Page 37 of Claimed By the Boss
I’m very good at this—at taking something, putting it in a compartment, and closing the door.
The door has been harder to close lately. I don’t think about why.
Lena calls me on Friday afternoon.
I pick up at my desk, and she says his name before she says hello.
“The man,” she says. “Dario. He hasn’t called.”
I sit very still. “Since when?”
“Wednesday. The calls just stopped.” A pause. “Did you do something?”
I look at the closed door of Zane’s office across the floor. “I told someone,” I say.
“Who?”
“Someone who could help.”
Lena is quiet for a moment. “Is it your boss?”
I don’t answer that.
“Celine.”
“How are you feeling?” I say. “How’s the new dosage?”
She lets me change the subject. She knows when I’ve said everything I’m going to say.
“Better,” she says. “Actually better, not the kind where I’m just tired of complaining.” A pause, and I can hear her settling intoher chair the way she does when she’s about to tell me something good. “Priya has been dragging me along a canal every morning. It’s freezing, and she complains the entire way. I look forward to it more than anything else in my day.”
I close my eyes for a second. She sounds like herself. Not the careful, managed version she uses when she doesn’t want me to worry. Actually, she sounds loose and dry and entirely unbothered.
“Tell Priya she’s a saint,” I say.
“I tell her that every morning. She says saints don’t complain this much about cobblestones.”
When we hang up, I sit at my desk for a moment with my phone in my hand and the sensation of a feeling I can’t name sitting in the center of my chest. Not relief exactly. Relief is clean. This has something else underneath it.
I know what that something else is.
I put my phone in my bag. I stand up. I cross the floor to his office, and I knock once and open the door.
He’s at his desk. Jacket off, the dark shirt underneath, sleeves pushed to the forearm, the way they are when he’s been working for a long time. He looks up when I come in, and there’s something in his face that settles when he sees it’s me. I don’t know what to do with that, so I do nothing.
“Lena called,” I say.
“I know.”
“Dario stopped contacting her on Wednesday.”
“Yes.”
I close the door behind me. Take two steps into the room. “What did you do?”
He looks at me. “It’s handled.”
“I know it’s handled. I’m asking what that looked like.”
