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Chapter Five
Vanessa
I’ve never been in a more tense meeting in all my life, and I’m including the last time I was in this exact room. It’s so tense, I’d call it painful. The last meeting had been painful, but this is pain of an entirely new and considerably less pleasant variety.
I shuffle in my seat, wanting to toss the rolling chair back and run. I’d prepared for this, been so prepared. But I couldn’t have prepared for this .
My team and I strategized every possible scenario as we worked and reworked plan after plan and cobbled together clause after clause to finally complete a contract. We worked through Sunday and late into the night Monday and Tuesday before finally getting something together that we were happy with and that we could present today. I was thrilled with my team’s work and wished I could reward them with a few extra days off, but we would have to hit the ground running; our first press release would be tomorrow, and there we’d announce Mr. Casteel’s new name—the $180 million brand.
“One foot in front of the other.” That’s what Margerie said to me at the end of our first team meeting Sunday morning, in a very different tone than the one she’d arrived with when she’d all but shouted, “Emergency PR overhaul to redirect the narrative?” and stumbled into our small office, prepared to throw down to help clean up the mess I’d made—literally and figuratively—when I threw up all over our newest client.
Even though it was only April, Margerie showed up on Sunday in a summer dress and heels and sunglasses that made her look like a celebrity trying to remain anonymous. She was the last person to arrive to our small office. The shock on her face seeing my entire twenty-two-person team stuffed into our not-quite-big-enough conference room was priceless.
“Not quite,” I answered with a grimace. “I actually called you all here to let you know that Mr. Casteel changed his mind.”
“Changed his mind?” Margerie looked around, taking a seat on a high stool against the wall next to Melody, one of two legal associates working under Jem. “On what?”
“Everything.” I swallowed hard. I was dressed in an oversize button-up with leggings underneath. Some unfortunate combination of still hungover but trying to be professional. “He wants to join the Champions, and he wants our team on the long-term contract.” The cheers that went up after that only happened after a long moment of utter astonishment as I explained to them what had happened in my driveway yesterday morning.
“I need the comms team to get started on a campaign to explain the, um ... the situation at the bar. I need the legal team to start drafting long-term contract amendments based on the generic contract Mr. Singkham sent us. This is the same base contract the large brands are using to work with the other Champions, so we need this tailored to our client and our work.
“I need ops to start looking into what hiring might need to look like for the next six weeks, because we’ll need to scale up but not so quickly that we can’t manage our work and onboarding simultaneously. Mr. Singkham mentioned potentially contracting space and seconding staff from the COE offices themselves since our space here isn’t big enough. Dan, can you oversee that? And lastly, I need to see Jem and Margerie privately.”
As my team dispersed in a frenzied panic, I spent the next half hour going over the nauseatingly sparse countersigned contract copy Mr. Singkham had sent me. Neither Jem nor Margerie was particularly pleased.
“You signed this?” Jem said, holding up the sheet of printer paper. “This looks like a four-year-old put it together. It’s not even an original.”
“We’ll get an original Monday.”
Margerie huffed. “This seems sketchy.”
Yes. Yes, it did. “We know the proposal. There wasn’t anything in there for one person to do.”
“There were a few things in there one person might be seen as being potentially capable of doing alone.”
“What Margerie is so inelegantly saying is that he’s not a PR expert, and some of the ideas listed in the proposal were vague,” Jem said. “They could be interpreted to be jobs for a single individual.”
“Like what?” I counter, giving Jem a flat look.
“Social media management, to start.”
“That’s clearly a multiperson job. It’s listed in the description as needing a graphic designer, plus I already raised that with Mr. Singkham, and he said he understood ...”
“What about the personal assistant or the Lois Lane clause? Either of those could be interpreted, based on language, as being the responsibility of one person.”
“Even if he wanted a fake girlfriend to spruce up his brand, it clearly said in the proposal that this was a public speaking gig—someone to pose with him in photos and to make most of his speeches for him since he’s basically an asshole.” I hissed out that last part, face flaming as I tried to defend myself. “But the job requires another someone to actually write the speeches and yet another someone to liaise with journalists and media agencies, not to mention the someone who would be managing her or their joint social media pages. Lois Lane was just the fancy name we gave the speaker of this house—because, unlike his name suggests, we don’t want it set on fire!”
