Page 34 of Claimed By the Boss
A desk job, Lena’s bills, and a house in Queens that smelled like dish soap.
I think about how it looks now.
Then I put the notebook in my bag, set my phone on the nightstand, lie back on the bed, and look at the ceiling.
I let myself feel, for exactly one minute, how tired I am of things arriving sideways.
One minute.
Then I start thinking about how to tell him.
14
ZANE
The city outsideis still the color of ash, streetlights holding on against a sky that hasn’t decided yet whether it’s morning. It’s six. This is the one hour I’ve kept unchanged for fifteen years, the only stretch of the day nobody else gets a claim on.
The gym first. Forty minutes, weight and repetition, nothing that needs a trainer or music, the body doing simple work while the mind gets to wander somewhere useful for once.
I shower, dress up, and head to the kitchen.
The coffee is already made because I set the timer the night before. I pour a cup, stand at the window, and look at the city doing its early version of itself, gray and quiet, the streets below moving at the pace of people who start before everyone else. Delivery trucks. A man walking a dog. The light that exists in New York for approximately forty minutes before the sun finishes rising and burns it off.
I drink my coffee.
On the counter beside the refrigerator is her notebook.
Navy cover, spiral-bound, the kind you buy without thinking at any drugstore in the city. Her initials are in the top-right corner, in handwriting that is small, slanted, and more deliberate than it looks.
She left it here last night. I heard her in the kitchen at eleven, the careful sounds of someone moving through a space they have not yet decided is theirs. The notebook was in her hand when she went past my office. It was not in her hand when she came back.
I look at it.
I don’t open it. I know what’s inside it. My security team has photographed every page twice. I know the diagram she built, the entities she traced, and the wall she hit on the third layer. I know it the way I know most things about her life, thoroughly and from a distance she’s not aware of.
I finish my coffee. Rinse the cup. Leave the notebook where it is.
I go to my desk, and I start the morning.
Roman arrives at eight with the weekly report and a separate folder, which he places on top of it without comment. This means there’s something that did not fit the standard format, and he has decided I need to see it before the day moves on.
I open the separate folder first.
Two items.
The first is Dario Vasca. He runs collections and enforcement for the Marchetti faction, the rival organization that has been applying pressure on our eastern arrangements for the betterpart of a year. In the past three weeks, he’s been making contact outside his usual operational territory. Not toward us. Sideways, toward people adjacent to our structure. The pattern is not yet a complete picture.
My team has flagged it because the direction of movement is deliberate, whereas random contact is not. Someone has given him a target, and he’s circling it.
I read the section twice. Set it aside.
The second item is a photograph. Gregor, four days ago, at a restaurant in Midtown that I don’t associate with council business. He’s across the table from a man named Sorrel.
Low level, loosely connected to two organizations, one of them the Marchetti faction. In the photograph, Gregor is talking. Sorrel is listening with the posture of a man receiving instructions rather than exchanging them.
I look at the photograph for a long time.
Then I set it aside, open the main report, and move through the rest of the morning’s information. Route confirmations, a personnel matter in the eastern office that Roman has already resolved, and a financial update from the Geneva account.
