Rose #2
One of the few real friends I've made in this city, a powerhouse attorney in her own right and my preferred source for anything tabloid, press or lawsuit adjacent.
We have mutually beneficial interests and absolutely no illusions about the arrangement.
She feeds me information before it hits daylight; I occasionally make introductions or help kill something before it grows teeth.
I've also tried, on more occasions than I care to count, to set her up with Michael.
He has held the line every single time on not being interested, which remains one of his more baffling failures of judgment. Jade is brilliant, beautiful, funny, terrifying in court and possesses exactly enough patience to survive him. I would make an excellent sister-in-law to her.
He refuses to cooperate.
Selfish.
I swipe to answer as I step into the elevator.
“Rosalie!” she screams.
I yank the phone away from my ear. “Damn, Jade, it's too early for this. Why are you screaming at me?”
“Sorry, I'm running a mile a minute this morning. It's your brother. There's a story about to break on him in under an hour, and it's not good, babes. I'm sending it to you right now.”
Fuck.
What has he done now?
“Thanks, Jade. How bad?”
“It's a hit piece. No question about it. Somebody came prepared, and whoever fed this to them knew exactly what they were doing.” Papers shuffle on her end, followed by the unmistakable sound of heels moving quickly across tile.
“I've gotta run. I'm walking into court, but I wanted you to have it before it dropped. Tell me what you need and it's yours.”
“Thank you. Love you, babes. Go kick some ass.”
“Always. Talk soon.”
The email lands before the call disconnects.
I open it as the elevator doors slide apart and start reading while I walk, heels clicking down the corridor. The article is slated for the Los Angeles Journal, and I make it halfway through before my feet stop moving.
I press the heel of my palm hard against one eye.
“Fuck.”
Not because it's all true.
That's almost worse.
It's the kind of piece built from enough truth to make every exaggeration around it feel credible, which means correcting the record won't matter once the headline does its job. Whoever put this together didn't stumble across Michael's mess by accident. They assembled it.
And we have less than an hour before it goes live.
I turn around and head straight for Frank's office.
Our most senior board member, the last man on earth I want to owe a favor to, and unfortunately exactly the bastard I need right now.
I walk in without knocking and shut the door behind me.
I can't take this to Michael first. He'll look at it, tell me it'll all work itself out and go back to whatever he's doing while the building burns down around him and the rest of us form an orderly bucket line.
God love him.
"You could knock, you know." He crosses his arms over his chest, and his eyes make a slow, appraising trip down my body.
I snap my fingers sharply next to my face. "I own the building, you know. Get your pervy fucking eyes off me and pay attention." I slide my phone across his desk. "We have a problem. An immediate, screaming problem."
I've never been one to cower to men like Frank. He's a dirty old bastard with a talent for making women feel like inventory, but he also has money, connections and a frightening ability to get things done before everyone else has finished deciding whether they're technically allowed to.
That combination is the only reason he still has a seat at this table.
I watch the reality of the article land on him. His face goes pale.
"Who?" he asks.
“No idea.” I fold my arms across my chest. “Jade got it to me before it goes live, but we don’t have a lot of time. We've got less than an hour.”
Within fifteen minutes, Jackson joins us in Frank's office.
There's a tension between the two of them, thick and immediate, that I can't decipher and don't have the time to try.
Frank barely acknowledges him, Jackson's jaw tightens the second he walks in, and whatever fresh circle of male bullshit they've opened between themselves gets filed under later with everything else.
“Where's Bennet now?” Jackson asks, both palms planted on the table, his head hanging low between his shoulders.
“He's with Ms. Monroe. Conference room B.”
“Then let's get this over with.”
The three of us move down the hall toward conference room B like a small storm front, tight and fast and mostly silent, the particular choreography of people who already know something unpleasant has to happen and aren't wasting time pretending a better option is going to materialize before we reach the door.
Somehow, I end up in front.
Why I'm first in line for the firing squad, I have no idea, but here we are.
I knock once before opening the conference room door, with Frank and Jackson filing in behind me.
“Sorry to interrupt.”
And immediately, more fucking tension.
Different tension.
It's contagious.
Michael and Ms. Monroe are sitting across from each other with matching scowls firmly in place, and whatever was happening before we walked in has stopped so abruptly I can practically see the skid marks.
“May we join you for a few minutes?”
Whatever's crackling between them is palpable.
There's a specific charged stillness to two people who were mid-something and snapped their mouths shut the second the door opened, and these two are practically humming with it.
Michael's jaw is set. Ms. Monroe's spine is a little too straight.
Behind me, I can feel Frank and Jackson clocking it too, their attention doing the same quiet bounce mine just did: Michael, Blaire, Michael again.
Wonderful.