A Deal with the Bossy Devil by Kyra Parsi

11

Adrien was havingme sort through his mail.

Jamie

Well that doesn’t sound too bad.

So I’d sent her a picture of the piles (plural) of the fan mail he’d dumped onto the table in front of me, accompanied by a photo of the very first letter I’d opened. Distasteful polaroids included.

Jamie

lmfao

This is it. This is my villain origin story.

And it wasn’t just an unlucky first draw, either. A solid thirty percent of the letters contained overtly sexual content, from both men and women. The rest were pages and pages of people raving about Adrien’s achievements, telling him how much they admired him and what a difference he’d made in their lives, yada yada yada, and I swear if I had to read one more thing about how gorgeous his stupid dimples were, I was going to tie him down and fill them in.

“The next time you say that out loud, it should probably be to a therapist,” Jamie had claimed when I’d told her what I planned on filling his dimples with.

“Joke’s on you,” I’d responded. “I’m gonna need therapy after all this anyway.”

By the time I was “dismissed” in the evening, I wanted to scrub my eyes and brain with a medical-grade disinfectant. There wasn’t enough therapy in the world that would help me forget what I’d witnessed today.

I went to bed knowing full-well I still had a small pile to sort through in the morning.

I was pretty sure that was what led to the polaroid-clad nightmares.

* * *

“I asked for extra hot.”

I shot Adrien the sweetest, most innocent of smiles. “And that’s exactly what you got.”

The right corner of his mouth ticked down as he tapped the cappuccino with his index finger. He didn’t believe me.

I cleared my throat. “If you twist the cup around, you’ll see that the order reflects your stated temperature preference. It’s written right on there… sir.”

He studied me with lazy disinterest, as though simply looking at me bored him.

I wanted to rip the lid off his cup and pour the drink onto his lap. Then we could have a discussion about how hot or cold it was.

Adrien had awakened a surprisingly violent streak in me. I wasn’t quite sure what to make of it yet.

“I don’t care what the cup says. It was cold yesterday, too.”

I jutted my lips out into a concerned pout, but only because he seemed to really hate it when I did that. Sure enough, his gaze slashed down to my mouth and hardened, his eyebrows drawing into a momentary frown.

“Would you like me to go back down and order you a new one?” I offered. “I could ask them to make it extra-extra-hot this time.”

It would probably burn the shit out of the milk, but that wasn’t my problem. And the baristas probably wouldn’t have minded either. I’d been tipping them twenty dollars every time Adrien sent me down for a fresh cup of coffee. So… four times a day.

Also, it didn’t matter how hot they steamed the milk. It wasn’t going to offset the little ice cubes I was sneaking into his drink from my own iced coffee.

Adrien waved me off. “I have a meeting in two minutes.”

That was my cue. He wanted me to go away now.

Gladly.

I made my way back to the small conference room beside his office and started working on what was left of his mail.

I didn’t know how he wanted the stupid things sorted, exactly, since he’d never clarified. So, I’d kept my method as simple as possible and limited myself to three piles, because chances were good he was going to make me do it all over again anyway.

There was a pile for the gross, raunchy stuff that made me want to dip my eyes into bleach, one for the super-fans gushing over him and his achievements, and one for the thank-you letters he’d received from various nonprofits and charities for his donations and philanthropic work.

The last pile was surprisingly large, and I had to (begrudgingly) admit that some of the letters were very sweet—especially the ones that had obviously been written by kids. I’d taken special care of those, keeping them piled neatly on top of the stack with little sticky notes outlining the name and age of their sender, plus a two-sentence summary in case Adrien wasn’t planning on reading them.

I really hoped he did, and I really hoped he replied. But I also knew that was just wishful thinking.

By early afternoon, I had the pile down to a short stack of a dozen unopened letters. And I was so eager to be fucking done with the task that I didn’t notice the envelope I’d picked up was entirely bare. It had no stamp, no return address, and no destination address.

Adrien had given me exactly one instruction when I’d started the task: “If you come across a blank envelope, do not open it.”

I opened it.

I didn’t actually realize what I was reading at first, because the content was so bizarrely out of left field that it took me a few seconds. But then it registered, and I dropped the piece of paper, scrambling away from it like it had burst into flames.

It was a death threat. Short and clear and to the violent point.

Oh, and it included Adrien’s address.

His home address. Apparently, he was in unit PH2-32.

I yanked the sleeve of my sweater down to cover my hand before carefully picking the letter back up. Though there was probably no point; my fingerprints were already all over the cursed thing.

