Chapter Two Hera
Chapter Two
Hera
“Mrs. Ellene! We weren’t expecting you today!” The security guard nearly tripped in his hurry to open the turnstile. Tara gave him a cool nod as she passed, her Valentinos clicking vindictively on the lobby floor.
The cluster of people waiting for the elevators—employees tapping at their phones, interns clutching iced coffees—automatically parted before her. When the doors to one of the elevators opened, no one dared to join her inside.
She stepped out into the fiftieth-floor executive suite, breezing through the generic reception area: couches with simple lines, armchairs that looked like they’d never been used.
“Mrs. Ellene!” A woman with a sharp gray bob sat behind the main reception desk. “I’m sorry, Mr. Ellene is still at a lunch. May I bring you something while you wait for him? A Perrier? A cappuccino?”
“No, thank you.”
The receptionist must have heard the note of dismissal in her voice, because she quickly stepped back.
The perimeter of the executive floor was lined in offices, most of which were marked with Ellene family names—Alina, Hector, Paul, Diana. They were all empty, everyone attending the same corporate lunch that had detained her husband. She had planned it this way.
Outside the largest corner office, a young woman sat in a cubicle.
“Olivia,” she said coldly.
Her husband’s assistant flicked her blond hair dismissively over one shoulder. She wore one of those Veronica Beard blazers that really shouldn’t qualify as office wear, its tapered sleeves barely reaching elbow length. Especially inappropriate given that Olivia had paired it with a short skirt.
Tara resisted the urge to tug self-consciously at her own dress, a white Oscar with cap sleeves and gold buttons down the front.
It had seemed appropriate when she put it on this morning—it conveyed righteous anger and old Hollywood glam at once—but next to Olivia and her long, tanned legs, the dress felt suddenly frumpy.
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Ellene, but Bruce is at an executive lunch at the club. I wasn’t aware he was expecting you?” Olivia’s pitch tilted up, as if asking a question. The nerve of her, using Bruce’s first name. Not to mention referring to the Knickerbocker Club as the club, as a member would.
Tara’s grip on her peacock-blue handbag tightened.
She glanced disdainfully over Olivia’s cubicle, which was strewn with papers and abandoned cans of Diet Coke.
A pair of ballet flats sat beneath the desk, which Olivia must have kicked off after she walked from the subway, trading them for heels.
Tara’s nose wrinkled at the candle burning on Olivia’s desk, the all-too-familiar Amour logo scrawled across its frosted glass surface.
Tara despised that scent, though she knew better than to say so aloud.
The Amour line had made millions for TWL, mostly thanks to these stupid candles, which always topped everyone’s gift-guide lists.
The funny thing was, even though the entire world claimed to love the candle, no one could agree on what it smelled like.
Some swore it was vetiver, others vanilla or honeysuckle, sandalwood or rose.
It smells like desire, its creator, Tara’s daughter-in-law, always said.
And since each person’s experience of desire is unique, everyone experiences Amour slightly differently.
Desire? That candle smelled like a cheating bitch.
Tara hated her daughter-in-law, the way she would have hated any woman who broke her beloved son’s heart. Though she pretended not to, for his sake. Because for some reason known only to him, he’d decided to stay with his wife, even after what she’d done.
Tara was aware of her own hypocrisy, wanting her son to leave his wife when she would never dream of leaving Bruce. But it was different for her.
“Would you like to wait in Bruce’s office?” Olivia asked, her lipsticked mouth curling into a smile.
Tara ignored the suggestion. “Remind me, how long have you worked for my husband?”
“Six months.”
“And have you been sleeping with him the whole time, or is it a recent development?”
She half-expected Olivia to deny it. Usually they did, at least at first—they would stammer that she was mistaken, that they had nothing but respect for Mr. Ellene.
The more fragile women broke out in guilty tears.
Yet Olivia did none of those things. She just stood, lifted her green eyes, and said in a bold voice, “You’re right, I’ve been sleeping with your husband.
I love him.” There was something vicious and territorial in the pronouncement, something that made Tara inexplicably sad.
“You love him,” she repeated flatly.
“Yes, I love him! And he’s going to leave you. We have plans.”
Poor, stupid mortal. Had she really been so foolish as to believe Bruce’s empty promises?
“Whatever he told you, he was lying. He’s not leaving me.” Tara’s voice was almost gentle, but Olivia cut her off with a caustic laugh.
“Don’t you get it? He doesn’t love you anymore.”
That was when the girl’s hair caught on fire.
For years afterward, long after insurance had paid off the medical bills—after the whole incident had been reduced to the stuff of corporate legend—people would speculate about what happened.
Did Olivia take a step back, her glossy tresses catching the flame of the Amour candle?
Did a gust of air come down from the AC vent, causing sparks to fly up like insects and settle in Olivia’s mane?
Whatever happened, people would tell one another in hushed tones, she’s a cautionary tale about candles at work. This is why we have fire codes.
