Page 80 of Claimed By the Boss
I step back.
I do this without deciding to; my body simply understands, before my mind catches up, that this reunion does not include me, that whatever happens in the next several minutes belongs entirely to two women who have spent their whole lives being everything to each other, long before I existed in either of their stories.
Celine pulls Lena into her arms. Lena starts crying the moment contact is made, the controlled composure she held together for the entire flight finally breaking apart now that she’s somewhere safe enough to let it.
Celine holds her, one hand cradling the back of her sister’s head, murmuring something too quiet for me to hear, and I stand near the elevator with Roman beside me, both of us giving them the room the moment requires.
I watch Celine’s face over Lena’s shoulder.
She finds my eyes across the foyer.
Neither of us says anything.
I don’t need her to.
Whatever passed between us in my office five nights ago, whatever sits unresolved in that locked drawer where the filestill waits, none of it matters in this moment, not because it’s been settled but because some things are simply too large to address while a frightened woman is still crying in her sister’s arms.
I see something in Celine’s expression that isn’t forgiveness and isn’t absolution. It’s an acknowledgment that I did exactly what I told her I would do, that her sister is standing in this room because of decisions I made and executed without hesitation.
She doesn’t cross the room to me, and I don’t expect her to.
We hold each other’s gaze for a long moment, the weight of the night sitting between us in a silence that says more than either of us would manage with words right now, and then she turns back to Lena, guiding her sister toward the couch, toward water, toward whatever small, ordinary comforts a person needs after the worst night of their life.
Roman touches my shoulder once. “Med team is on standby if she needs them.”
“Have them check her cheek,” I say. “And get the men who were hit proper treatment tonight, not tomorrow.”
“Already arranged.”
I look once more across the room, Celine kneeling in front of Lena now, smoothing her sister’s hair back from her face, the two of them framed by the city lights through the window behind them.
I go to my office. There is still work to finish tonight, calls to make, and the beginning of what comes next for the people who did this.
But for a few minutes, I just stand in the doorway and watch the two of them, safe, together, and let myself feel the relief without examining yet what it costs me that I still don’t know how to fix the rest of it.
35
CELINE
Lena is quiet this morning.
Not broken, not the version of fear I braced myself for during their flight back from whatever building she was held in, but quieter, a stillness sitting in her that wasn’t there before last night. The bruise along her cheekbone has darkened overnight, purple now instead of red, and she touches it occasionally without seeming to notice she’s doing it.
I sit beside her on the couch with two cups of tea that neither of us is drinking, and I let her set the pace.
She has always been the one who tells me things in her own time, on her own terms, ever since we were children, and I learned that pushing her only made her retreat further. I’m not going to push her now.
“They kept asking the same things,” she finally says, looking at the window rather than at me. “Routes. Shipping arrangements. Something about a northern territory I’d never heard of in my life.”
“You didn’t know any of it.”
“I told them that. Over and over. I think that’s what scared me most, actually. Not the room, not the man who hit me.” Her hand goes to her cheek again. “It was realizing that not knowing anything didn’t necessarily mean they’d let me go. That my ignorance was the only thing standing between me and whatever they actually wanted, and ignorance is a pretty thin thing to be protected by.”
I take her hand. She lets me.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “For all of it. For the fact that you got pulled into something that has nothing to do with you.”
“It has everything to do with me,” she says. “I’m your sister. That made me the easiest way to hurt you, which apparently made me valuable to people I’ve never met and never will.” She finally looks at me. “Zane explained that on the flight back. Said it plainly, no softening it. I think I needed to hear it that way.”