Margerie laughed while Jem narrowed her eyes and slammed one angry finger down on the single-page contract. “What about the PA position? His personal assistant? Personal. Assistant?”
My face reddened. My stomach churned. “I ...”
“Jesus Christ, don’t tell me you signed a contract to be a PA for ten years,” Margerie wheezed.
Oh my God. It was what I had missed, I was sure of it. Panicking, I babbled, “Let me make a call.”
Mr. Singkham answered on the first ring, and he was strangely ... reassuring, promising me that having a PA was one amendment to the contract the Pyro wouldn’t mind striking or delegating to someone else.
I left the call pleased but still confused because there wasn’t anything else we could find. What did he want me to personally work with him on? I planned to ask him at some point during our Wednesday meeting and expel the sick feeling in my belly once and for all, but now, seated in the room across the table from the world’s newest Champion, the butterflies in my stomach transform ... balloon, grow teeth .
No, maybe I won’t ask him today. Not today. Not tomorrow. Not ten years from tomorrow. Not if he keeps doing what he’s doing, which is the same thing he’s been doing since my team and I showed up and filed into the boardroom to find him already seated at the table.
He’s staring right at me.
Right.
At.
Me.
His pink eyes bore into my skull like a damn drill. I can all but hear the shrill sound of the bit as it pummels through drywall to reach the brain stud behind it. Dark pink around the edges of the iris, his eyes bleed lighter and lighter pink the longer he stares.
“Ms. Theriot came up with the idea.” Margerie’s voice is like a cattle prod to the side.
I jerk and look up in time to see Mr. Singkham grinning huge from the head of the table. “The Wyvern. I like it.” He raps his fist on the tabletop twice. “What do you think, Mr. Casteel?”
Mr. Casteel tilts his head to the side and blinks. “Say it,” he says to me. It could only be to me because he hasn’t looked at anyone else since we walked into the room. At first I thought my hair was dancing or that I had boogers in my nose, but I didn’t find anything wrong the three times I excused myself to take a look at my face in the bathroom mirror.
“The Wyvern?” I repeat, trying to sound strong. My throat is dry. I glance at the water pitcher in the center of the table but don’t dare reach for it.
“The Wyvern,” he repeats, and though quiet, nearly gentle, the way his voice wraps around me gives me chills. “What is that, Vanessa?” At the sound of my name in his voice, paired with the flare of white light from his irises, I shiver fully.
“It’s a mythical dragon.”
“A dragon?”
I nod quickly and even more quickly sputter out, “We thought the other fire names, like Pyro, were too obvious. Most of the heroes—Ch-Champions,” I correct on a slight stutter, using the preferred moniker, “have drawn on names from fantasy and mythology. We ran through lists of fantasy creatures and mythological gods who can wield fire before settling on the Wyvern. More subtle than a dragon, it tested best with our focus groups, both those who knew and those who didn’t know what a wyvern is.” My voice fizzles out, and we’re left in silence.
“And it was your idea?”
I glance again at my water glass on the table, needing a sip because it feels like I’ve been sucking on cotton balls all afternoon, but the pressure of eyes on my face is too much. I don’t move. Can’t.
“It was a team effort.”
His expression turns severe then, and he drums his nails into the top of his packet. His nails look well trimmed, but they still mottle the glossy surface of the pack, digging shallow little trenches on each touch. “Was it, Vanessa?”
Vanessa, you’re such a fucking disgrace.
I shake my head, feeling reprimanded, feeling scorched. “My team came up with many ideas. I happened to come up with that one, yes.”
“Hm,” he says, and he goes back to searching my face as if it were a riddle he remembered the answer to once but with time has forgotten. He watches me with frustration and fascination in equal measure, making me feel like a bug beneath a microscope.
