Page 41 of Claimed By the Boss
Three words.
Sorrel is talking.
I put the phone down. Look at the document in front of me. Put it aside.
Sorrel is the man Gregor had lunch with three weeks ago. Sorrel is connected to the Marchetti faction. Sorrel sat across from Gregor in a restaurant in Midtown and listened.
I think about the Marchetti faction’s questions starting four days after that lunch. I think about Maric hearing talk about Celine’s background from a source he can’t name. I think about Gregor at every council dinner since the first one, watching her with the focused attention of a man building a case.
I have enough now.
Not enough to be certain. Enough to know the direction.
I pick up the phone. Call Roman back. “The Gregor file,” I say. “Everything since the first council dinner. On my desk by morning.”
“Done,” Roman says.
I put the phone down.
The penthouse is quiet around me. Down the corridor her light is still on, the thin line of it under her door. She’s still awake. She doesn’t know what’s moving toward her. She doesn’t know that the conversation she had with her sister tonight, the laughing and the canal story and Priya with her coffee cup, happened while someone was already pointing people in Lena’s direction.
I look at the phone on my desk.
I should tell her.
I will tell her when I know the full shape of it. When I have Gregor’s file and Roman’s confirmation and enough to give her something complete rather than a threat with no edges. That’s the rational decision. That’s the decision that protects the investigation and protects her from information that would send her in a direction I cannot yet control.
I tell myself this is why I don’t go down the corridor and knock on her door.
I almost mean it.
17
CELINE
The coffee smells wrong.
It has smelled wrong for four mornings now. I stand at the counter the way I always stand, mug in hand, and my body rejects it before it reaches my mouth. I pour it down the drain. I wash the mug. I tell myself I’m tired.
I have been telling myself I’m tired for two weeks.
I’m at my desk when it hits again, the nausea, arriving without warning from somewhere low in my stomach.
I press my fingers to my lips. Breathe through my nose. Wait for it to pass. It passes. I go back to the schedule on my screen, and I don’t think about it because I have seventeen other things requiring my attention, and my body has been through enough in the last two months that I owe it the benefit of the doubt.
The next morning, I’m in the shower when I stop.
Just stop. Standing under the water with my hand against the tile. Counting something I have not let myself count until right now. The weeks. The last time. The weeks again.
I stand there for a long time.
I don’t go to the pharmacy near the building.
I walk three blocks north and two east, to a drugstore I have never used, the same way I walked away from the building before calling Joanna, the same way I have moved every time I needed to do something this man’s world could not see. I pay cash. I put it in my bag under my notebook.
The coffee shop on the next street has a bathroom at the back. I order something I won’t drink. I sit at the table by the door, and I wait long enough to stop my hands from doing what they are doing. Then I go to the bathroom. Lock the door. Open my bag.
I look at the result for a long time.
