Page 18 of Claimed By the Boss
I turn from the window. “And then what?”
“Then I handle it.”
“I don’t need you to handle things for me.”
“I know you don’t.” He says it simply, without edge. “Look at me anyway.”
The car turns onto a street I don’t recognize. The buildings here are older, heavier, the kind of architecture that was built to last rather than impress.
“Are you nervous?” he asks.
I look at him. “Are you?”
The corner of his mouth moves. Not quite a smile. The suggestion of one.
“No,” he says.
“Then neither am I.”
The car slows. Through the window, I can see a building with a door where two men are standing outside in a way that is not decorative. The driver pulls up to the curb and kills the engine.
Zane gets out. Comes around. Opens my door.
I step out onto the street. The night air is cold. Somewhere inside that building are twelve people who already know my name.
I straighten my shoulders.
Not for them. For me.
“Ready?” Zane says.
I walk past him toward the door.
“Let’s get this over with,” I say.
8
ZANE
I have satat this table for eleven years.
I know every face in this room, and every face knows mine. I know which men drink too much at these dinners and which ones don’t drink at all. I know who defers to whom and who pretends to defer while keeping count. I know the way silence settles over this room when I walk into it, not the silence of respect, the silence of calculation.
These men are always calculating. So am I. The difference is I don’t let it show on my face.
Tonight I’m not watching the room.
I’m watching the room watch her.
Celine walks in beside me, and I feel the adjustment happen, twelve people recalibrating in real time, and I let it run. Let them look. Let them form whatever initial position they choose, because the initial position is always the least accurate, and I’m not concerned with it. I am concerned with what they do with it.
Alexei greets her first, because Alexei has the social fluency of a man who has attended forty years of dinners like this one and understands that how you receive someone in the first thirty seconds sets the table for everything that follows.
He takes her hand. Tells her she is welcome. Means perhaps half of it. She thanks him with such composure that he looks at her a second time, which tells me something.
Viktor and his wife are next. Viktor’s wife does the work for both of them, warm, direct, asking Celine something about the city, which gets an answer I cannot fully hear from where I’m standing. Celine laughs once, low, real. Viktor’s wife laughs back. Viktor watches this happen with the expression of a man updating a file.
Gregor does not come to her. He waits by the window with a drink until the room has seated itself, and then he takes his chair at the far end of the table and looks at her once, the way you look at something you have already decided about, and then he looks away.
