Page 77 of Claimed By the Boss
Afterward, I stay inside her, collapsed over her body, but careful not to crush her. I roll us slowly onto our sides so we’re facing each other, still connected. I pull the sheets over us and tuck heragainst my chest, one arm wrapped securely around her back while my other hand strokes slowly through her hair.
The gray light outside the window is slowly turning softer, the first hint of morning creeping in. Neither of us speaks for a long time. I just hold her, feeling the steady beat of her heart against mine, breathing in the scent of her skin and the faint trace of her shampoo.
She presses her face deeper into my chest and lets out a long, shaky breath. I tighten my arms around her, resting my chin on top of her head.
“We’re going to get her back,” I say quietly into her hair. “And when we do, I’m never letting anything like this happen again.”
She doesn’t answer with words. She just nods against me and holds on tighter.
We lie there together as the light outside slowly strengthens, two people wide awake in the early morning, finding whatever comfort we can in each other while we wait for the phone to ring and the day to demand everything we have left to give.
The window shows the first hint of gray pushing against the dark.
“If anything happens to her,” she says quietly.
“It won’t.”
“You can’t promise that.”
“No,” I say again, because I have learned that lying to her, even gently, even to protect her from fear, costs more than the fear itself. “I can’t promise that. I can promise that every single assetI have is moving toward getting her back, and that I’m not going to stop until she’s safe.”
She’s quiet for a long moment.
“Okay,” she says.
We lie there together as the gray light strengthens into something closer to morning, neither of us sleeping, both of us listening for the phone that will tell us whether the plan we built in the dark is enough.
At five fifty-one, Roman knocks.
“Team is in position,” he says through the door. “We move in twenty minutes.”
I feel Celine go rigid against me.
“Then we move,” I say, and I get up, and the day that follows is going to ask more of both of us than any day that’s come before it.
33
CELINE
The door closesbehind him at six twelve.
I stand in the foyer for a moment after the sound of it, two security men positioned just inside the entrance, the way they’ve been positioned since the breach, and the penthouse around me goes very quiet in a way it has never quite managed before, even in the worst of the last five days.
I didn’t fight to go with him.
I notice this about myself, the way I’ve started noticing most things lately, a small fact held up to the light and examined for what it says about who I’ve become. Three months ago, I would have argued my way into that car, would have told him I had a right to be there, would have made it a referendum on every decision he’s ever made without consulting me.
Tonight I just watched him leave. I trust the team. I trust Roman. I trust, somewhere underneath everything else that’s still unresolved between us, that Zane will not stop until Lena is safe.
That trust costs something too. I just don’t have the energy right now to examine exactly what.
I try the couch first. Laptop open, a report from Alexei’s office I should be reviewing, and I read the same paragraph four times without absorbing a single word. I close the laptop. I make tea I don’t drink, the steam rising off it, untouched, while I stand at the kitchen counter, staring at nothing.
I move through the penthouse room to room, unable to settle anywhere for more than a few minutes, my body doing the thing fear does when it has nowhere productive to spend itself. The window in the living room. The hallway. Back to the kitchen.
I have never once, in three months of living in this apartment, felt its size as acutely as I feel it right now, sixty floors of carefully appointed space with nothing in any of it that can tell me whether my sister is safe.
I end up in my room, sitting on the edge of the bed, one hand pressed flat against my stomach where the baby has been quiet for the last hour, which only makes the silence in the apartment feel louder.
