Page 10 of By A Thread

It was something my father would have done. Abusing his position of power to have someone who dared stand up to him fired.

That made it worse.

I already hadn’t felt great about it, but I couldn’t seem to stop myself. A year’s worth of pent-up frustration had finally boiled over. Not that the woman had been an innocent victim. There was nothing “victim” about the opinionated, curvy Maleficent.

Minus the firing, I thought we’d both enjoyed the sparring.

“Liar,” Greta said fondly.

We were close but notthatclose. As a rule, I didn’t spill my guts to anyone. Not to my mother. Not to Greta. Not even to my best friends. It was part of being a Russo. We did what was necessary to protect the family name.

Even if it meant never admitting anything was wrong.

A leggy woman in a fitted sheath dress trotted by, a tray of eye-searing juices in one hand and four Hermès shopping bags in her other. She was making a beeline for the conference room when she spotted me. Her eyes went wide in that deer-in-the-headlights, fearful adrenaline kind of way. She stumbled, the point of her shoe grazing the carpet.

I looked away as a putrid green juice tumbled into one of the bags.

She yelped and sprinted away.

Another day, another terrified employee.

I’d assumed they’d all get used to me. Apparently I’d assumed incorrectly. I was the beast to my mother’s beauty. The monster to the heroine. When they looked at me, they saw my father.

“Maybe if you smiled once in a while,” Greta suggested to me.

I rolled my eyes and pulled out my phone. “If I smile, they think I’m baring my teeth at them.”

“Rawr,” she teased.

“Drink your poison, woman,” I said gruffly.

“Maybe someday you’ll grow up to drink coffee too,” she said, fluttering her eyelashes.

“When hell freezes over.” I was a staunch tea drinker, and the preference had nothing to do with the beverage itself. It had been the first of my many rebellious stands.

She nodded in the direction of the windows. Outside, New York shivered and froze. “Looks like it already has.”

I leaned against her desk, thumbing through my inbox on my phone. “What’s up first today?”

“You’ve got advertising at ten, proofs for approval due by noon, Irvin asked if you could take his place in a budget meeting at two, and Shayla would like five minutes of your time right now.”

Greta nodded behind me, and I knew the beauty editor was standing there. I felt her perpetual cloud of low-level annoyance.

I turned.

The terms statuesque and stern came to mind. Shayla Bruno had earned the Miss Teenage America title at age seventeen and enjoyed a brief career in modeling before moving behind the camera. She was a few years my senior, had exquisite taste in jewelry, mothered three children with her wife, and—in my opinion—her talents were being wasted as beauty editor.

Too bad for her that the position she wanted was the one I currently occupied.

“Good morning, Greta. Is now a good time, Mr. Russo?” she asked, her tone making it clear that she didn’t care if it was or wasn’t.

“Dominic,” I reminded her for the one-hundredth time. “Of course.” I gestured toward my office.

At least with Shayla I didn’t have to pretend to be something I wasn’t. Like kind or caring. Or interested in her life in any capacity. She recognized me as the uncaring bastard I was.

While I hung up my coat, Shayla crossed to the lightboards in the corner and clipped a page layout in place.

So it was going to be one of those meetings.