Page 70 of Claimed By the Boss
He answers on the first ring, the way he always does when he knows the call is coming.
“The Marchetti faction made direct contact,” I say. “They want the northern routes in exchange for leaving her alone. I refused.”
“Understood.”
“I want a full operational plan on my desk in seventy-two hours. Every asset, every position, every weakness in their structure, we can exploit. We’re done playing defense.”
A brief pause on Roman’s end, the kind that means he’s recalibrating everything he was planning to do this week.
“Seventy-two hours,” he confirms.
I end the call. Look at Celine, standing in my office with the city dark behind her, carrying my child inside a danger neither of us asked for, and something settles in me that has nothing to do with strategy.
“It ends soon,” I tell her. “One way or another.”
“Promise me something,” she says.
“What?”
“That when it does end, you tell me how. Not after. You tell me while it’s happening.”
I look at her for a long moment.
“Yes,” I say.
I mean it.
29
CELINE
Alexei callsmy desk at eleven.
“The amendment language needs the original incorporation records,” he says. “Before digitization, nineteen ninety-one structure. They’ll be in the archive cabinet in Zane’s office, third drawer if memory serves. I need them confirmed against the new clause before I send anything to print.”
“I’ll get them this afternoon.”
“Today, if you can. The printer needs forty-eight hours.”
I tell him today works. I hang up and finish the email I’m writing, and at two o’clock I walk down the corridor to Zane’s office, which is empty; he’s on a call two floors down, and I let myself in with the key Roman gave me weeks ago for exactly this kind of errand.
The third drawer sticks, as it always does. I have to pull it twice before it gives.
The incorporation records are right where Alexei said they’d be, a thin folder near the front, tabbed in his own handwriting.
I pull it out. Behind it, pushed back further than the rest, is a second folder. No label on the spine. Just a date written in pencil in the corner, eight months before the job posting for Volkov Holdings ever existed.
I should put the drawer back. I have what I came for.
I open it instead.
Four pages.
The first page is a summary sheet, my name typed at the top, and a compilation date that confirms what the pencil mark already told me. Below that, a list of prior employers, dates, and titles I gave during my interview, almost word-for-word, except that this document predates that interview by months.
The second page is financial. Account numbers I don’t recognize as having been shared with anyone, a single line item that makes my stomach drop before my mind catches up to why.Outstanding medical balance, L. Varas, $—.The exact figure from that month, the one I did the math on twice every morning because I couldn’t believe it was real.
The third page is Lena. Diagnosis date. Treatment center. A note in the margin, not typed, handwritten, three words.Stable income required.
