Page 30 of Claimed By the Boss
Outside the window, the city is running its Tuesday morning operations, indifferent to the fact that a woman in my penthouse spent three hours on a Saturday mapping an offshore corporate architecture that took my legal team four months to build.
She got further than I expected. I log this without sentiment.
Roman is at the window. He has the posture of someone who has delivered the report and is waiting to be told what to do with the information.
“The structure,” I say. “I want it reviewed. Every layer she reached and every layer below it. I want confirmation that there are no gaps.”
“By whom?”
“Not the original team. Use Hartwell.”
Hartwell is a Geneva-based firm I’ve used twice before for exactly this kind of internal review. They are thorough and quiet, and they won’t ask why the review is being requested.
“When do you need it?” Roman asks.
“End of week.”
He writes something. Closes his folder.
“And her movements,” I say. “Continue monitoring. No restrictions.”
Roman looks at me. He doesn’t ask the question out loud. He has the discipline for that. But the question is there in the way he looks at me, the fraction of a second before he nods.
“No restrictions,” he confirms.
He leaves.
Hartwell comes back Friday afternoon.
Their report is twelve pages. I read all of it. Every entity she found is confirmed intact. The holding company she runs into is layered behind two additional structures that don’t appear in any public registry, cannot be reached without access to aprivate filing system that requires organizational authorization, which I have not given and will not give.
The contract sits at the center of a structure that was built, as I instructed, to withstand any challenge she can mount with the resources available to her.
There are no gaps.
I put the report in the drawer with the others, go back to the Hale Group terms, and work until nine o’clock because there are seventeen other things that require my attention, and they do not pause for the complications in my personal life.
She’s in the kitchen when I come through.
Late, the penthouse quiet, the city outside going about its night.
She’s at the counter with a bowl of something and her laptop open beside it, reading something that’s not work because she has the expression she gets when she’s reading for herself rather than for the job. Focused. Still. The version of her that doesn’t know she’s being watched.
She looks up when she hears me. “There’s soup,” she says. “Diane left it.”
I open the cabinet. Take out a bowl.
This is what the evenings have become since she moved in. Not warm. Not cold. Somewhere in the middle, where two people who have decided not to address the thing between them have learned to exist in the same space without it becoming a confrontation.
Some evenings, she’s in her room when I come back, and I don’t see her until morning. Some evenings she’s here, like tonight, and we move around each other in the kitchen with the practiced ease of people who have learned each other’s geography without meaning to.
I ladle the soup. Sit at the counter two seats down from her.
She goes back to her reading.
I eat.
After a few minutes, she says, without looking up, “Gregor was at the Fedorov dinner last week.”
