Page 19 of Claimed By the Boss
The dinner runs for two hours.
I spend most of it aware of where she is at every point. Not because I’m watching her. Because she’s at my table in a room full of people who are deciding what she means, and what they decide about her has consequences I have already mapped. This is not sentiment. This is management.
But she doesn’t need managing.
Dominic, three seats down, asks her what she knows about Volkov Holdings. It’s a test dressed as small talk, and they both know it.
She tells him she’s still learning the full scope of the operation, which is true. Then she asks him a question about the eastern logistics arrangement that she could only have known if she had been paying very close attention to the documents moving across her desk over the past week.
Dominic stops testing her and starts talking to her.
I drink my wine.
Across the table, Mikhail’s wife asks her something about where she grew up. I watch Celine answer without any of the adjustments people make in rooms like this when the honest answer is not the impressive one.
She says Queens. Mikhail’s wife nods. Tells her she has a cousin in Astoria. The conversation moves.
I watch Gregor watch this exchange from the end of the table. His glass is his third of the evening. His attention has not left Celine for more than five minutes at a stretch since we sat down, which is either surveillance or offense, and with Gregor, it’s usually both.
After dinner, the room breaks into smaller conversations, the way these rooms always do, men with drinks, women with other women.
I’m speaking with Alexei and a man named Fedorov about a route question that has been sitting on the council agenda for six weeks, when I see Gregor move toward Celine. I track it without turning my head.
He says something. She looks at him with the expression she has for things she’s deciding how to answer. She says something back. He says something else. She holds his gaze for a moment and then turns back to Viktor’s wife, which is not a dismissal but functions as one.
Gregor sets his glass down on a passing tray with more force than necessary.
I finish my thought with Alexei and excuse myself.
He finds me near the door at the end of the evening. This is how Gregor operates. He waits for the moment that looks casual, a man catching another man on the way out, nothing formal about it, just a word.
“A moment,” he says.
I stop.
“She’s not one of us,” he says. His voice is low. He’s not performing for the room. This is the genuine version, which I respect more than the performed one, even when I have no use for the content. “No bloodline. No history with any organization. No understanding of what this world actually is.” He looks at me the way men look at you when they believe they’re saying something you need to hear. “You’ve handed a stranger access to everything you have built, Zane. When this comes apart, it will not come apart quietly.”
I look at him.
He holds it. He’s sixty-three and has buried two rivals and doesn’t frighten easily. I will give him that.
“She handled the room tonight,” I say.
“One dinner.”
“She handled Dominic in twenty minutes. He was testing her. She knew it, passed, and then made him like her. In this room. At this table.” I let that sit for a second. “How many people have you brought to this table that could do that on their first night?”
Gregor’s jaw tightens. “That’s not the point.”
“It’s exactly the point.” I button my jacket. “We’re done, Gregor.”
I walk back into the room.
Celine is near the window with Viktor’s wife, finishing a conversation that looks like it became a real one somewhere in the last two hours. She sees me cross the room toward her and says something to Viktor’s wife that makes the woman laugh, a genuine laugh, before they separate.
She falls into step beside me without being asked.
In the foyer, she takes her coat from the attendant. I watch her put it on, the practiced ease of someone who has been dressing for difficult rooms her whole life without the budget to make it look effortless, and somehow making it look effortless anyway.
