Belong to Me (East Coast Mafia #10)

Chapter 1

DAISY

The coffee is on my blouse before I make it through the doors.

Not a tasteful splash. Not something I can dab at with a napkin and pretend never happened.

A full, committed spill, the lid popping clean off my travel mug as I trip on the marble step outside Keyes, Inc.

, and now there’s a river of medium-roast running from my collarbone to my waistband, and the glass doors are several feet away, and through them I can see women in silk and heels crossing a lobby that costs more than my parents’ house.

I'm seven minutes late on my second day of work.

The doors are heavy. They swing inward on some kind of hydraulic system that makes them feel like they’re judging you, and inside, the lobby of Keyes, Inc.

smells like gardenia and money. White marble floors.

Recessed lighting that turns everyone’s skin golden.

A reception desk made of something dark and polished that might be ebony or might be the physical manifestation of my inadequacy.

“Fletch!”

Aunt Kaye crosses the lobby like she was born on marble.

Her heels make no sound. Her hair is pinned in something architectural, blonde and immaculate, and her suit is the colour of graphite, and she is smiling at me with the specific warmth of a woman who once let me eat frosting straight from the can at Thanksgiving and now signs paycheques with a title under her name.

“Let me see.” She takes my shoulders, turns me, assesses the coffee damage. Her mouth presses together. “We’ll fix it. Come on.”

She steers me past the reception desk, past three women who track our movement with the polished disinterest of cats evaluating a mouse, and into a washroom that has actual hand towels. Cloth ones. In a dispenser.

“Dab, don’t rub,” Kaye tells me, handing me a towel. “The blouse is a loss, but the jacket will cover it. You brought the navy jacket?”

“It’s at my desk.”

“Good girl.” She leans against the counter and crosses her arms. In the washroom mirror, we are two versions of the same gene pool: her jaw, my jaw.

Her blue eyes, my blue eyes. But hers come with fifteen years of Monaco and whatever it is that turns a woman from Boise into someone who moves through marble lobbies without making a sound.

“How was the apartment last night? Did you find the grocery store I mentioned?”

“Found it. Bought pasta. Burned the pasta.”

She laughs. It’s a real one, head back and teeth showing, and for a second she’s just Aunt Kaye again, the one who drove me to the airport in Boise with the windows down and Promise me you’ll call every Sunday on her lips.

“You’ll find your feet,” she tells me. “Everyone does. The first week is survival. After that, it’s instinct.”

I nod. I dab. The coffee stain isn’t coming out.

KEYES, INC. OCCUPIES the top four floors of a building on Avenue de Grande Bretagne, and everything about it is designed to make you feel like you’ve wandered into someone else’s life.

The conference rooms have glass walls. The partners’ offices have views of the harbour.

There are fresh flowers on every surfaceand the women who carry files down the corridor do it like other people carry champagne flutes: with their wrists turned out, fingers long, as if the file itself is an accessory.

I carry mine pressed against my chest like a shield.

Blythe finds me at ten-fifteen.

She’s the other new paralegal. Or not new, exactly.

She’s been here less than a year. But she’s the one Kaye assigned to “show me the ropes,” which so far has meant a tour of the copier room, a list of partners’ names I will never remember, and a single, devastating sentence delivered over the copier while it hummed: “The dress code is technically business professional, but everyone here is auditioning for something.”

Today she’s wearing a pencil skirt and a blouse that probably cost what I pay in rent. Her dark hair is blown out straight and her eyeliner could cut glass.

“You have coffee on your—”

“I know.”

“Jacket.”

“Wearing it.”

She tips her chin toward my desk. “Kaye wants the Marchetti files colour-tabbed by end of day. Red for litigation, blue for compliance, green for correspondence. You know how to tab?”

I pull open my desk drawer. Inside: a bag of adhesive tabs I brought from Idaho, sorted by colour, each strip pre-cut to the same length. Blythe bends down. Her eyebrows go up.

“You brought your own tabs.”

“The ones in the supply room are too wide.”

Something crosses her face. Not amusement, not quite. Something closer to recalibration. She straightens. “End of day,” she repeats, and turns on one impossible heel and is gone.

BY THURSDAY I HAVE a system.

Tabs: red litigation, blue compliance, green correspondence, yellow for anything that doesn’t fit the first three categories but feels important.

I’ve added sub-tabs: small white ones that flag pages with signatures, dates, or dollar amounts.

Every file on my desk is squared, spines aligned, a colour-coded map of someone’s legal life that I can navigate in the dark.

I like this. I like how a file goes from chaos to order under my hands. I like that there’s a right way to do it and a wrong way, and I can tell the difference.

What I don’t like is the rest.

I don’t understand why the female associates take meetings behind closed doors with no case files on the table.

I don’t understand why a woman named Sabine came out of Partner Larroux’s office at six-forty-five on Wednesday with her lipstick reapplied and her blouse buttoned one hole lower than it was when she went in.

I don’t understand why the clients who come through the lobby are flanked by men who don’t carry briefcases but do carry something under their left arms that makes their jackets hang wrong.

I file these things in the yellow category. Things that don’t fit but feel important.

Blythe catches me frowning at a file on Thursday afternoon. “Problem?”

“This retainer agreement.” I turn it toward her. “The billing structure doesn’t match the service description. They’re charging for litigation support, but the scope is listed as ‘client relations.’ That’s not—that’s two different things.”

