Page 75 of Claimed By the Boss
“Two men down. Not killed, but out of commission, professional work, fast. Whoever did this knew the rotation schedule, knew the blind spot in the east corridor we flagged for upgrade, and hadn’t finished upgrading yet.” Roman’s voice stays level, the way it always does, but I can hear something underneath it, the closest thing to genuine alarm I’ve heard from him in eight years. “Priya is unharmed. She was in the adjoining room. She called it in within minutes.”
I stand at my desk with my hands flat against the surface.
“Who?” I ask.
“We don’t know yet. The method has Marchetti fingerprints, but it’s too clean for the contacts we’ve been tracking. This was a dedicated team.”
“Get me everything. Every camera, every contact, every thread you can pull in the next hour.”
“Already moving.”
He leaves. I stand alone in my office with the city dark and indifferent through the window, and I do something I haven’t done in this room in longer than I can remember. I put both hands against the desk, and I lean into it, head down, and I let myself feel, for exactly as long as it takes to draw three full breaths, the complete and total weight of having failed at the one thing I told her I would never let happen.
Then I straighten. I pick up my phone.
I call Celine.
She’s in my office within four minutes, still in the clothes she was wearing when I called, hair loose, her face already pale in a way that tells me Priya must have reached her independently, the same minute I did or sooner.
“Tell me everything,” she says. No anger in her voice. No trace of the five days of distance between us. Just a woman who needs facts in the order I have them.
I give them to her. The breach, the two men down, Priya safe, Lena taken by a team too disciplined to be the low-level contacts we’ve been tracking. I watch her absorb every piece of it,standing very straight, the same composure she’s worn through every crisis in this book of a life she didn’t choose, except this time there’s no controlled distance behind it. This time it’s just fear, focused on something useful because the alternative is unbearable.
“What do we do?” she asks.
“We build an extraction plan. I need every asset I have working on this within the hour.”
“I want to be in the room.”
I look at her. Every previous crisis, I’ve managed her exposure to the operational details, told her what she needed to know after decisions were already made, the pattern that cost us everything between us over the past month.
“You’re in the room,” I say.
Something shifts in her face. Not relief exactly. Recognition, maybe, that something has actually changed.
Roman runs the operation from my office for the next three hours, maps spread across the table, contacts called in from three time zones, the full machinery of an organization built specifically for moments like this one finally turning at full speed.
Celine sits at the edge of the table, not decorative, not silent, asking sharp questions about the facility layout, about Priya’s statement, about the timeline that doesn’t quite add up betweenthe breach and the first ransom contact we expect but haven’t received yet.
By two in the morning, we have a plan. A team in place by dawn, a location triangulated from the last verified signal off Priya’s phone before the breach, a narrow window where the extraction has the best odds of being clean.
Roman leaves to finalize logistics. The office empties out around us, the maps still spread across the table, the city outside doing nothing, indifferent as always to whatever is happening in any single room above it.
Celine sits very still in the chair across from my desk.
“She’s going to be okay,” I say.
“You don’t know that.”
“No,” I admit. “I don’t.”
She looks at me, and something in her face cracks, the composure she’s held since the moment she walked into this office finally giving way to something rawer underneath it. I cross the room before I’ve fully decided to.
I don’t say anything else. There isn’t anything else to say that would make this better, and I have learned, slowly and at considerable cost, that sometimes the only honest thing is silence held close enough to mean something.
She comes into my arms like something in her has simply given out, and I hold her in the middle of my office with the maps still spread across the table and dawn still hours away, and neither of us says a word about the five days, about the file, about anything except the fact that her sister is somewhere in the dark right now and there’s nothing either of us can do but wait for the sun.
We don’t go to separate rooms.
