Page 66 of Claimed By the Boss
I lie awake long after she falls asleep, one arm wrapped securely around her, the city lights flickering quietly beyond the window.For the first time in years, I have no plan, no calculation, no strategy for what comes next.
And for the first time in years, I’m not afraid of not knowing.
27
CELINE
The invitation comes through Oliver,not Zane.
A printed card on my desk Monday morning, formal in a way the dinner invitations never were, my name on the front in the same dense lettering I’ve seen on every council document since the succession filing.
Underneath my name, the agenda item:Ratification of Heir Recognition Documentation, Item 4.My presence required, not requested.
I read it twice. Then I carry it down the corridor to Zane’s office.
“This is different from the dinners,” I say, holding it up.
“It is.” He’s at his desk, jacket already on, looking at me with the attention he gives things that matter to him. “You’re not attending as my wife this time. You’re attending because the documentation requires your acknowledgment as the carrier of the succession line. It’s procedural. It’s also the first room in this organization where your presence isn’t tied to me.”
I look at the card again. My name, printed clean, is attached to an item number rather than a seating chart.
“I want to go alone,” I say.
Something shifts in his face, not quite surprise, something closer to recognition. “You don’t need to prove anything to them.”
“I know. I want to go alone anyway.”
He doesn’t argue. That alone tells me how much has changed between us in the last week, the disclosure in his office, the night that followed it, the quiet recalibration neither of us has named out loud since.
Three months ago, he would have walked me in himself, hand at my back, the whole performance of ownership and protection layered over every step. Today, he just nods.
“Roman will be outside if you need anything,” he says.
“I won’t.”
I believe it when I say it. I’m only partly right.
The council room is smaller than I expected, dark wood and a long table, the same twelve chairs I remember from the first dinner, though the configuration feels entirely different without place settings and wineglasses softening the edges. Alexei is already seated when I arrive, and he stands when I enter, an old-world courtesy I’ve learned not to read as warmth but also not to dismiss as nothing.
“Mrs. Volkov,” he says.
I have heard him use that name perhaps three times. It always lands strangely, a title that was forced onto me through a clause I didn’t read, now spoken with something that resembles respect.
Fedorov is two seats down, and when I look at him, he meets my eyes directly, none of the careful distance he kept at the first dinner, none of the silent presence beside Gregor at the formal objection meeting. He nods once, an acknowledgment that costs him nothing and means more than it should.
Viktor’s wife isn’t here—this isn’t that kind of meeting—but Viktor himself gives me the same easy warmth he’s given me since the gala, gesturing to the chair beside him like it was always going to be mine.
Then there’s Henrik.
I don’t know him well, an older man, white-haired, seated at the far end with a stillness that reads less like hostility and more like a man who has already decided something and is simply waiting for the room to catch up to him. He doesn’t stand when I enter. He doesn’t look away either. He just watches, the way you watch something you’ve already filed under a category you have no plans to revise.
I take my seat, and the meeting moves through three items before mine. Route logistics, a financial matter I don’t fully follow, a personnel question resolved in under five minutes.
I watch the rhythm of it, the way these men defer to Alexei’s pacing without anyone needing to say so out loud, and I file the dynamic the way I file everything, quietly, for later.
When my item comes up, Alexei reads the documentation aloud. The formal language is dense, the same offshore-adjacent phrasing I’ve spent months learning to decode, except this timeit names a child instead of a marriage. Position in the succession line. Inheritance rights. Protections that activate automatically upon birth, regardless of any future change to the marriage contract itself.
I listen to that last part twice.