Silence prevails. I hate it a lot. His arms cross over his black T-shirt—hole-free this time—and hoodie, and I pray that he threw the gray sweat suit he was wearing last time I saw him in the trash—no, that he used his powers to incinerate it—because it needs to be gone from this earth.
I shuffle my feet against the bag I brought with me. I cough into my fist. Mr. Casteel raises a black eyebrow and glances to the glass of water in front of me. In a panic move, I reach for it, and as I feared I would, I fumble the glass. Condensation glosses the exterior, and my clammy hand slips. It falls, spilling, winding idle rivers toward Mr. Casteel and threatening the small projector box along the way.
I gasp, frantically lurch up, hit my thighs on the underside of the table, grunt at the shocking pain that slices through my knees, and, grimacing, still force myself to stand. I reach for the black napkins fanned so elegantly down the center of the conference table, but I’m not tall enough to reach them. Not that it would have mattered. Roland’s hand is already there, pushing the napkins on the table within my reach away.
“Sit.”
I sit. Like a damn dog. Heat suffuses my cheeks, but it’s nothing compared to the heat that suddenly emanates from Roland. He’s standing in front of his chair, the wad of napkins completely soaked and doing absolutely nothing for the flood I’ve started. He’s abandoned them anyway and is staring down at the water, his eyes glancing over it almost absently, every other second flicking back to me. I don’t know where to look because, as much hold as those pink eyes have on me, I can’t help but be amazed by the fact that the water on the table is evaporating .
When the table’s slate surface is entirely dry, the wet napkins go up in a small, angry blaze. Roland sits down insouciantly, but before he does, he pushes his full, untouched glass of water across the conference table until it’s right in front of me and grunts, “You okay?”
I nod jerkily, though it’s a lie. No, I’m not fine. No part of me is fine. He’s supposed to be mean and combative, frustrating and confrontational. He’s not supposed to be ... nice . He’s not supposed to use his powers to help me .
He squints at me, and his eyes fade from the palest shade of pink to a darker fuchsia color. “Wanna hear you say it. Use your words.”
I heat unexpectedly and hope that the color doesn’t pinch my cheeks. “I’m o-okay.” I clear my throat. “Mr. Casteel. Thank you.”
Silence simmers and sputters, the oil too hot not to burn. His eyes are changing color again, but their focus is unwavering. “A wyvern breathes fire. I don’t just breathe fire,” Mr. Casteel finally says, voice softer than it has a right to be.
I shrink down in my chair even farther when his eyes blaze a bright orange before settling back to their normal color. And then fire suddenly erupts on the tips of his eyelashes like little sparklers, and I jump. It spreads across his cheekbones before disappearing as it hits the collar of his hoodie and then shooting across the backs of his hands and off the crests of his fingernails in a shower of tiny sparks.
“I am fire. I generate it through every pore.”
I jump, jolt, and shiver. I swallow hard. “We, um ... knew that ... but we couldn’t find another creature to more aptly describe your abilities.” We did ... but it wasn’t a good name for a Champion.
The devil and his demons, after all, could generate a fire like that according to some of their depictions throughout history. Luckily for us, our rebranding efforts were strictly secular, and luckily for Mr. Casteel, he has neither claws nor fangs nor horns. Luckily for all of us, because I don’t know what I’d do if a more monstrous Mr. Casteel were here staring at me like that.
Abruptly, Roland rolls his chair forward. He opens the packet to the correct page, the one with the images of wyverns on it from various mythologies, without looking down. “I like it.”
I swallow hard and glance up at Margerie, who’s leading the presentation from the front of the room and staring down at Roland like he’s grown three heads. I clear my throat.
She looks at me and shakes out of it, then says, “That’s very good to hear, Mr. Casteel. Now, if you’ll turn to the next page of your packet, we can look more at some of the design prototypes we’ve come up with so far ...”
A few more minutes pass, questions are asked and answered, and then Margerie makes space for Jeremy to come to the front of the room to discuss the contract. “After we go through the details, our legal team will finalize anything that needs correcting in the terms, and when we come back from the break, Vanya will talk to us all about tomorrow’s press conference.”
