I rolled my eyes and shook my head at his request to deliver his daily romantic overture to my coworker.

“I got no time to play middle-school love messages game with you, Nico.” I flashed him with deuces and stepped into the elevator. It was 5:30 a.m. and I was already five minutes behind schedule. Which wouldn’t be a big deal if I didn’t work for the most fastidious, demanding, punctuality obsessed man on planet earth.

Theodoro Anibal Ganas, heir to the Ganas real estate empire—and I meant that literally, the man’s father owned hundreds of apartments in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens. The senior Ganas was a former Greek nuclear physicist trained at MIT who instead of, as he put it, “making bombs for some dictator,” in the ’80s began buying condemned buildings and renovating them himself with the help of a friend. A decade later, Achilles Ganas was a bona fide mogul with dozens of properties. As his star was on the rise he met a lovely Dominican flight attendant while on a business trip to the DR. That relationship was not one of Achilles’s most successful ventures, but it did yield my pain-in-the-ass boss. You’d think me being Dominican would give some kind of favor with the man.

Well, you’d be wrong.

Theo Anibal Ganas did not give a fuck about our shared ancestry. Where I was a little militant about my Dominicaness, Theo barely acknowledged it. To be fair, he didn’t seem to care about being Greek either. Theo was...taciturn. Stoic. Contained. After years of working for him I could recite every detail about what the man did from the moment he woke up until 6:00 p.m. every evening, but I had no idea how he felt about anything.

Okay, maybe that wasn’t exactly true. I knew he loved his little sister, Zoe. I knew his best friend was his stepmother—which was not as weird as it sounded since she was only like five years older than him. I also knew he was a generous and fair boss. But other than that, Theo Ganas was a mystery to me. A large and imposing, ruthlessly serious mystery that I wished I cared a lot less about deciphering.