Page 95 of Claimed By the Boss
“Tell me about her.”
I haven’t told anyone about my mother in longer than I can accurately measure. Not Roman, not Alexei, not anyone in the entire structure of my adult life. But sitting here, our daughterasleep against my chest, something in me wants Celine to know this part of where I came from.
“She died when I was twelve,” I say. “Before any of this, before my father built what he built, before I became what I became. She was the only person who ever looked at me as simply her son, not an heir, not a future asset to the organization. Just hers.” I look down at the baby. “I haven’t thought about her this clearly in years. Not until right now.”
Celine reaches over, her hand finding mine over our daughter’s small back.
“Elena,” she says, testing the weight of it. “It suits her.”
I look at our daughter’s sleeping face, impossibly small, impossibly here, and I think about a woman I lost decades ago and a woman beside me now who chose to stay despite every reason I gave her not to, and a name that connects both of them to this small new life in a way I didn’t expect to find this morning.
“Elena Volkov,” I say, the name settling into the room like it’s always belonged there.
Celine smiles, exhausted and radiant at once. “Elena Volkov,” she repeats.
The baby stirs slightly against my chest, one small hand opening and closing around nothing, and I hold her closer, this small undefended weight that has undone every careful structure I’ve ever built around myself, and I understand, sitting in this quiet hospital room as the sun starts to rise outside the window, that nothing in my life will ever be the same as it was yesterday.
I find that I don’t want it to be.
43
CELINE
The penthouse looksdifferent with a car seat sitting in the foyer.
We’ve been home three days, and the apartment that used to feel like his, fully and entirely, has started reorganizing itself around a person who takes up almost no physical space and has somehow rearranged everything anyway.
A bassinet in our room. A changing table in what used to be the unused guest space down the hall. The careful, ordered geometry of Zane’s world bending, slowly and without complaint, around a six-pound girl who sleeps most of the day and screams with startling conviction the rest of it.
I’m in the kitchen, Elena asleep against my shoulder, when the elevator chimes.
Lena comes through the foyer at a near run, stopping herself just short of barreling into me, her eyes already wet before she’s said a single word.
“Let me see her,” she says, voice cracking. “Let me see my niece.”
I shift Elena carefully into her aunt’s waiting arms, and Lena goes completely silent, the constant motion of her usual self stilling entirely as she looks down at the small sleeping face for the first time.
“Oh,” Lena says, very quietly. “Oh, Celine.”
“I know.”
“She has your mouth.”
“Everyone keeps saying that.”
Lena doesn’t look up from Elena’s face for a long time, swaying slightly the way people instinctively do with infants, humming something under her breath that I recognize as a song our mother used to sing, half-forgotten until this exact moment, surfacing now the way old things do when you need them most.
Zane comes home from the office at six, later than he wanted to be, given everything happening at home, but the council still requires him most days, even now. He finds us in the living room, Lena settled into the corner of the couch with Elena still in her arms, and he stops in the doorway for a moment before crossing the room.
“She’s beautiful,” Lena says, looking up at him.
“She is.”
He reaches down, and Lena passes Elena to him with the careful, practiced motion of someone who’s already spent the better part of an afternoon learning how to hold a newborn properly.
I watch him settle our daughter against his chest the way he’s done a hundred times in three days, the same complete stillness coming over him every time, that quiet that has nothing to do with the control he carries everywhere else in his life.
Lena watches too.
