Page 38 of Handsome Devil
I’d realized that yesterday, after seeing her at the restaurant and getting a little annoyingly interested in sparring with her. It felt too much like… flirting? In a really warped, fucked-up way. Only because I’d enjoyed it.
Clearly, she did not.
Either way, I had no time for that shit right now. With anyone. Least of all an employee at one of Valhalla’s companies, who hated me because of fucking high school.
I had enough issues to deal with.
I did not need some hot but hot-headed employee mouthing off at me. I just needed a job done when I asked for it.
I realized, belatedly, that I’d picked up her employee file and was leafing through it, not for the first time. Clipped to the inside of the folder was a photo of Devi, a headshot, and a copy of an employee ID card, like she might use at industry events.
In the photo, she looked just as striking and almost as dangerous as she did in real life. That flawless smile with a terrible joke in it, pretty white teeth against her brown skin.
I wondered if I’d be firing her next.
I dropped the file on the desk and looked up. Could’ve sworn I saw at least two people vanish down the hall when I looked out into reception. I heard a door close. Why were there no privacy blinds on that goddamn window?
I wondered at what point my new employees would start Googling me, and finding out about the sex tape.
Maybe they already were.
I knew they didn’t want me here. That much was obvious, and it was a feeling I was accustomed to.
At head office, they liked to call mefixer, in part because I excelled in figuring out why things were broken and fixing them. And in part because the job title “fixer” also meant someone who made illicit arrangements for others. You know, like when the mob needed someone dead.
Yeah. I cut jobs, and they joked behind my back that I made bodies disappear.
Funny.
The fact was, I was a master at sussing out weakness. What good was sussing out weakness if you couldn’t also coldly cut it out at the root? I was able to do this with surgical precision.
It’s called efficiency, people.
Often, efficiency required making changes. Shifting roles. Amalgamating.
Downsizing.
Maybe sometimes people just needed to accept that things were broken and fucking deal with the necessary changes. And deal with me coming into their lives for a short while to make those changes.
But I didn’t exactly choose to be here. I didn’t even buy this agency, personally. None of this was a personal attack on Devi Sereda. I didn’t know shit-all about her agency, really, until yesterday.
I didn’t know she worked here.
If she thought I’d bought this agency because she worked here, or because I gave a shit where she was or what she was doing with her life… wrong. I had zero interest in Devi Sereda, or literally anyone else I went to high school with—other than Lex, Shane and Johnny; same as back then.
I didn’t even give a shit about this agency, particularly, except for the fact that my family now expected me to give a shit—and thanks to Janelle Gorman, I was now obligated to give a shit.
Because she wasstealingfrom the agency.
It took very little digging into the agency’s financials last night to suss it out. As usual, my instincts were spot-on. The woman was shady as shit. And even more self-interested than she came across in our meeting at the restaurant, which was saying a hell of a lot.
I decided to bite the bullet and pick up the phone, calling my mother’s personal cell. It was already afternoon in Toronto, and I needed to get this call the fuck over with.
“Dane,” she answered.
“Just calling with a progress report. I thought you’d appreciate one.” There was no point in small talk with my mother. She abhorred it from anyone, especially her own family members.
“Do you have something to report?” she asked, like she was talking to some middle-management dolt who might just be wasting her time, and not her formerly beloved son.
