Page 33 of Claimed By the Boss
“Last name.”
She hesitates.
“Lena. Last name.”
“Vasca.” A breath. “He runs operations for an organization. I didn’t know that when I met him, or I knew but I didn’t understand what it meant. He was just someone with money who could move quickly. I needed that. I told myself it was a loan, that I’d pay it back in a month, and then the diagnosis happened and everything went sideways and I kept meaning to call him and?—”
“What organization?” I say.
She tells me.
I sit very still on the bed in a penthouse on the fifty-third floor of a building in Manhattan, where I’m living as the legal wife of a man whose world operates on the same invisible map as the name Lena just said to me.
And I understand, immediately, completely, in the way that you understand things when all the pieces have been on the table for a while. Something finally turns them the right way up, and I realize this is not a conversation about money anymore.
“He’s been calling you in Zurich,” I say.
“Yes.”
“How many times?”
“Four this week.”
Four this week. I look at the window. The city outside is dark and indifferent, running its late-night operations without any interest in what is happening in this room.
“Does he know where you are?” I say.
“I don’t think so. I haven’t told him.”
“Don’t.” My voice comes out harder than I intend. I hear her breath catch. I soften it. “Don’t tell him anything about where you are. Don’t call him back. Don’t answer if he calls.”
“Celine, it’s just money. If I can pay him back?—”
“It stopped being about the money the moment he started calling four times in a week.” I stand up from the bed. I’m moving now, the way I move when I’m thinking and my body needs to do something while my brain catches up. Across the room to the window. Back to the bed. “I need you to send me every number he has called from. Everything he has said in his messages, word for word.”
“You’re scaring me.”
“I know. I’m sorry.” I stop moving. Sit back down. Press my hand flat against the mattress because it gives me something to feel that is not the thing I am feeling. “You’re safe where you are. Priya is there. I’m going to handle this.”
“How?”
I look at the wall across from me. Plain, white, expensive in the way that everything in this penthouse is expensive, the way that things are expensive when the person who owns them has enough money that cost is not a consideration.
I think about a man in the next room who told me he would handle the Lena situation before I even finished asking. Who had her flown to Zurich and her best friend compensated, and every bill cleared, and did all of it before I had finished being furious about the contract that put me in the position of having to ask.
I think about what it means that Dario Vasca works for the organization Lena named.
I think about the fact that Zane Volkov, my legal husband through an offshore clause I signed without reading, will need to know about this. Not because I want his help, but because this life is in his world, and he’s going to find out one way or another, and I would rather be the one to tell him.
I hate that I know that.
I hate more that knowing it feels like something I have earned rather than something that was done to me.
“Don’t worry about how,” I tell Lena. “Just send me those numbers.”
She sends them before we hang up. Seven missed calls logged in her phone over three weeks, three of them from this week, climbing in frequency the way these things do when someone has decided that patience is no longer the strategy.
I sit on the edge of my bed with my phone in my hand and the notebook beside me, and the locked room in the middle of my diagram, and I think about how my life looked five weeks ago.
