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Working together two floors beneath the ground in Chicago with clipboards and pens and highlighters, cross-checking numbers, verifying payrolls, and making sure every T and I are crossed and dotted when we’re not here. Efficiency keeps these Plazas running, and the man in charge of making sure that happens is me.
The Company Liaison.
As Kingston himself once told me, it’s the second most important job in the company after the CEO themselves — on paper. What he meant by that, obviously, is that it was more important than the CEO. Hearing that as a teenage kid in his shadow put me on the path to where I am now.
So best not fuck this up.
“Hm,” Paige moans.
I glance up from my paperwork, my tired vision blurring for a half-second before I make her out. She sits on the desk by the door, perched about ten feet away from me down the long line of file cabinets. With her arms outstretched above her head, she finishes her yawn. My eyes instantly lock on her elongated chest, but a silent personal scolding keeps me in check.
Focus, buddy.
Paige relaxes and gathers her hair, gently setting it on one side of her head. She let those golden locks loose about a half hour ago, and I will not lie and say that wasn’t a welcome distraction.
I clear my throat. “How’s it going over there?” I ask.
She looks up from the folder laid open on her lap. “Not too bad,” she answers. “There’s a few numbers here that don’t match up.”
I abandon my file to look myself. She hands it off and I scan it over, instantly coming to the same conclusion she did.
“They really don’t,” I say, doing a bit of simple math in my head. “There’s nearly two-thousand dollars missing here. This the gift shop?”
Paige nods.
My chest skips with power. “Do I get to fire somebody?” I ask.
She chuckles. “Not so fast, boss,” she says as she takes the file from me. “That’s not how we do things.”
“We?” I repeat as she jots down a note on her hot-pink sticky notes.
“We. Botsford Corp. We don’t fire people without investigating first.” Her brow rises for a half-second. “Especially not at the Chicago location.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Let’s just say…” Paige wets her lips. “Money goes missing here. A lot. We open investigations and suddenly — poof — the money returns.”
“Then, you must have made a mistake, right?” I ask. “Money doesn’t just go… poof.”
“And yet, every single time we report the error to management, the money does just that within a couple of minutes.”
I chortle. “Man, you really have it out for Ian, huh?”
“It’s not just me, Oliver,” she says. “Graham. Kingston. We hoped it’d stop as soon as Drake retired, but Ian hasn’t fallen too far from the tree.” She slides off the desk and closes the folder. “I’ll send in the report in the morning,” she adds a smile, “and you can see for yourself when Ian magically figures it out before we leave.”
I step back, giving her space to move. “All right. We’ll see.”
Paige sets the file on her stack by the desk. “Other than that, that’s the gift shop done. How’s the bar?”
“Done,” I say.
“Excellent.” She checks it off her list. “That leaves... the restaurant,” she says, clearly not in the mood to scale that mountain tonight.
“Our flight isn’t until the afternoon tomorrow, right?” I say. “I vote to leave it and finish it up in the morning.”
“You have shareholder prep with Ian in the morning,” she reminds me.
“I can set my alarm an hour earlier.”
