Free Winner Takes All by Jacqui Moreau Page B

before he goes into a meeting. He’ll be in meetings most of the day. If you don’t see him now, you won’t see him at all today, and then tomorrow when I come around here telling you Ben wants to see you, I’ll be handing you a cardboard box as well.”
    Eva signed the letter. “All right. Be there in a second.” Although she heard Devorah’s warning, it didn’t bother her. Devorah was always threatening to hand coworkers a cardboard box, but these threats were baseless. Devorah could no more fire a Wyndham employee than she could afford to buy one of the artifacts the auction house sold.
    She sealed the package and addressed it quickly in her scratchy handwriting. Then she looked around the room. Her coworkers were sitting at their desks, all seemingly engrossed in their own projects. This was what it was always like at Wyndham’s. The staff, made up almost entirely of Ivy League graduates and the offspring of British aristocrats, were friendly enough in a Tiffany’s salesperson way, but they weren’t outgoing and they were rarely inclined to do you a favor—especially not for a junior associate who’d recently been promoted to senior associate. They were a cutthroat bunch who would sell their mothers to get one over on a colleague.
    Her gaze traveled to her neighbor. Except David. He didn’t fit the mold. He had the proper pedigree—son of a viscount, grandson of a former Home Secretary—but not the attitude. He was gregarious and outgoing and loved to chat: The more information he gathered, the more information he could spread. At the moment, David was drinking his first cup of coffee of the day, which meant he would soon start reading Buzzfeed, which would be followed by Gawker, Vox and the AV Squad. Eva had observed his morning routine enough times to know he was still thirty minutes away from doing any actual work.
    She brought the package over to him.
    “Can you spare a second?” she asked disingenuously. She knew the answer.
    He looked suspicious. “What for?”
    “I need to get this out ASAP. Mind calling the mailroom for me and arranging a messenger? I’d do it myself, but Ben wants to see me and Devorah is threatening the old cardboard box,” she explained. “All the information is on the envelope.” She held out both. “Think you can handle it?”
    “I can do it from my desk, and it doesn’t require me to make any snap decisions that affect the lives of hundreds of people. Yep, right up my alley. Leave it here.”
    She did exactly that. “Thanks. I owe you one.”
    Eva looked at her watch. Eight minutes until ten o’clock. Perfect. It would give Ben enough time to say his piece but not enough to review and lecture.
    “He will see you now,” Devorah said importantly as Eva brushed by her desk. “Go right now.”
    Devorah wanted to be a gatekeeper, Eva thought, but she just didn’t have the trappings. Her boss wasn’t important enough and she herself was far too young.
    “You wanted to see me?” Eva asked as she entered the room. Ben was sitting at his desk reading the newspaper. He had his own morning routine, and reading the Times from cover to cover was one of them. Being up on current events didn’t directly relate to his job, but it didn’t hurt and every once in while he snagged a commission from the obituaries page.
    Ben wasn’t the best boss in the world—he was lazy and easily bored and tended to not be around when you needed help—but Eva liked him. There was a disinterestedness about him that appealed to her and kept him out of her hair. Other staff members weren’t so insouciant. Room at the top of the Wyndham’s ladder was tight, and most of Ben’s underlings resented the space he took up.
    Not Eva. She knew he wasn’t dead weight. Ben sometimes had good ideas. He just didn’t like having to implement them.
    Looking up, Ben folded the paper and put it to the side. “Yes, yes. Come in. Take a seat. I want to hear about your meeting with Hammond yesterday.