The moment Olivia’s hair caught fire, she froze. The flames flickered around her head like a golden crown, casting her features in an ethereal glow.
Then she screamed.
The sound sliced through the other noises of the executive floor, the clacking of keyboards and ringing of phones.
Olivia flung herself to the ground and began rolling back and forth. There was something pitiful about the whole thing: her Barbie-doll skirt hiking up around her thighs, the singed ends of her hair falling around her face.
Tara stepped neatly over Olivia and walked to the corner of the desk. She leaned down and blew out the candle as if it were sitting atop a birthday cake.
“What happened?” another assistant cried out, reaching the scene. Right on cue, Tara turned, lifting her manicured hands to her mouth in horror.
“The candle caught her hair on fire! One minute we were talking and then—It was all so fast—”
Within seconds, a crowd had gathered. The floor’s main receptionist, the gray-haired woman from earlier, took charge of the situation, pulling Olivia to one side and wrapping a cashmere blanket around her shoulders.
In the hubbub, no one protested as Tara retreated to her husband’s office, murmuring something about feeling faint.
It wasn’t a lie. She leaned back on the couch and closed her eyes against a sudden wave of exhaustion.
These confrontations were always draining, and they seemed to be getting worse each time.
She wasn’t sure how long had passed before she heard the office door swing open.
“Seriously?” Bruce demanded without preamble. “You need to stop screwing with my assistants.”
“I will, if you stop screwing them in the first place.”
Her husband ran a hand wearily over his features. “At least go somewhere private, the next time you feel the urge to confront a mortal. What if you’d been seen?”
“No one saw.” And even if they had, they wouldn’t have believed it—would have invented some rational explanation for what had happened.
Mortals were willfully blind in that way. They had a remarkable ability to ignore the evidence of their own eyes, insisting on science and logic when the world was so clearly wild and supernatural.
And magical.
Tara glanced over at her husband, who leaned a hip against his desk, his deep blue eyes on hers.
For all the eons that Tara had known him, this was how Bruce had looked.
Unfairly handsome, his dark hair peppered with only the slightest bit of gray, his face creased with boyish mischief and, usually, lust.
Bruce Ellene, also known as Zeus.
For better or worse, Hera—currently operating among the mortals as Tara Ellene—had long ago accepted him, flaws and all.
Sometimes she wondered if mortal women felt this way about their marriages. Not that she could ever ask a mortal. Like all the gods, Hera kept her true nature hidden, along with her name. When she said Hera aloud, the humans heard Tara, just as Zeus turned into Bruce. It was safer this way.
“She’s going to be fine, you know,” Hera felt the need to add. She hadn’t meant to scar the girl, just teach her a bit of a lesson.
Zeus shrugged. “We’ll give her a good severance package. I was planning to do that anyway, since…”
Since he’d already been growing tired of Olivia.
The phone on Zeus’s desk rang, startling them both, but within seconds it was picked up by a young man at a cubicle around the corner.
“Mr. Ellene’s office,” he murmured, smoothly taking over Olivia’s job.
Already Olivia’s desk area was empty, the black singe marks on the carpet the only evidence that she had been there at all.
Zeus sighed and walked to the bar cart, a Victorian antique with original nineteenth-century wheels. He poured two measures of bourbon and passed one to Hera.
Silence still hung between them, but it was softer, less aggressive than before.
She lifted her drink in an ironic mockery of a toast, noting the Baccarat crystal tumbler. “Remember when we tried to buy them?”
As always, Zeus knew exactly what she meant. “Too bad the sale didn’t go through.” He settled into the armchair facing the couch, crossing one ankle over the opposite knee. “You always did have a soft spot for pretty things.”
No, that’s you, Hera wanted to reply. Yet she lacked the heart to keep attacking.
The bourbon settled in her stomach, its warmth as familiar to her—and as infrequent, lately—as her husband’s touch.
She and Zeus had been married so long ago that she could hardly recall it, her memories of that day as hazy as an old, faded painting.
Truthfully, she couldn’t remember all that much. This was for the best.
No one, human or immortal, would have been able to bear centuries of memories. It would only lead to madness.
“Olivia didn’t matter to me, Hera. It was just…sex,” Zeus assured her, interrupting her thoughts.
“She was under the impression that you were divorcing me,” Hera said quietly.
Her husband scoffed. “That woman was getting too clingy. Delusional of her, thinking that I would ever leave you.”
Just like always, Zeus had deflected blame onto someone else’s shoulders—and deliberately avoided the words I’m sorry. Nor had he promised to remain faithful, not that Hera would believe him if he did.
They would keep doing this same dance, over and over and over again.
Zeus would keep cheating, and she would keep pretending it was fine, because she was the goddess of marriage and domesticity.
Because they had three children together, and their offspring had already fractured the family in irreparable ways.
Hera would say or do anything to hold her family together.
“Please, Hera, can we put this behind us?” Zeus added. “Forgive me?”
“You’re already forgiven,” Hera promised, and reached across the couch to take her husband’s hand.