Blythe takes the file. Her eyes move over it fast, practised. Then she closes it and hands it back.

“Tab it blue,” she tells me. Her voice is careful. Neutral in a way that isn’t neutral at all.

“But it’s not compliance. The billing code—”

“Tab it blue, Daisy.”

I tab it blue.

FRIDAY. END OF MY FIRST week. I’m at my desk early because the coffee disaster taught me to build in a margin, and I’m three files deep in the Marchetti account when the air in the office changes.

I don’t know how else to describe it. The fluorescents don’t dim.

The temperature doesn’t drop. But something moves through the firm like weather through a valley, and everyone adjusts at once, without speaking, without signalling, as if they all heard the same frequency and I’m the only one without a receiver.

Sabine puts down her phone. Partner Larroux comes out of his office. Two associates in the corridor turn on their heels and walk toward the lobby. Blythe, at the desk across from mine, goes still for a half-second, then opens a compact and checks her teeth.

I follow the current.

He’s standing at the reception desk.

Tall. Dark suit, no tie. Hair that’s dark enough to be black in this light, pushed back from a face that makes my brain short-circuit and produce nothing useful for a full three seconds.

He’s signing something the receptionist has put in front of him, and the pen moves in his hand the way expensive things move, without effort and without sound, and his other hand rests in his pocket with a stillness that suggests he has never once in his life been seven minutes late for anything.

Every woman in the lobby has repositioned.

Sabine is closer to the desk than she was a moment ago.

The two associates from the corridor have found reasons to be carrying things past reception.

Even Kaye is here, emerging from the executive suite with her graphite jacket buttoned and a smile that is warm and professional and something else I can’t name.

“Mr. Almazov.” Kaye extends her hand. “We’re so glad you’re here. Conference room three is ready for you.”

He lifts his head from the registry.

His eyes are grey. Not the soft grey of overcast skies. The grey of something mineral, something compressed. He takes Kaye’s hand, and the smile he gives her is perfect, wide and easy, a smile that costs nothing and promises everything, and it doesn’t reach his eyes.

I know because I’m close enough to see.

I’m close enough because I forgot to stop walking when my brain short-circuited, which means I’m now standing several feet from the reception desk holding a Marchetti file with colour tabs fanned out like a paper peacock, and I’m openly, catastrophically, obviously staring.

He sees me.

His gaze tracks from Kaye’s face to mine, and it happens in less than a second, and in that second something moves behind the grey: an assessment, a calculation, an inventory taken by a man used to cataloguing everything in a room.

His eyes drop to the file in my arms. The colour tabs.

My coffee-stained blouse hiding under the navy jacket. My flat shoes on the marble floor.

The smile changes.

It’s still wide. Still easy. But something about the angle of it tightens, and for one beat I have the feeling I have been read from cover to cover by a man who does this for a living.

Kaye is saying something. Conference room. This way. He turns to follow her. He is a few steps past me when he glances back.

Just once. Over his left shoulder. His eyes find mine like he already knew where I’d be.

Then he’s gone. Through the glass doors, into the conference room, and Kaye pulls the door shut behind them, and the lobby exhales.

Blythe is beside me. I didn’t hear her arrive.

“Anton Almazov,” she tells me, and her voice has the same careful neutrality from the billing-code conversation, except now it’s laced with something drier. “Ace Royale casino. Biggest client Keyes has ever landed. His family owns half the waterfront.”

I’m still facing the conference room doors. Through the glass, I can see the shape of him, dark suit against the white chairs, and Kaye across the table, and his hand lifting in a gesture that is fluid and easy and sends something through my chest that I have no yellow tab for.

“Daisy.”

I turn.

Blythe is assessing me like she assessed my pre-cut tabs: with the faint surprise of someone who expected something predictable and got something she’s still deciding how to categorise.

“You’re doing the thing,” she tells me.

“What thing?”

“The thing where a girl from Idaho stands in a marble lobby with a colour-tabbed file and forgets how to blink because a man in a dark suit has grey eyes.” She picks a piece of lint off my jacket. “Don’t do the thing.”

I open my mouth. Close it. Open it again.

“He’s a client,” I manage.

Blythe’s expression does something complicated. “Yes,” she agrees. “He is.”

She doesn’t say anything else. She doesn’t need to.

Her turn back toward our desks carries the weight of something she has decided not to tell me, and I stand there in the lobby with my Marchetti file and my sensible flats and the ghost of a grey-eyed glance still burning a hole in my peripheral vision, and I think: Tab it blue, Daisy.

I go back to my desk. I file. I tab. I do not think about grey eyes or smiles that don’t connect or how he glanced back like he was making a note of me in a system I can’t see.

Just before five, my desk phone rings.

“Fletch. My office, please.”

Kaye is standing behind her desk when I come in. The harbour is behind her, all blue and gold, and the late-afternoon light makes her hair glow like a halo, and she is smiling at me with an expression I will remember for a long time.

Pride. Like I’ve done something right. Like this is the beginning of everything she brought me here for.

“Sit down, sweetheart.”

I sit.

“Mr. Almazov has requested you be assigned to his account.”

The harbour burns behind her. The world tilts. And something in my chest, something I don’t have a tab for yet, something that is neither red nor blue nor green nor yellow, catches.