from those women. They’ll put blood and teeth on the carpet and I’ll let them.”
The ghost of a smile tugged at the corner of Jessamyn’s mouth. “I understand that, too.”
I took a step backward. “Fine.”
Jessamyn crossed the threshold like a soldier who’d just stepped into enemy territory.
I shut the door behind her quietly, turning the lock with enough slowness to keep the thunk from echoing through the house.
The only sounds were the hum of the refrigerator and the rumble of the white noise machine in the master bedroom, the latter barely audible through the ceiling.
She took a quick look around, going on tiptoe. “You have a lovely home,” she ventured.
I wasn’t interested in hearing it. “Talk. The clock is ticking.”
One thing for Jessamyn Fawkes—she certainly didn’t waste time. She opened her coat and slid a small leather portfolio from an inner pocket, then handed it to me. “This is for you,” she said.
“What is it?”
“A signed, notarized retraction.”
I blinked. “Of what?”
“Of everything.” Jessamyn’s smile was no longer faint. “Everything I said on that podcast. Whatever else happens, I want you to have that.” She paused, marshaling her courage. “I want Samantha to have it.”
I let that sit.
Don’t respond to the opening offer too fast. The words came back to me from fifteen years in the past, delivered by Daniel Ramsey to his hotshot apprentice, me, over a glass of bourbon in his office after a particularly tricky negotiation with a client.
Everyone always thinks they’ve got a winning hand when they play that first card.
You let it settle, you give them a little bit of silence, you knock the wind out of their sails.
He’d taught me a lot about business. Taught me how to play blackjack, too, which I’d passed on to Kiki.
I’d never expected to be utilizing his lessons in my own foyer at two in the morning, though.
The silence stretched out. Jessamyn fidgeted nervously. She opened her mouth to say something, then closed it, frowning deeply.
Once I figured she was ready, I cleared my throat. “Tell me everything,” I grunted.
She did.
The five minutes I’d promised her came and went without me depositing her back on the front step.
Jessamyn kept her voice down, narrating her story like she’d rehearsed it a hundred times in the mirror before she’d made the drive to Boston from wherever she was headquartered.
She talked and talked and did it without looking me in the eye or anywhere else in the room.
It was like she was reading a script inside of her head.
“She approached me three months ago,” Jessamyn explained.
“At first, I thought it was the luckiest break I’d ever had.
I was at the end of my rope, I was holding onto my position as Delta Rho president by a thread—I needed a win.
I needed a safe place to land, in case the worst happened and I couldn’t fend off the challenge from national leadership. ”
National leadership, it turned out, was not happy with Jessamyn Fawkes.
Pursuing a personal vendetta against a local sorority president was one thing—being fooled into believing her expert witness was Lakshmi Majumdar instead of a family member with a fake profile picture and a voice changer was something else entirely.
We’d been too busy celebrating Samantha’s victory to notice, but the other members of Delta Rho’s board were pissed about the black eye Jessamyn gave them.
Being duped by a fake Facebook account was beneath them.
They’d been quietly moving against her, trying to have her replaced as national president.
The irony was both thick and delicious. It still wasn’t enough to make me wish Samantha were awake.
“She met me at a hotel bar,” Jessamyn said ruefully.
“At a property I later learned her family owned—all the security cameras ‘malfunctioned’ the night we met up. She offered me a way out. A board seat at a wellness-and-lifestyle company the Ruocchios have a controlling stake in, along with a signing bonus bigger than it should have been. A graceful exit from my previous career.” She sniffed hugely.
“I was going to make videos for the company’s Instagram account. Influencer stuff.”
I let that pass without comment.
“And in exchange, I did the interview,” Jessamyn explained.
“With Everything’s A Cult. The whole thing was scripted.
Not word-for-word, but I was given a list of topics to stick to and emotional beats they wanted me to hit.
When to cry, when to get angry, that kind of thing. Victoria was very thorough.”
I could only imagine how thorough she’d been. “Why are you telling me all this?”
