Page 62 of Claimed By the Boss
“There was a credible threat,” he says. “An intercept came through yesterday morning. Someone was building a profile of her location, her routine, her security. I moved her within hours of finding out.”
“Within hours of finding out, and you didn’t call me.”
“No.”
I stare at him. He doesn’t look away. He doesn’t soften it or wrap it in something gentler than what it is, and somehow that’s worse than if he had.
“Three weeks ago,” I say, and my voice drops because I need it to stay steady more than I need it to be loud, “I stood in your kitchen and told you to stop deciding what I can carry. I told you that exactly. Those words.”
“I remember.”
“And you did it again.”
“Yes.”
“You’re not even going to pretend this was different.”
He’s quiet for a moment, and I watch him choose honesty over the easier path, the one where he explains the threat in enough detail that I forget to be angry about the silence underneath it.
“It wasn’t different,” he says. “I knew what I was doing when I did it. I told Roman so in this office before I made a single call. I weighed telling you first against the cost in time, and I chose the time. I’m not going to stand here and tell you I didn’t understand what that choice meant to you.”
Something in my chest cracks, not from the threat to Lena, not even from the secrecy, but from the fact that he’s not arguing with me. He’s just confirming, piece by piece, every single thing I already suspected, and there’s nowhere for my anger to land because there’s nothing left to push against.
“You promised me,” I say.
“I didn’t promise you I would never make that choice again. I promised you I would give you everything I had once there was something concrete to give.” His voice doesn’t rise, doesn’t defend, just states the distinction like it might actually help. “There wasn’t time for both.”
“There’s always time to pick up a phone, Zane.”
“Ten minutes,” he says. “Maybe less. Against a contact actively building a target profile on a woman with no security training of her own.”
“And you decided those ten minutes were worth more than my right to know what was happening to my own sister.”
“Yes.”
I want him to flinch. I want some crack in the composure, some sign that saying it out loud costs him the way hearing it costs me.He doesn’t give me one. He just stands there, taking it, letting me see exactly how deliberate the choice was, and I understand, with a clarity that makes my eyes burn, that this isn’t cruelty. It’s something worse. It’s a man who has spent his whole life being right about threats and has never had to answer to anyone for the cost of being right.
“Is she safe now?” I ask.
“Yes. Fully secured. Better protected than she was before.”
“That’s not the question I actually want answered.”
“I know.”
“Then answer the one I want.”
He looks at me for a long moment, and something in his face does shift this time, some weight settling behind his eyes that I haven’t seen from him since the morning I told him I was pregnant.
“I don’t know how to give you both things,” he says. “Speed and inclusion. Not every time. There will be moments where the danger moves faster than the conversation can, and I will choose the danger every single time, because the alternative is a version of you I can’t accept losing.”
The room goes very quiet.
I don’t know what to do with that. I don’t know if it’s an apology dressed up as strategy or strategy dressed up as something closer to love, and right now I don’t have the energy to tell the difference.
“I need the full picture,” I say. “Not pieces. Not what you decide I can handle this week. Everything. The faction, the intercept, what they actually want.”
“Tonight,” he says. “I’ll give you all of it tonight.”
