“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 the tape because he made it.”
“Made it as in…”
“He had a year-long affair with Elena, which happened to overlap both your marriage to him and my relationship with her.”
It had been my father’s shirt she’d been wearing when I showed up at her apartment two years ago.
My mother looked down at the teacup in her hand for a long beat, then hurled it against the wall. Conversation in the room cut off. It looked as if we Russos were starting to have trouble controlling our tempers.
“Is everyone okay?” Linus asked slowly, approaching with caution.
Mom gave him the circle the wagons smile. “Everything is fine. Just dropped my tea. It’s time for something harder anyway.”
“Mom.”
She held up an index finger, effectively shushing me. Russos didn’t discuss things. We certainly didn’t admit to being betrayed. And we definitely didn’t show weakness.
“Come inside, Dominic. We’ll figure out what direction we should go in.”
On a sigh, I followed her inside and pulled out my phone.
Me: It’s going to be a late night. I’m with my mother in an emergency strategy session over the May cover story.
Ally: Elena? I am officially staying up for an update. I’ll put your dinner in the fridge and take Brownie for his walk. Let me know if you need anything.
Maybe I should tell her. Secrets only seemed to fester.
I grabbed a carton of drunken noodles and settled in with the rest of the team.
An hour later, we were still nowhere near a solution.
Linus sat up from where he reclined on the couch. “I’ve got it! Why don’t we put Ally on the cover? It seems her star is rising,” he joked.
My mother relaxed with a laugh. “It was a striking photo,” she agreed.
“What photo?” I demanded.
“Christian James’s Instagram,” Linus said, fingers flying over his phone screen. “I can’t believe you didn’t see it yet.” He slid the phone to me.
I felt my heart clumsily miss a beat as a chill settled in my chest. “What is this?” I asked, glaring at the photo.
“You didn’t know about it?” my mother asked.
“I had no idea,” I said, feeling the knife twist in me. Betrayal was the theme of the day. How many times could a man have his legs swept out from under him before he didn’t get back up?
“I need to take care of something,” I said, abruptly rising.
“You look comfortable,” I said, my tone too bland for her to pick up on the anger I was choking on.
Ally looked up from her cocoon on my couch and grinned. “Your fault for having such comfy furniture,” she teased. “Want to bring your dinner in here and snuggle while you fill me in on all the gossip?”
This charade of affection turned my stomach.
I tossed my phone in her lap.
She picked it up, grinned. And that knife in my guts twisted again.
“Wow. I don’t look half bad.”
“Care to explain?” I asked, my tone was deceptively mild. I wanted her to lie to me so I could call her on it. Because there were only two reasons why she’d be in Christian James’s photo on a bed, in an unzipped dress staring at the camera as if it were a lover. As if it were me.