The Mafia Boss’s Assistant

The Ruthless Boss

Seven days after the email, Aria sat in front of the library's best computer in a green blouse that had once been her mother's, and interviewed for her life.

The woman on the screen looked as tired as Aria felt. She asked about spreadsheets, about databases, about a certification earned in the deep hours of the night. Aria answered everything in a voice steadier than her hands. When the woman asked why she wanted to leave Holloway, Aria did not mention Paige Miller, or the pawnshop ticket for her mother's ring, or the number on her head. She said, "Because this is where the work is," and meant every word of it.

Two days later, the invitation came: final interviews in Milan. Flights and hotel, company expenses.

The night before she left, Kim propped himself up on the couch and made her promise things.

"Eat something that isn't from a gas station," he said. "And don't let some fancy European company work you to death." A grin, pale but wicked. "And whatever you do, don't fall for some rich CEO. I read about those guys. They're all trouble."

"I'll be interviewing in a supply closet, Kim. The CEOs are all sixty and terrified of spreadsheets."

"You're going to be great," he said, and the way he said it like it was physics, not hope, was the thing she carried through two airports.

Milan hit her like a different century.

The Duomo rose over the piazza like a wedding cake carved from moonlight. The women on the sidewalks wore boots that cost more than her father's truck. And there, in the fashion district, stood the headquarters of Cross International, forty stories of smoked glass, with the company's silver emblem catching the afternoon sun like a blade.

Aria walked into the lobby in her mended coat and nine-year-old boots, carrying the suitcase her mother had bought secondhand when Aria was twelve, and felt every marble tile quietly assess her.

Signora Bellini from Human Resources met her at the security desk, a small neat woman whose smile kept flickering at the edges.

"You are early. Good. Mr. Cross likes early." She said it the way people say the dragon prefers virgins.

"Is the interview with a panel?" Aria asked.

Signora Bellini's face did something complicated. "Mr. Cross prefers to conduct final interviews himself."

"Isn't he the chief executive?"

"He is." The elevator doors opened. "He has gone through four assistants this year, Miss Bennett. The last one lasted eleven days. The one before her cried in the elevator on her very first morning, and we never saw her again." She pressed the button for the fortieth floor as though arming a device. "We have stopped keeping tissues at the desk. It only encourages them."

Through the glass walls of the top floor, Aria saw him before she heard him.

Adrian Cross stood in an office the size of his whole house, dismissing a man twice his age with the flat calm of a man closing a door. " . . .finished here. Security will walk you out." The older man went gray. Adrian Cross did not raise his voice once. He didn't need to. Cold, Signora Bellini had written in the profile email. Aria understood now that cold was a euphemism. He was glacial. He was a man who had never once been told no and had forgotten, if he ever knew, what it cost other people to say yes.

Then he turned, and saw her watching, and something in his eyes went briefly, dangerously amused, like a wolf noticing a rabbit that hadn't run.

"Miss Bennett." He didn't offer his hand. He didn't offer a chair. He picked up a tablet and held it out. "Ninety seconds. Tell me what's wrong with these numbers."

No greeting. Not tell me about yourself. Aria took the tablet. Quarterly reports, a regional distribution network, revenue figures in a language she didn't speak. Her heart hammered, and then the numbers took over the way they always did, quieting everything else.

She barely heard the clock. Somewhere around sixty seconds, the numbers lined up the way they always eventually did, and she set her finger on the screen.

"Your northeastern distributor is robbing you."

His eyebrows rose a millimeter. "Explain."

"His revenue is up twenty-two percent, but his freight costs are flat, his warehousing is flat, and his returns actually dropped. Either he's invented free shipping," she turned the tablet "or the invoices are inflated and someone is skimming the difference. Either way, those aren't sales. That's a leak with a signature on it."

Silence. Somewhere behind her, Signora Bellini had stopped breathing.

"Numbers don't lie," Aria said, setting the tablet down. "People do."

For the first time, Adrian Cross looked at her. Really looked the way jewelers look at stones, the way surgeons look at scans. He was younger than she'd expected from the profile photo. Thirty, perhaps. Dark-haired, unfairly composed, with the kind of face that would have been handsome if anything in it knew how to soften. Nothing in it did.

