Page 5 of Beau and the Beast

“The front door was unlocked,” Geoffrey said. “Exactly like you said it would be.”

“Get out—all of you,” Wolfram commanded, loosening a $400 necktie that had begun to feel like a noose. Something was very wrong.

The doorbell rang. His staff stood there looking dumb as dairy cows, no one moving a muscle. Wolfram roared at them to leave again as he strode back to the front door. He threw it open to find a beautiful woman in a long black dress holding a small wooden box.

“What is it?” he snarled.

“I’m delivering a gift,” she said. Her voice sounded as if she was holding back a laugh.

“No thank you,” Wolfram said quickly, moving to shut the door in her face. He and his colleagues had become the object of scorn since the crash—rightfully so, he knew—and he expected the box to contain something disgusting. A dead rat or bonbons infested with insects. He’d heard of other Wall Street execs being tricked into accepting disgusting “gifts” like that in the past several days.

The woman wedged her foot into the door before Wolfram could close it, though, stepping forward swiftly and opening the box. Instead of the stench of something rotten, Wolfram was hit with the unmistakable gleam of real gold. He stopped.

The box was lined with indigo velvet and inside sat a perfect gold watch—perhaps the nicest Wolfram had ever seen. There was no logo on it, which meant, Wolfram thought, that it must be ineffably expensive.

“A gift from the Mueller family,” the woman said, smiling into Wolfram’s face.

“Fine, yes,” he said, taking the box and shutting it. The name Mueller sounded familiar, but he couldn’t immediately place it. It must be some other Wall Street family, he thought, trying to offer reassurance to the Wolframs that they were all going to come out on the other side of the crisis as rich and powerful as ever. He tucked the box under his arm and waited for the woman to leave.

“Please, put it on,” the woman insisted in her almost-laughing voice.

Wolfram could hear his staff members in the foyer behind him begin to argue with one another. He was impatient to deal with them, to get this insane person with her odd gift out of his doorway.

“Right, of course,” he said, annoyed. He wrestled the box open again, removed the watch, and fumbled with the clasp. There was something in the box underneath the watch—a handwritten note on thick paper. It looked like a poem. He tucked the note into his pocket, determined to read it later.

Wolfram slipped his hand through the band of the heavy gold watch, locked the clasp, and looked up.

The woman had disappeared.

* * *

“The boss has either losthis mind with the stress or he’s playing some harebrained trick on us,” Ryan insisted. “I’ve got an appointment at six that I can’t miss—I don’t have time for this bullshit corporate bonding mission today.”

Violet put up a cautioning hand. “Let’s just see what Wolfram wants.”

“I don’t have an appointment,” Geoffrey said, rolling his eyes at Ryan, “but Idohave better things to do than an after-hours meeting with—”

Their bickering was interrupted by a bellow of pain from the door. When Violet spun, she saw her boss’s suit-clad figure, crumpled on the floor and shaking.

“Wolfram, Jesus—”

Violet and James rushed to him, the rest of the staff close behind them.

“Hey, what happened?” James asked, patting Wolfram down, trying to figure out the source of his discomfort.

The man wailed and spasmed under James’s hands.

“That woman—thatwitch!”he groaned between his cries of pain. Wolfram scratched at his own arm, finally taking hold of a watch Violet had never seen before, dragging it off his wrist, and throwing it away from him as if it had burned him. The watch skidded across the polished marble floor and came to rest up against Alfie’s wingtips. The man stooped to recover it.

“Nice watch,” he said, looking between the time piece and his collapsed boss.

“Don’t touch it,” Wolfram choked out. “Poisoned.”

“We’ve got to get him to a hospital or—or something—” Violet insisted. Song rushed forward to help James get Wolfram up off the floor. Their boss was a big man, well-muscled and tall, and it took both of their full strength to help him up, his brogues slipping against the marble as he spasmed.

“No—I can’t—”

Violet strode forward, opening the door and exiting the penthouse. Something cold and unfamiliar squeezed around her heart and she found it difficult to draw a breath—as if her lungs had turned to stone. The situation was… too tense, she decided. Her body must be responding to the adrenaline.

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