Chapter 34

He turned up each month—usually at night—to “check on things,” as he put it. We would sit in my tiny, cluttered office, where he took over my desk and chair to set up shop. His sharp blue eyes missed nothing at all, and, while I had my own employees quaking in their boots to a certain degree, only a look from him would get someone to confess taking a napkin home. A dirty one, at that

For all that, he was brilliant, but also an arrogant fuckwit with perfect teeth and a Napoleon complex who got on my nerves, and he knew it.

Case in point, he was grinning at me on a Saturday evening after the shop had closed. I reeked of spilled substances, used coffee grains, and was drooping fast. Yet the asshole was sitting there, grinning at me while fresh as a daisy in his freakishly well-starched white shirt and subdued tie, suit jacket unbuttoned. At ten o’clock.

“Didn’t take your vitamins this morning, Sybil?”