Before he could start yelling again, she said calmly, “You’re going to let me continue to report on Johnny Pappalardo and also the dead body found nine hours ago on that fire escape.”
The ugly flush that rode up Dick’s thick neck suggested that getting pissed off at her was the only exercise he’d had for the month.
“Don’t tell me what you’re going to do—”
Jo leaned in and lowered her voice. “It turns out I’m a helluva reporter. You know what my next story is going to be on? Sexual harassment at the CCJ by its editor-in-chief. How many women do you think will take my call on that? I figure I’ll start off by telling them my own story, the one about that business trip you asked me to take with you? That long weekend away—where you made it clear that if I didn’t go, I wasn’t going anywhere at this paper? How many other women who used to work here have a similar story, Dick?”
Her boss slowly shut his mouth.
Jo released the button on the phone, the dial tone loud in the silence between them. “Thinking of what kind of quote you’re going to give me? Make sure it’s a good one, one that your wife’ll understand. Her family owns this paper now, right? Plus, I’ll bet the story’ll have national reach, and you’ll need another job after she kicks you out of the house and you get fired here. So you better try to put yourself in a favorable light in twenty-five words or less.”
She gave him an opportunity to respond. When he put the receiver back in its cradle, she nodded.
“That’s what I thought,” Jo said as turned on her heel and left his office.
Butch entered the Pit from the underground tunnel that connected the mansion site to the training center. As he opened the steel-reinforced door with a code, he kept quiet. V and Doc Jane were doing some work down at the clinic, so they weren’t home, but Marissa had come back to read in bed right after Last Meal, and he didn’t want to disturb her. Her work at Safe Place was demanding, and if she were sleeping, he wanted her to log those hours of rest.
The domestic abuse center that his shellan ran was the first of its kind for the species, and not unlike her brother, Marissa had a strong service side to her nature. She was driven to help other people, but it also turned out she was a terrific businesswoman. She coordinated everything at the facility, from the females and their young, to the treatment plans by the social workers, and also the budgets, the supplies, the food, the clothing. She was amazing at her job, but leading a compassionate cleanup crew for vulnerables who had been beaten, abused, neglected, and worse, was exhausting.
It was hard stuff to take, night after night.
Of course, her commitment to her work just made him love her more. Except he also worried about her when she looked as tired as she had been lately.
Closing himself in, he glanced at the racks of clothes that choked the hallway leading down to the pair of bedrooms. It was time to start putting his winter stuff into storage, and liberating his spring collection. Usually, he would be psyched for this annual ritual, and so would Fritz, but it was going to be a one-sided party on the butler’s part this year.
Butch was too distracted with the prophecy shit.
Walking out to the common area, he took off his jacket and laid it on the arm of the leather sofa. The cottage where he and V, and their mates, lived was the pebble to the mansion’s bolder, done in the same architectural style, but filling out a fraction of the square footage. It was also not decorated the same. The big house was like Tsarist Russia meeting Napoleonic France with a flash of Hogwarts. Butch and V’s crib? Try frat house crossed with bachelor pad: They had this couch, a foosball table, a TV the size of a soccer field, and V’s Four Toys, a.k.a. his computer setup. But at least here had been some refinements since their shellans had moved in. Courtesy of Marissa and Jane, gym bags were no longer coughing up jock straps and running shoes like they were choking from the smell, the issues of Sports Illustrated were in a tidy stack on the coffee table, and the half-eaten bags of