Page 96 of Claimed By the Boss
She looks at Zane, holding his daughter with an expression that strips every careful wall away from his face. Then she looks at me, sitting beside her on the couch, watching the two of them with an expression I’m certain is doing exactly the same thing to mine.
She doesn’t say anything.
She doesn’t have to. I can see it in her face, the whole complicated journey from that first phone call about a strange clause in a contract to this living room, this man, this child, written plainly in my sister’s expression without a single word required to carry it.
I reach over and squeeze her hand. She squeezes back.
Later, after Zane has taken Elena to settle her for the night, Lena and I sit alone in the kitchen with tea neither of us is drinking, the way we used to sit at the kitchen table on Mercer Street before any of this happened.
“How’s the house?” I ask.
“Good. I’ve been staying there mostly, since I’m back properly now.” She wraps her hands around her cup. “I’ve been thinking about renting out the second bedroom. There’s a girl from thefacility, actually, someone I met in Zurich who’s relocating for work. She needs a place, and I have an empty room and an income now that doesn’t depend on anyone else covering my treatment.”
“You don’t have to do that.”
“I want to. I’ve spent so long being the thing everyone else worries about. I want to build something that’s mine.” She smiles, soft and a little uncertain, the way she does when she’s saying something she’s still getting used to believing herself. “Your husband cleared the last of my debt, you know. Quietly, a few weeks ago, before Elena was even born. I only found out because the facility sent a confirmation letter.”
I didn’t know that. I make a note to ask him about it later, though I suspect, knowing him, he’ll simply say it needed doing and leave it at that.
“I’m proud of you,” I tell her. “Building something of your own.”
“I’m proud of you too,” she says. “Even though this whole thing started in the strangest way I’ve ever heard of in my life.”
I laugh despite myself. “It really did.”
I think about Dominic before I fall asleep that night, the thread I left dangling in my notebook months ago, the entity tied to his name that I never fully resolved before everything else in my life became too urgent to keep chasing it.
I asked Zane about it last week. Finally, the question I’d been sitting on since before the pregnancy made everything else morepressing. He told me the truth, plainly, the way he tells me everything now.
Dominic had helped build part of the protective structure around the family decades ago, before any of this, a loyal piece of architecture rather than a second betrayal waiting to surface. I’d spent months suspecting a man who had, in his own quiet way, been protecting something all along.
I closed the notebook for good after that conversation. Not because there’s nothing left to find, but because I finally understand I don’t need to keep looking. The contract that once felt like a cage has become something else entirely, something I chose to stay inside of with my eyes fully open.
I fall asleep listening for Elena’s cry through the baby monitor, Zane’s arm heavy and warm across my waist, and for the first time in longer than I can remember, I don’t lie awake bracing for whatever comes next.
I simply sleep.
44
ZANE
I findthe notebook on her nightstand two days after she’s already told me she’s done with it. Closed. The pen resting on top instead of inside it, the way she used to keep it when she still had an active page to return to.
I don’t open it. I don’t need to. She told me directly last week, sitting on the edge of our bed with Elena asleep between us, that she’d stopped looking for an exit, not because she failed to find one, but because she no longer wants one.
I have heard her say this before, in different forms, since the night in the kitchen after Gregor’s removal. Tonight, looking at a closed notebook on a nightstand, the truth of it finally lands somewhere it hasn’t landed before.
The contract sitting in my desk drawer downstairs is a lie now.
Not because anything written in it is false. The marriage is real, recognized by the council, binding under every law that matters in either of our worlds. The lie is in what the document claims to be the foundation of all that. Strategy. Necessity. A structurebuilt to satisfy succession requirements and nothing beyond that, four months before she ever walked into my lobby.
She has built something true on top of a foundation that was never honest to begin with.
I decide, standing in our room with Elena’s monitor humming softly on the dresser, that this ends tonight. Not the marriage. The lie underneath it.
I don’t call my legal team.
This is deliberate, the first real decision I make about the new document. The original contract was built by people I instructed from a distance, language constructed to survive any challenge, every clause engineered for defense rather than truth. I’m not building this one the same way.