Roland’s still looking at me, and if I had to bet whether he heard anything Jeremy said, I’d bet ten to one against. He glances at my hands and then at my water glass. I still haven’t picked it up. I’m too nervous.
He looks ... angrier than he did a second before and huffs, “Let’s do this quickly. I’m ready for lunch.”
Jeremy wraps up at warp speed, and as the two teams break for lunch and everybody disperses, I remain seated. If I thought I could get away with it, I’d have grabbed a sandwich and eaten it sitting on the toilet in the women’s bathroom, but lunch isn’t sandwiches—it’s sushi—and trying to juggle soy sauce, wasabi, and chopsticks on my lap in the bathroom doesn’t sound particularly appealing.
Also unfortunate? The moment the group breaks for lunch and gets up from the table, Roland stands and starts to come around the conference table. He all but runs Garrison over in his effort to steal his seat, the one directly to my right. He drops into it, his knees pointed toward me, and stunned silly as I am, when he grabs the underside of my chair and swivels me to face him, I don’t do anything but let him.
His thighs move to bracket the outsides of my knees, and he cocks his chin at my feet. “What are you hiding under the table?”
“Oh! I, um ...” Flounder. “This is for you. A, uh ... hoodie to replace what I ...” threw up on. “ ... ruined. I bought you pants, too, because I, um ... well ...” I make a frantic hand gesture while my body cooks to a simmering boil. “I didn’t get shoes, though I would like to. I don’t know your size. If you could tell me your size, that would be helpful.”
I kick the bags under the table inelegantly toward him, the crinkle paper crunching inside as I do. I’ve been using work as a distraction from thinking about the images splattered across social media like blood from the jugular, but right now, hearing that paper crinkling ... thinking about his sweats and what I did to the old ones on Friday ... those pictures start to batter their way in. The moat is dry, the drawbridge is lowered, and when I lift my gaze and catch his profile—because for once he isn’t staring straight at me but is giving the bags some apathetic consideration—I can see those shaky cell phone photos and videos clearly.
“You look like a Black Fay Wray,” Jem said when I caught her scrolling socials Sunday evening before we all dragged ourselves out of the office to bed. Jem was the only one who still seemed alert despite the fact we’d been working for ten hours straight.
“Jem! Close that shit,” Jeremy chided her, and she had the indecency to look incensed.
“What? She looks gorgeous draped over his arms like that. A proper Ann Darrow to his King Kong, don’t you think? The 1933 version, of course.” She’s a monster movie fanatic and does not discriminate against a film’s age—or its quality. She really fits all of those typical second-generation Ethiopian, Mezcal-slinging, monster-loving, shrewd lawyer stereotypes.
Jeremy slammed his hand down on Jem’s computer, but the damage was done. When I later looked up the movie poster that Jem had been talking about, I almost passed out. Because it wasn’t the fact that I was draped like a beach towel between Roland’s strong arms, or the fact that his sweats were covered in splotchy patches of throw up; it was the way he was looking at my face. He’d had and held an expression all the way through the bar, up until the point that he curled me into his chest and rocketed into the sky, caught by so many different camera angles. He looked ... not angry. Very, very not angry. I swallow hard. He almost looked ... intrigued.
“There are two of them.” He turns back to face me, but I don’t let his pink eyes hook me or reel me in.
“I ... yeah.” I tuck my hair behind my ear and smile abruptly down at the boxes for reasons fully passing understanding. There’s just something strange about the question. It’s the kind of question I’d ask, so boldly random. “I got two different size sweat sets. Large and extra-large. I wasn’t sure what would fit you best. They’re navy blue and charcoal, though. I couldn’t find light gray to replace the ones I threw up on.” It’s a lie. I found gray. There were tons of gray. But humiliation prevented me from buying the identical shade; if I ever even see him in light-gray anything ever again, there’s a strong chance I’ll simply perish.
