Chapter 6
VIOLET
My office. Bring a notepad.
The text comes at eleven-fifteen while I'm halfway through a stack of vendor invoices that were sitting on my desk when I arrived that morning.
There's no name on the text and no context. But I know who's texting me like I'm a soldier receiving orders from a general who expects unquestioning obedience.
The same thing happens to me as every time I see him or talk to him. My heart beats faster, my blood runs somehow hot and cold at the same time, and everything below my waist files a formal objection to being at work. The effect he has on me makes no sense, but it's there all the same.
I don't need to send a follow-up text to know it's implied he means now. I grab a legal pad, check my reflection in the powered-off screen of my monitor, and head to the elevator and to the forty-second floor.
When I walk into his office, two people are seated across from Gianni's desk.
The first is a man I've seen exactly three times in the eleven months I've worked here, a man named Chad Spackman.
He's in his late thirties, though he carries himself like someone older.
Something about the way he holds his left side, a stiffness in the shoulder he's learned to compensate for but can't entirely hide.
Chad is well-built, with a lean, powerful frame that reminds me of a quarterback.
He's sharp-jawed with close-cropped hair and eyes that always seem to be scanning and assessing and cataloguing.
He's the head of security for Russo Industries, and you can tell it by the way he sits angled toward the door, his hands placed on his thighs as if he might need to draw a gun at any moment.
No one really knows much about him, but the office rumor is that he used to be a federal agent.
Danger radiates off of him, like he's the kind of guy who could take someone down in two seconds with nothing more than a paper clip.
The second is Theresa Randolph, the Senior Vice President.
Thirty-five, tall, immaculate, the kind of beautiful that requires both excellent genetics and a full-time commitment to maintenance.
She has dark hair blown out to perfection, cheekbones that could slice paper, and today she's wearing a gorgeous cream Chanel blazer over the rest of her impeccable and undoubtedly eye-wateringly expensive outfit.
She and Gianni have a history. Everyone on the floor knows it, though nobody says it out loud. But I get the sense that whatever they were, they aren't anymore. And rumor has it that Theresa hasn't accepted the change.
Theresa looks at me in the way she always does when we happen to bump into one another. Like I'm a piece of furniture that's been placed in the middle of the room and she doesn't quite know what to do with me.
Gianni flicks those impossibly dark eyes at me as I enter. Maybe I'm crazy, maybe I'm imagining things, but I sense a heat in the way he looks at me, even though his eyes linger for a half-second at the most.
"Miss Wolfe will be taking notes," he says from behind his desk.
His tone is total business professionalism. But my mind goes right back to last night, when he was anything but professional. My thoughts flood with memories of his hand on my thigh and his mouth against my jaw.
I push them out as quickly as I can. Right now, I'm an employee, and this is a meeting. Last thing I need is to get turned on in the middle of the damn meeting.
Gianni gestures to the chair on the far side of the office, about a dozen feet from where the small group is situated. I slide into it before crossing my legs, opening the legal pad, and clicking my pen.
"Excellent. Let's begin." Gianni leans back a bit. "Let's start with Marino."
Theresa straightens in her chair. "His people approached the dockworkers' union again last week. That's the third time in two months."
"And what was the nature of this approach?" Gianni asks.
"He's offering better terms than ours, undercutting the contracts we negotiated in January. It's costing us leverage with the port authority, and it's starting to affect supply chain timelines for the construction arm."
"How much leverage?" Spackman asks. His voice is calm and measured.
"Enough that if we lose the union vote next quarter, we lose the port contracts entirely. Marino knows that. He's been working toward this for years."
I write it down in clean, shorthand notes, the way I've been trained. My pen slows as the conversation shifts, because what started as a discussion about union negotiations is becoming something else entirely.
"It's not just the unions," Spackman says. "He's been moving on the delivery routes in Jersey, too. Squeezing our logistics partners, poaching drivers. This is a full-court press."
"Because he wants the seat," Gianni comments.
Silence is the only answer.
I don't look up. I keep writing, my pen moving in careful, measured strokes, as though the words I'm recording are perfectly ordinary business strategy and not a reference to something I've spent eleven months suspecting but never confirming.
The seat. He's not talking about a board seat or a seat at some conference table down the hall.
No. He's talking about a very different kind of table. The biggest one there is.
In that moment, I realize this isn't a meeting about Russo Industries.