Adrien’s office door was hanging open, and my knuckles barely tapped it before I shuffled right in.

He didn’t bother looking up from his monitor, his fingers continuing to move across his keyboard with uninterrupted ease.

“What?” he said when I paused in front of his desk, holding the piece of paper an arms-length away from my body. My heart was bouncing all over my chest.

“Hey. Um… do you remember when you told me not to open any suspicious-looking envelopes with no stamps?”

Adrien’s fingers paused, his flat glare slowly sliding to my face. He lizard-blinked in response to my incompetence.

“It was the one instruction you were given,” he said slowly.

I swear the man was convinced he could count all my brain cells on one hand. I’d never met anyone who was so relentlessly unimpressed by me.

“Mmm, it sure was,” I agreed. “But that’s not really important right now.”

Adrien opened his mouth to argue, but I held a finger up to stop him. “Just… listen for a sec,” I said, shifting on my feet. I wasn’t quite sure how to deliver the news… and I kind of didn’t want to show him the letter. Because it was intense and terrifying and what was wrong with people?

I mean, I hated the guy more than anyone, but I didn’t think he deserved a literal death threat.

Adrien noticed how much I was struggling and stood up, rounding his desk. I took a few steps back, rotating my body so the letter remained out of his reach. But he went for it anyway.

“Wait, Adrien, just…”

He paused midreach, his head slanting to the side as something unidentifiable flicked across his features. And I realized I’d accidentally called him by his first name instead of “sir” or whatever he wanted to be called.

“It’s not… it’s not a nice letter,” I warned.

An unrecognizable expression flitted across his face, but it hardened again before he said, “Let me see it.”

He reached for it again and I hesitated, putting my palm up without thinking. It pressed against his chest when he leaned forward—his extremely broad and surprisingly hard chest.

His chin dipped, his attention cutting down to my hand as I felt his pulse kick against my palm.

I snatched it back. “Sorry.”

Adrien met my gaze again and, for the very first time since I’d met him, there was no venom in his eyes when he looked at me. “Can I please see the letter?”

The surprisingly gentle politeness was a tactic, obviously—an effective one.

I slowly placed the paper in his palm, not realizing that my hand was shaking until it was in my line of sight. Adrien must have noticed it, too, because instead of snatching the letter from me, he eased it out of my grip.

“We should probably, um, tell the police,” I stammered as he skimmed the note.

Except he didn’t frown or look at all surprised by what he was reading. And before I could offer to call the authorities on his behalf, he’d folded the note, ripped it into an uneven half, and tossed it into the recycling bin.

As though it were just another piece of junk mail, on another uneventful afternoon. Nothing to see here, folks!

I stood unmoving in the middle of his office, utterly dumbfounded.

“It’s nothing,” Adrien said coolly. “Don’t worry about it.”

Um, I’d read that letter. And it was definitely not “nothing”.

“Shouldn’t you—”

“It’s nothing.”

“But—”

“It’s nothing, Sanchez. Leave it alone.”

A part of me wanted to argue with him… but what would I have said?

Adrien let out a breath as I continued to stand there. “It’s not the first one I’ve received, and nothing ever comes of them. They’re supposed to be filtered out along with the hate mail before they reach my desk, but sometimes one slips through.”

For some reason, the fact that he’d received enough of them to be this… cavalier about it bothered me. “Okay… but shouldn’t you have given it to the police instead of ripping it up?”

Adrien cocked his head and slid his hands into the pockets of his slacks. He was in a stone-grey suit today, with the top two buttons of his starched white shirt popped open. No tie.

Not that… not that I was keeping track of his outfits or anything. I was just… how was he so freaking nonchalant about this?

“Why do you care?”

I blinked. “What?”

Adrien shrugged. “Why do you care?”

“It’s a literal death threat, Adrien. How do you not care? They had your address written right on there.”

“That leaked a while back,” he said. “Someone posted it on the hate club website you now mod for.”

You could actually hear my mouth snap closed. That was how effectively he’d shut me up.

“Go home,” he said, the quiet venom returning to his voice. “You’re done for now. I’ll call you if I need anything else today.”

Heat bloomed across my cheeks, and I didn’t say anything else as I turned around and walked out of Adrien’s office with my chin tucked an inch lower than usual.

The very first thing I did when I got home was scour the forums on the hate club’s website and start flagging posts that included any of Adrien’s personal information. I didn’t have the clearance to delete them, but at least this way they were hidden from view.

And then I deleted my account.