sat, crossing one knee over the other, stretching her arms over the back. Posing. “I don’t want to do it anymore.” But the lie didn’t quite reach her eyes.
“Yes. You do. You’ve always wanted that cover. It’s why you started dating me.”
She rolled her eyes. “Always with the same song and dance.” She reached for the pack of cigarettes she had on the table.
“I guess that’s why you changed partners in the middle of the dance.”
“Dominic, that was ages ago,” she said, lighting a skinny cigarette. “Let’s forget all that.” She patted the couch next to her.
I ignored the invitation.
I didn’t like being here. I didn’t like being around her. The stark contrasts between her and Ally, my past and my present, were dizzying.
“The cover,” I repeated. “What’s your game?”
She looked away again and brushed a hand over a furry pillow, fingers plucking at the ivory tufts. “I changed my mind,” she said, less emphatically.
“You changed your mind, or someone changed your mind?”
“What does it matter?”
“We can still run your cover, your story. You signed the releases,” I warned her. “This isn’t going to look good for you, reneging on a deal with Dalessandra Russo.”
She flinched then. Elena already had a reputation for being difficult. She showed up late, left early, and spent most shoots complaining. Her manager and her looks were the only things keeping her gainfully employed.
“She won’t do anything about it,” she said, studying her nails. “She’ll let me out of it and play nice.”
“That doesn’t sound like you, Elena. I remember you confessing that my mother was your idol when you were a teenage model doing car shows and catalog shoots. You know who that sounds like to me?”
She gave a shrug as if she couldn’t care less, but those unnatural green eyes were watering.
“My father,” I said.
Her eyes darted to me, wide with surprise. “You know?”
“I guessed. What did he promise you?”
She slumped against the cushion. “The cover of Indulgence. I can’t do both.”
“Why would you choose Indulgence over Label? They’re not even in the same league.”
“It’s a good opportunity,” she parroted.
“Says my father who landed a job with them, and now he’s poaching content from Label. I repeat, why are you doing this?”
She worried her lower lip between her teeth hard enough that I was concerned the filler would leak out. “He has something of mine,” she said.
“Christ.” I shoved my hand through my hair. “What?”
“A tape,” she answered in a tiny voice.
“What kind of tape?”
“What kind of tape do you think? A sex tape.”
I sighed. “Elena, come on. You know better than that.” I knew her manager personally, a no-nonsense woman who schooled her charges in all the ways the world could chew them up and spit them out if they weren’t very smart and very cynical.
“I didn’t know. I didn’t know he made one.”
“That’s illegal.”
“I can’t prove it, and he knows it,” she said, fat tears finally fighting their way past the jungle of lashes.
“How did my father get the tape? Did someone sell it to him?” Maybe I could finally find a way to hang Paul Russo. Blackmailing family was one thing, but this was an entirely new low.
She shook her head.
“You don’t know?”
She took a shuddery breath. “He made it.”
66
Dominic
My mother was still in the office when I got back. She’d gathered the troops in her office. Linus, Irvin, and Shayla were joined by a handful of editors. There were cartons of Thai food and bottles of wine on every flat surface. People paced and slumped and threw out ideas while my mother twirled her reading glasses by the arm and shot them down one by one. Irvin was kicked back in a chair, his phone glued to his hand.
“Mom? A minute.” I hooked my thumb over my shoulder, not wanting to air our dirty Russo laundry in front of everyone else.
She picked up her tea and followed me into the hall.
“Come on, people, focus,” Linus said, clapping his hands as we stepped out. “We have seventy-two hours to come up with a plan, shoot it, and write the goddamn story.”
“Did you talk to Elena?” Mom asked.
I nodded. “We have bigger problems than an egotistical model.”
“What?”
“More like who. Elena has committed to do the Indulgence May cover.”
“That’s ridiculous. Their circulation is barely sixty percent of ours.”
“She’s being blackmailed into it.”
She closed her eyes and blew out a breath. “Paul.”
“It seems he’s blackmailing her with a sex tape.”
My mother’s eyes opened. “That’s rather low even for him.”
“It gets worse. He has