Jessamyn hesitated. “Because an hour before that episode dropped, Victoria sent the full script and proof of the deal to Delta Rho’s national leadership.”
My jaw dropped open.
“She… what the hell? Why?”
Jessamyn grimaced. “She burned me. The whole thing was fake. The wellness company ghosted me. The money was real enough, but that was just the down payment—low six figures, enough to keep the lights on for a few months but not enough to live on. She never had any intention of bringing me into the fold. She got what she wanted out of me and then threw me away.”
I let that sink in. Of course she did, I thought, ticking it over in my head. Why take a chance on a woman this volatile? Someone who’d try to destroy Samantha like that is a disposable asset, whether they realize it or not.
From a certain angle, I had to admire the way Victoria Ruocchio fucked this woman over. It was brutal, it was efficient, and you couldn’t argue it wasn’t well-deserved.
“She also handed my notes to a tabloid,” Jessamyn finished in a sepulchral tone.
I blinked. That part I hadn’t expected.
“And from the fact that those notes weren’t plastered all over the Internet, I take it that…?”
“They weren’t made public,” Jessamyn said. “But they could be. That’s the point. It’s insurance. I step out of line, I do anything I’m not supposed to—it comes out that I was a puppet the whole time. Which means I’m double ruined. No new job, no second act—no nothing.”
I leaned against the archway leading to the living room, my hands across my chest. Somewhere above my head, the three most beautiful, important women I’d ever met slept soundly, with no idea one of their worst enemies was trying to talk their way back into my good graces just beneath their feet.
“I’m resigning from Delta Rho next week,” Jessamyn said. “It’s being framed as my choice. ‘Stepping back to focus on new ventures.’ But everyone knows I’m being shit-canned, even if they’re too polite to say it.”
“Nobody knows better than me how sorority girls gossip,” I said with a smirk.
Jessamyn didn’t say anything. She just stood there. Waiting.
She was very good at waiting. I did have to give that to Jessamyn, at least. I’m sure Samantha wished she’d been better at waiting to jump in a hot tub with her parents, though.
“So let me make sure I have this straight,” I finally said.
“You’re standing in my house at two in the morning telling me Victoria Ruocchio played you.
That she got you to turn against Samantha and her family one last time, then lit a torch and set all your bridges on fire the second the deed was done? ”
She didn’t try to deny it. “Yes.”
I shrugged. “If you’re expecting sympathy, you’ve come to the wrong house.”
Jessamyn didn’t flinch. “That’s not what I came here for.”
“Then what did you come here for?” Maybe I shouldn’t have been so snarky, but it was two in the morning and I was tired.
“Because all you’ve told me is that you’ll try and make up for telling the whole world my wives are sex-cult victims, and that Victoria knows something about Daniel but you don’t know what it is—”
“It’s got something to do with money,” Jessamyn murmured. “Lots of money. Like, the SEC gets involved kind of money.”
I made a mental note to ask Mona about it as soon as possible. There was no doubt in my mind that Mona knew where every cent of Ramsey Engineering’s slush funds—the official ones and the hidden ones—got spent during her tenure.
“That’s not good enough,” I said. “You told me you would get the details.”
“And I will,” Jessamyn said. “Once I get what I need.”
“Which is?”
“The same thing I asked Victoria for,” she said. “It’s not complicated. I want a second act.”
The words hung in the air for a long moment. The realization dawned on me slowly.
“No,” I said. “Hell no.”
“Mr. Avery—”
“I am not going to hire you,” I growled, looming over Jessamyn. “Are you fucking insane?”
“I’m not saying you put me in the front office,” Jessamyn said, trying her best to smile and make this all sound normal.
“The Avery Company hires me as a consultant. I stay very far away from all of you, and I never interact with Samantha. You give me a salary, a small amount of stock options—just enough for me to keep my feet while I figure out what I’m going to do without Delta Rho—”
“That’s not happening,” I said. “Jessamyn, you fucked Samantha’s parents. My company isn’t touching you with a ten-foot pole. You’re lucky I’m even talking to you right now!”