“The receipts are in there too. I bought them at that store in Sundale—Westwood—in case you want to exchange them. The address is on the receipt in case you don’t know where it is. Also I, um ... I’m not sure how to say this, but I ...” I choke, wondering why he still hasn’t taken the bags yet. “My brothers ... I don’t think you ... If we’re going to be working together in the long term ...” Does he hate the sweats? He hasn’t even looked at them yet. “I just wanted to say ... fighting them ... it wasn’t ...” I can’t take this anymore. “Do you not like the sweatpants?”
He grunts. “Your brothers fought me first.”
“Right, but ...”
“I won’t do it again.”
Air punches out of me in a shallow burst. “Oh, okay, thanks. I ... the pants ...”
“They’re fine.”
“Oh ...” Fine. I feel my cheeks heat anew. I tuck my hair behind my ear and then immediately untuck it, wanting to make the shrub of my hair large enough to disappear behind. “And I, um ... Margerie and I could have gotten a cab, you didn’t need to fly with me. It ... that’s ... I didn’t agree ...”
“She wouldn’t give me your home address. Only your family’s.” His gaze blazes orange this time, and his softness is gone. Back is the monster I met in the boardroom. I jump at the sudden severity of his tone. “And I wasn’t about to send two drunk women in a cab home alone at night.”
I try to keep my shoulders rolled back, try to push my toes into the floor and get some space between us, but his knees clamp around mine, holding me in place. “Jeremy and Dan could have taken us.”
“I wasn’t about to let your drunk ass take a cab with two men I don’t know.”
“ I know them ...” I start, but he leans in toward me, grabs the arms of my chair, and yanks me in until my knees meet the edge of his seat.
He lowers his head and speaks very quietly, his voice taking on the cadence of faraway thunder. “And I know that this is really fu—really new,” he says, censoring himself for inexplicable reasons, “but you’re going to have to get used to talking to me if you’re going to go through with this contract for the long term.”
I inhale, hold it, and then ... nothing. The breath doesn’t come out. I shake my head, feeling slightly incensed. “I ... you ...” I can’t get anything I want to say out, and I feel like a freaking fool.
You’re such a dumb little slut, Vanessa .
“I ... you are going to have to learn to be less ...” I wave at him frantically, trying to get my point across, because there are no words to accurately summarize how he’s being right now. No one has ever been like this to me before.
“Less what?”
“Less intense .”
Brow furrowed, he starts to stand and, fully towering over me, offers me his hand. He exhales, and I realize he’d been holding his breath too. I wonder ... why.
“I’ll try.” He nods once, and my gaze swims over his extended forearm, shrouded in pilled black fabric. He needs a makeover, and ... he agreed to one, I guess. All because I agreed to work with him. I don’t understand it, and yet I tentatively take this peace offering for what it is—at least, for what I hope he means for it to be—the flimsiest of olive branches.
I say, “I’ll try, too, Mr. Casteel. But like I told you at the bar, and as you can probably tell, I’m not really the one who usually does the talking in these meetings.”
His hand is big and warm and dry and fully envelops mine. It feels so personal, having my hand held like this. I actually ... can’t remember the last time anyone held my hand, and I don’t free my fingers as quickly as I should. That said, he also doesn’t release me but applies an even greater pressure.
As he continues to hold my hand and stare at me, his lips tilt down into an uncomfortable grimace. “You never have to talk to anybody in this building—or anywhere else—ever again, Vanessa, but I expect my wife to talk to me and, when she does, to call me Roland, not Mr. Casteel.”
“Your wife?” I glance around, feeling deeply uncomfortable holding his hand like this knowing he has a wife. How did that not come up in our research? “You have a wife?”
He freezes. “Yes. You. Or did you not understand the terms of our deal?”
My jaw unhinges, and my eyes flutter, and my knees go weak, and Mr. Casteel curses as he lunges to catch me.
And as I faint for the second time in that same boardroom, truly giving the classic Fay Wray a run for her money, I think back on that mockingly simple contract laughing at me from Mr. Singkham’s fancy suit jacket pocket and the feeling I’d had that I had missed something. Because it would seem that I had missed something big.