Page 61 of Claimed By the Boss
Roman picks up his folder.
“For what it’s worth,” he says, at the door, “I think she’ll understand the threat. I don’t think she’ll forgive how you handled telling her about it. Those aren’t the same thing, and I don’t think you’ve fully separated them yet.”
He leaves before I can respond, which is probably deliberate. Roman has been doing this long enough to know when a man needs the last word taken away from him, so he actually sits with what was said instead of arguing his way out of it.
I sit at my desk with the Zurich report in front of me, Lena safe and delighted and unaware, Celine still in the penthouse with no idea what happened today, and I don’t call her.
Tomorrow, I tell myself again.
It is, I am fully aware, the same sentence I told myself about Gregor. I make it anyway, and I don’t let myself pretend the repetition is a coincidence.
25
CELINE
Lena is tellingme about a garden.
I’m sitting on the edge of my bed with the phone against my ear, and she’s describing rose bushes along a stone path, a fountain that runs all day, a sunroom where she’s been taking her afternoon tea instead of in her old room. Her voice has that bright lift it gets when something genuinely good has happened to her, and for the first ten seconds, I’m just glad to hear it.
Then I do the math.
“Wait,” I say. “Different sunroom. Different facility?”
“Oh, they upgraded me.” She says it like it’s nothing, like it’s the kind of thing that happens to people every day. “Apparently, it’s a reward for how well I’ve responded to treatment. They moved me yesterday. It’s gorgeous here, Celine, you’d love it.”
My stomach goes cold before my brain finishes catching up.
“Who moved you?” I ask.
“The facility, I guess? Or the foundation covering my care?” A pause. I can hear her shifting, the soft sound of fabric against achair. “Priya said it came through Zane’s people. I figured you knew.”
I didn’t know.
I keep my voice even because that’s the only thing I can control right now, the only muscle I have left that still listens to me. “Of course,” I say. “I just hadn’t heard the details yet.”
“It’s really nice here,” she says again, and I let her keep talking, about the fountain and the new doctor and a nurse named Astrid who brings her extra blankets without being asked, and I make all the right sounds in all the right places while something in my chest tightens into a fist.
When we hang up, I sit very still for a moment.
Then I stand up, and I go to find him.
He’s in his office. Of course he is. He’s always in his office at this hour, the lamp on, the city dark behind him, a man who has built his entire existence around being available to everything except the people who actually need him to explain himself.
I don’t knock.
He looks up when the door opens, and something in his face shifts the instant he sees mine.
“Lena was moved,” I say.
“Yes.”
“You knew.”
“Yes.”
I cross the room and stop in front of his desk, and I’m shaking, not visibly, not in a way anyone else would catch, but I can feel it under my skin, the tremor of fear that has nowhere left to go now that the danger is already past and all that’s left is the aftermath.
“Why?” I say. “Tell me why my sister was moved to a secured facility without anyone telling me, without anyone telling her the real reason, while I was sitting here finding out about it from her describing a fountain.”
