“Of course,” I said. “Management should make sure their behavior is aboveboard if we want employees to follow our example.”
“What does that mean?” Leo said. He poured coffee with extra-careful precision, communicating that his hands weren’t steady.
“You and Tashi on the roof.”
“It was a marketing strategy session,” Leo said.
I glanced up. Leo’s hair looked like he’d run his hands through it fifty times. Same shirt from last night.
“That’s what you’re calling it? At midnight? On the rooftop?”
“Yeah.” He wouldn’t meet my eyes as he added cream and sugar. Leo always overdid the cream when he was rattled.
“Uh-huh,” I said as I snapped the laptop shut.
“What?” Leo feigned innocence.
The first spears of dawn cut through the windows, casting shards of light on the glass conference table and shadows on the floor.
“You know what,” I replied.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
I shook my head. “If that’s how you want to play it. There is just one word I want to remind you of—liability.”
Leo huffed. “You’re too cautious.”
“And you’re not cautious enough.”
The door opened. Orion walked in, impeccably dressed in a charcoal suit with perfect hair and tie, dressed for war. Everything about him screamed control. For Orion, this meant he felt the opposite. The tension in his shoulders and the tightness around his mouth told me something was on his mind.
“We need to discuss the overnight social media activity,” Orion said in clipped tones as he headed for coffee.
Leo and I exchanged glances.
Here we go.
Orion pulled out his phone and connected it to our wall display. Tashi’s posts filled the screen, photos of three brothers surrounding an employee they had pulled from a burningbuilding. Strategic hashtags. The engagement numbers made my security brain calculate threat assessment and exposure risk.
“She posted at two a.m.,” Orion said, voice carefully neutral. “The post was trending locally by three and nationally by four. By six, there were two hundred booking inquiries and seventeen interview requests.”
“That’s amazing,” Leo breathed.
“She turned a disaster into a phenomenon, but without consulting us, or obtaining approval or legal review.”
“She’s doing her job,” I said.
“But this? Making us a media circus?”
“Look at the numbers, Orion,” Leo said. “The positive comments. The shares. The narrative shift from ‘hotel with bad security’ to ‘heroic rescue’ and ‘management that cares.’”
“Still, she should have gotten permission.”
He wasn’t angry about the posts. He was angry about losing control.
I understood that. Control was how we’d survived our parents’ death. How we’d built this empire. Still. “And you would have said no,” I said, “quashing her creative impulses. That is not why we are paying her.”
Orion gave a dismissive wave of his hand.
