3. Celine
CELINE
Lena is fine.
That’s what I keep telling myself all weekend, despite the call I received on Friday afternoon.
She was fine when I got home. She’s fine now.
I’ve decided this is the version of events I am operating with because the alternative is a permanent state of low-grade terror, and I cannot afford that on top of everything else.
Two days into this job, and I’m already behind on learning the calendar system.
Volkov Holdings runs on a proprietary scheduling software that Oliver described to me on my first morning with the enthusiasm of someone explaining a religion they recently converted to.
I nodded in the right places. I’ve been nodding in the right places for two days while quietly building a parallel system in a notebook I keep in my top drawer, because some things are faster done by hand.
Friday evening I got home late and Lena had made soup, the kind from a can that she elevates with things she finds in the back of the spice cabinet, and we sat at the kitchen table and she wanted to know everything. Not the salary, not the office. The people.
“What are they like?” she said, pulling her knees up on her chair. “Are they normal? Are there any normal people in a building like that?”
“Oliver at the front desk.”
“Oliver counts?”
“Oliver is the best thing about the building.”
She laughed. She wanted more. I gave her the broad strokes of the legal team, the two assistants on the floor below mine, and the general corporate silence of a company that doesn’t display its name on the outside of its own building. Then I mentioned the man who follows my boss around.
Lena put her spoon down. “Follows him around how?”
“Like a shadow with a jacket. Everywhere. He was waiting outside the elevator this morning when I arrived, and he was in the corridor at six when I left. Built like a door. Doesn’t smile.”
“Celine.”
“I know.”
“That’s a cartel.”
“It’s not a cartel.”
“That is textbook cartel behavior, and you have signed an NDA with these people.”
“I signed several NDAs,” I said, “which I should probably go back and read properly because I was moving fast when they walked me through them.”
She picked her spoon back up. “Read them tonight.”
I didn’t read them that night. I was tired from spending two days learning an entirely new environment from scratch, while performing competently enough that no one asked follow-up questions. I told myself I would read them over the weekend.
Sunday night, Lena falls asleep on the couch at ten with the television on low, and I move through the apartment doing the small quiet things that accumulate when a week goes sideways.
I wash the dishes. I wipe down the counter.
I find the employment package at the bottom of my bag under my umbrella, two receipts, and a pen with the cap missing.
I sit down at the kitchen table.
The document is thirty-one pages. I read it front to back, slowly, the way I should have read it the afternoon they handed it to me.
The first several pages are what I expected.
Employment terms, salary structure, NDA clauses, confidentiality agreements, and corporate compliance language that is dense but not unusual for a company of this size.
Page fourteen.
I read the paragraph once. The words don’t arrange themselves into meaning immediately, which is how I know they mean something I’m not ready for. I read it again.
My name is in this clause.
I read it a third time.
A corporate structure is described, offshore entities named, a shell arrangement referenced in language that bends in on itself deliberately, the way language does when it’s written by people who don’t want it understood on a first read.
Inside it, embedded in a paragraph about organizational succession requirements, is a designation.
A legal one. My name and Zane Volkov’s, bound through this structure into an arrangement the document calls a domestic appointment.
I set the paper down on the table.
I pick it up again and check the signature page at the back.
My name. My handwriting. The date. Three days ago, in a conference room on the forty-second floor, while a man in a neat suit turned pages and pointed to lines and said sign here, initial this page, and I did, because the salary figure was real and Lena’s next payment is due in eleven days.
It is twelve forty-seven in the morning.
I open my laptop and find the HR contact from the onboarding email. I write what I intend to be a measured, professional message asking for clarification on a clause in my employment documentation. I read it back. It is neither measured nor professional.
I don’t hear back from HR because it’s the middle of the night. I’m not surprised, but I check my phone four times before six anyway.
Monday morning, I’m at my desk by eight fifteen.
My desk sits outside Zane’s office on the forty-fourth floor, positioned at an angle that gives me a sightline to both the elevator bank and his door. The floor is quieter than the ones below, less traffic, more deliberate movement from the few people who have business up here.
I’ve been here two days and already understand that this floor operates on a different register from the rest of the building.
I’m pulling up the calendar system when Roman appears.
He does this. Materializes. I have not once seen him come off an elevator or emerge from a stairwell. He’s simply not there, and then he is, standing at the edge of my desk with a leather folder and an expression that suggests he has already decided how this conversation is going to go.
“The courier package for the Mercer address,” he says.
“Needs to go this morning before eleven. There’s also a notarized letter at the building on Fifty-Third that requires collection, front desk, give them this reference.
” He sets a card on my desk. “And Mr. Volkov needs a specific bottle from a place on the Upper East Side. The name and address are in the folder.” He places the folder beside the card and steps back.
“Roman,” I say.
“The courier closes at ten forty-five. You’ll need to move.”
“I need to speak with Mr. Volkov this morning.”
“He has calls until noon.” He says it the way people say things that are not open for discussion. “The errands first.” He’s already walking away.
I look at the folder. I look at the closed door across the floor, with its brushed-steel handle and the silence behind it. I pick up the folder, collect my bag, and go.
The Mercer address takes forty minutes with traffic.
The building on Fifty-Third adds another thirty.
The wine merchant on the Upper East Side is a narrow room that smells of oak and climate control, and the man behind the counter treats retrieving a single bottle as a minor ceremony. I do not have time for that today.
I’m back at Volkov Holdings at twelve fourteen.
The elevator opens on forty-four, and I walk directly to Zane’s office without stopping at my desk.
I’ve been thinking about page fourteen for eleven hours.
I have the document in my bag. I have had no response from HR.
I’ve run three errands on three hours of sleep, and I’m done waiting for a convenient moment for this conversation.
His office door is not fully closed. I don’t knock. I push it open.
The office is large, with a desk at the far end, dark wood and wide, the city arranged behind it through a window that runs most of the length of the wall.
There’s a sitting area to the left, with two chairs and a low table, and a separate door on the right side of the room that stands half-open.
Bookshelves line one wall, all the books used, no decorative spines.
The whole room is arranged in a way that is not suited to the impression it makes.
He’s not at his desk.
The sound comes from beyond the half-open door on the right.
Low. Rough. A grunt and then a breath and then my name, in a voice that has become more familiar in the last two days.
Celine.
I stand exactly where I am.
End of preview. Continue reading Claimed by the Boss here.