"Holloway," he said. "I've never heard of it."

"Most people haven't had the pleasure."

"Your coat is ten years old."

"It's warm." She kept her voice even. Do not flinch. Flinching is a currency he trades in.

"Why do you want to work here, Miss Bennett?"

"For the salary." No speech about dreams. No poetry. "My brother is sick, and money matters to me more than your opinion of my coat."

Signora Bellini made a small dying sound by the door. Adrian Cross went very still, the way a blade goes still before it moves.

"Most people lie to me," he said at last. "It's a reflex. Like breathing. They lie about their ambitions, their loyalty, their fear." He tilted his head. "You've been in my office four minutes, and you've accused my distributor of theft, insulted my manners, and told me to my face that my opinion is worthless. You're either the bravest applicant I've ever had, or the stupidest."

"Which one gets the job?"

Something moved at the corner of his mouth. Not a smile. The rumor of one.

"The data position is filled," he said.

The floor dropped out from under her. All of it: the flight, the suitcase, the number in her head.

"You'll be my personal assistant instead. Double the salary. Housing allowance. Full medical coverage, effective immediately." He said it the way other men commented on the weather.

Double the salary. Her mind did the arithmetic the way it always did, faster and more mercilessly in one year than her father earned in three. And medical coverage, effective immediately, four words that meant a knocked-out tooth wouldn't become a debt, a fever wouldn't become a choice. She wondered, with a catch in her chest she refused to show, how far four words like that could reach.

"I am Mr. Cross. I applied as an analyst. I don't know the first thing about being an assistant."

"You'll learn. Everyone in this building tells me what I want to hear, within the hour and at great length. You just looked at numbers you'd never seen before and told a stranger he was being robbed, and you didn't blink." He finally gestured to the chair not an offer, a summons. "I want that within arm's reach, Miss Bennett. I find it interesting."

"And if I say no?"

"Nobody says no to me," said simply, without heat, which was somehow worse. "But you won't. Because of the salary. Because of your brother." His eyes hadn't left her face. "Do you accept?"

She should ask for a day. She should read something, sign something, call her father from a hallway and whisper. But the number in her head, three hundred and fifty thousand, pressed on the back of her tongue, and Kim's laugh pressed behind it, and the word came out before sense could catch it.

"Yes."

"Good." He turned back to his screen, already done with her, a king dismissing a subject. "Signora Bellini will handle the paperwork. Be at this desk at seven tomorrow morning."

In the elevator, Signora Bellini stared straight ahead at the doors. "Medical coverage," she murmured. "Effective immediately. Do you have any idea what that is worth? I've worked here for six years. He offered it to a stranger. In eleven days."

Aria looked at her own reflection in the polished steel coat, the boots, the suitcase and thought of Kim propped on the couch: don't fall for some rich CEO.

"You're staring," Signora Bellini said gently, "at the most dangerous man in this building. Possibly in this city."

"I know," Aria said. The elevator chimed, and the doors opened onto the marble light of Milan, and somewhere very far behind her, she could feel Adrian Cross's eyes on the back of her neck like a hand. "That's why I took notes."

That night, in a hotel room with a bed softer than anything in her life and a view of a city that glittered like it had been invented to mock her, Aria called her father from the window and told him, in a voice kept carefully level, that she'd gotten the job.

"Told you," Daniel Bennett said, and she could hear him smiling in the dark kitchen twelve miles out of Halloway, the truck keys already hung by the door for tomorrow's first shift. "That's my girl. Set the world on its ear."

After she hung up, she stood a long time at the glass. Somewhere below, Milan was lighting itself up, window by window, floor by floor, the Cross International tower burning brightest of all forty stories of smoked glass with a blade for an emblem, and at the very top of it, a man who looked at people the way jewelers look at stones.

Double the salary. Full medical coverage. Her brother's laughing. Her father's tired hands.

Outside, the sun had set over the piazza, and the Duomo burned gold against the darkening sky, and Aria Bennett stood in the middle of the richest city she had ever seen, holding a job she hadn't applied for, working for a man she didn't understand and smiling, because tomorrow, the arithmetic of her whole life finally changed.