Between his employer’s expectations and his own efforts at generating a force field, Owen’s look was fairly specific. The Anningers, especially Mrs. Anninger, preferred their staff to present and act as if they should have a staff of their own—a collector’s set of nesting dolls of privilege. If the butler had a housekeeper, and the chef had a cook, and the personal shoppers all had harried assistants, the Anningers were just that much more buffered from all the sadness and tedious work in the world. Work that they possibly only grasped at the level of fable.

Of course they scheduled inoculations of misery into their itineraries with tours of Mumbai slums and Cambodian orphanages. But closer to home, none of them ever seemed keen to drive from the pavement to the gravel to the dirt in Appalachia, and they found reasons not to set a charitable course through the less manicured areas of Chicago or Dallas. But Mrs. Anninger always told Owen to send checks with the regrets when she turned down domestic outreach events.

They weren’t evil. Not really. Only remote, nearly alien. Owen wasn’t convinced they understood the concept of generosity, but they had to do something with all that money. The Anningers were generations removed from the merely wealthy. They were practically a different species.

Mrs. Anninger would have liked it better if Owen had put more effort into letting everyone know how well they paid him. It would have been good for what passed as a conscience’ sake, but he suspected they also liked the friction of a stubborn employee they could choose to suffer over.

His employers were easily bored, so he was busy. He did for them in capacities secretarial to diplomatic. He researched things; procured things. Sometimes he stood in as proxy to make matters easy for them or to make a point of their absence when they thought it necessary. He was a high-end errand runner.

By looking at him, some people wrote him off as a bodyguard, an enforcer. That was useful at times and it amused his bosses. But his size and his strength and his specific inclination to violence were his own, and as not for sale as his cock. He had applied all of those things adjacent to his professional duties at times, but on his own terms and without comment or suggestion from anyone who wanted to keep on his good side.

He did their bidding as he pleased and tempered it with the bare minimum of the image they wanted. He wore decent suits and bought the Mercedes, a sleek thing that he might have actually loved a little bit, once upon a time. Beyond that, he withstood being the source of their favorite discontent.