Page 31 of Claimed By the Boss
I look at her. “How do you know that?”
“Viktor’s wife mentioned it.” She turns a page. “She said he asked about me.”
“What did she tell him?”
“That I handled myself well at the gala.” She closes the laptop and looks at me. “What is he doing?”
“Building a case.”
“Against me.”
“Against my judgment.”
She absorbs this. “Is that better or worse?”
“For you, better. For him, considerably worse.”
Something moves at the corner of her mouth. Not a smile, but the beginning of one she pulls back.
She picks up her bowl and stands. “I’m going to bed,” she says. She rinses the bowl. Sets it on the rack. Picks up her laptop. Pauses at the doorway. “Zane.”
I look at her.
She opens her mouth. Closes it. Looks at the floor for one second, then back at me.
“Goodnight,” she says.
She goes down the corridor. Her door closes.
I sit at the counter with my soup going cold, and I think about four pages of surveillance report and a notebook my team cannot see. I think about a woman who has been in my world for less than a month, spending her Saturdays chasing offshore registrations through four jurisdictions because she doesn’t know how to accept a wall.
I chose her because my team could not find a reason to distrust her.
I’m watching her be trusted by everyone she comes into contact with in my world, yet still reaching for the exit with both hands.
The part I have not examined, the part I’m not going to examine tonight, is that I have not restricted her movements, and I don’t intend to. She can keep looking. She can spend every Saturday in that room with her notebook, mapping structures she will not find the end of.
I have told myself this is a strategy. That a woman still looking for a way out is a woman I understand, and the variables I understand are the variables I can manage.
I finish the soup.
I tell myself that on the way to bed.
I almost mean it.
13
CELINE
The notebook isopen on my bed, and I’ve been staring at the same page for twenty minutes.
Not reading it. Looking at it the way you look at something you have memorized so thoroughly, it has stopped yielding new information.
Six entities across four jurisdictions and a locked room in the middle with no handle I can find, and I’ve been here before, in this exact position, on enough Saturdays that the diagram has started to feel like a landscape I live in rather than a problem I am solving.
I close the notebook.
The penthouse is quiet, as it always is at this hour.
