Page 82 of Claimed By the Boss
“That’s not very reassuring.”
“No,” he agrees. “But it’s true, and I think you’d rather have true than reassuring.”
I would. I do.
“I’m not ready to put it down yet,” I say. “The anger. The file. I need you to know that, even after last night.”
“I know.”
“And I’m not leaving either.”
Something in his face shifts, not relief exactly, something quieter than that.
“I know that too,” he says.
We stand there for a moment longer, the unresolved thing still sitting in the room with us, neither of us pretending it’s gone, neither of us trying to force it into something smaller than it actually is. I don’t cross the room to him. He doesn’t come to me.
But something in how we’re standing has changed since I walked through that door, and I don’t fully understand it yet, except that it feels less like a wall this time and more like two people standing on the same side of something difficult, even if neither of us has found our way fully through it.
I turn and leave his office, the door staying open behind me this time.
I don’t look back to see if he’s watching me go. I already know he is.
36
ZANE
I do not raisemy voice once in the four days it takes to end this.
That restraint matters more than anything else I do during this stretch. Every instinct I have, after watching Lena walk through my door with a bruise darkening her cheek, says to make this loud, to make every organization within a hundred miles understand exactly what happens when you reach for my family.
Loud would feel correct. Loud would also be the wrong tool entirely, the kind of mistake men make when they let feeling dictate strategy instead of letting strategy absorb the feeling and put it somewhere useful.
I choose quiet instead. Quiet is more frightening, in the end, than anything loud could manage.
The first movement is identification.
Roman’s team spends two days tracing the abduction backward through every layer of the operation, not the men who executed it, who matter less than the structure that authorized it. By the second evening, we have three names. Not the Marchetti leadership directly, but the operational tier just beneath it, the men who actually decide what gets attempted and what doesn’t, the layer that insulates the people at the top from consequence.
I look at the three names for a long time.
“Start with the money,” I tell Roman.
The second movement takes a different shape entirely.
One of the three men, a logistics coordinator named Petrenko, has been quietly skimming from Marchetti’s own shipping operations for the better part of two years, a fact my financial team uncovers within hours of a proper look. He has been careful. Not careful enough.
I don’t have him removed. I have the information delivered anonymously to exactly the right person within the Marchetti structure, timed precisely enough that the consequences land within their own organization rather than ever touching mine. Within thirty-six hours, Petrenko is no longer a problem I need to manage, and nothing about his removal traces back to me in any way that could be proven or even reasonably suspected.
Roman watches me work through this with an expression I don’t fully read until he finally says something.
“You didn’t even need to be in the room for that one,” he says.
“No.”
“That’s the part that should worry people more than the violence does.”
I don’t disagree with him.
