15. LEO #4
Her perfectly cut suit, straight hair, and harmonious makeup make her as impeccable as ever.
The first thing she does is examine me with her emerald eyes, raking over my skin as if searching for fresh wounds and new scars.
She stares at my bandaged hand before saying, "The report."
I go to the computer desk, grabbing the flash drive I kept in the drawer. "I've completed 50% of the work."
She takes it from my hand, arching one of her thin, defined eyebrows.
"Efficient," she says, satisfied. "And what did you find?"
"Nothing that will break your financial market. The strangest thing was the head of security accessing furry porn during work hours."
She looks disgusted. "Porn of what?"
" Furry . It's a subculture..."
"I don't want to know," she interrupts me. "Anything else?"
"I also found a small anomaly in a payment diversion. It's not a big one, but I imagined it could be a test from you, so it's detailed there. One of your capos paid nine thousand instead of ten to an employee. He kept a thousand for himself."
"Right," she says. If she was surprised by the diversion, she didn't show it. She puts the flash drive in her blazer, and her eyes return to examining me. She glances at my neck, noticing the slightly loose turtleneck, and I'm sure she's seeing the marks Dante left.
"What's the plan for Monday?" I say. I hope that, if Dante didn't give me any answers, at least she can provide some.
"That will depend on what I think of your report. And on Dante ."
She shows this . A stagnant, tired disgust— Dante . Considering the respect with which she spoke about him last time, I imagine they are on bad terms now. Because of me, for sure.
She turns to the door. "We'll inform you tomorrow."
Svetlana appears to be the kind of person who plans ahead and resolves issues well before deadlines. Dante, on the other hand, has a difficult temperament—he must be turning the whole monotonous routine she exudes into a personal hell.
"Yes, ma'am."
I watch her heels click down the hall before closing myself in the room again.
The next morning is a silent insult.
There's no Dante. No screams, no threats, no blood-laced stolen kisses. There's just Luca knocking on my door, holding an ironed suit and polished shoes I'd never wear in my life.
"Mr. Volkov has decided you'll return to your normal activities," he says. He leaves the clothes hanging on the doorknob and walks away.
I thought Dante would go to greater lengths for me. It's disappointing.
"Is that all?" I ask, and Luca just nods.
"A car will take you to work."
The lack of fanfare is the strangest part. No last threat, no final possessive touch. Just a cold order, delivered by an intermediary.
I put on the suit. It's expensive, made of a fabric I've never felt on my skin, and it feels like a costume; a disguise of normalcy that no longer belongs to me—I barely recognize myself in the mirror. The bandage on my hand is a reminder of it.
Luca escorts me to the front of the mansion.
The waiting car isn't luxurious enough to attract unwanted attention, but it's far more than I'd ever need.
The driver is a large man in a suit, and another enforcer takes the seat beside him; people I've never seen, who drive me in silence. I say nothing.
Facing my destination building, I barely recognize myself in the reflection of the glass doors.
The clothes look like something I would wear, but they don't feel like it—too ironed, too polished, too expensive.
I usually come to work in wrinkled dress pants and old shoes, never really caring what to wear or how I look.
The state of my hair, my barely healed face, is unsettling against the normal appearance those selected clothes exude.
I walk in. Brenda greets me with a nervous smile, glued to the computer on her desk. Not my problem. I walk past her, and the turnstile camera recognizes me this time. My face is still bruised, but at least it's no longer swollen.
I step into the elevator. I press the button, look at the closed doors, and then my gaze drifts to the floor. My own reflection bothers me. I'll have to ask them to bring me my own clothes.
When I step out of the elevator on my floor, I catch the familiar aroma of the citrus essential oil Nicole drops into the humidifier every morning.
I always take the same glazed-over path to my cubicle, avoiding anyone I can.
But this time, something beyond the citrus scent bothers me in the air.
The suppressed desperation of a swarm of average workers has been replaced by a frantic tension.
Brenda's nervousness extends to the entire IT team.
Employees check their emails with a nervous energy that makes their hands tremble on the mouse, struggling to click the 'x' on open windows.
Some are on their personal phones, others peek into Chad's office with restless legs, waiting for some important announcement, and others—most alarmingly—are gathered in small huddles, whispering amongst themselves. IT staff aren't usually that social.
Something is off.
Cardboard boxes are scattered across the gray carpet, haphazardly stacked like headstones of a failed startup. Some are open, revealing the pathetic contents of an office life: mugs with motivational quotes, family photos in frames, staplers.
I walk past a group. Nobody notices me.
"…they said the restructuring was to optimize…"
"…they're firing everyone in marketing…"
Honestly, I don't care about marketing. The comments pass me by like some strange, isolated event. Then I see them—at the door of Chad's office, there's Nicole, biting her nails with a furrowed brow, and next to her, the manager himself, with his disheveled comb-over, gesticulating non-stop.
He sees me. His face lights up with misplaced relief.
"Leo! You're back! Thank God!" he says, approaching with open arms. I dodge any attempt at an embrace. "You won't believe what happened!"
I look at the boxes, at the terrified faces, at the mess.
"What happened?" I ask.
"It's the end of the world, Leo!" Chad wails, grabbing my shoulders with a strength his flabby arms shouldn't have. "A disaster! A corporate apocalypse!"
I look at his hand on my shoulder. Why the hell is he touching me? He doesn't seem to notice.
Before I can tell him to let go, Nicole approaches.
She has smudges of smeared mascara under her eyes.
"Leo! Accounting! All of them!" she says, pointing to a corner of the floor where more cardboard boxes accumulated.
"They just got an email! Contract termination!
Security is already waiting at the door to escort them out. "
Chad releases me to run his hands through his hair, making his comb-over even worse. "It's not just Accounting—Sales too! We've been bought , Leo. Out of nowhere. The company was sold."
So that's it. An acquisition. The capitalist life cycle; bigger fish eating smaller ones.
I almost yawn. If they get rid of the IT sector and the Volkovs release me to a facade of normalcy, I'll have to find another hole to slowly waste away in—I need at least one source of legitimate income that doesn't involve working for the mafia.
Thinking about the possibilities drains my energy.
Looking for a job opening. Updating my resume.
Going to job interviews, telling the interviewer they should hire me so I don't get arrested and that I see myself in a grave in five years.
"They're firing everyone," Nicole continues. "No one knows who's next. Brenda from reception said the new owners are ruthless."
Chad then turns to me. The expression on his face is one of such absurd expectation it's comical. He looks at me as if I were a prophet, a general about to draw up the battle plan that will save everyone.
"Leo, my champ," he says softly. "You're calm. You're the smartest guy in IT. What do we do? What's the play? There has to be a way to get around this, a plan…"
I stare at him. Does he expect me to type a line of code that will reverse a multibillion-dollar acquisition? His stupidity is almost an art form. He genuinely believes that because I can fix the printer when it's unplugged, I can stop a corporate restructuring.
His pathetic hope is the most depressing thing I've seen today. And that includes the cardboard boxes.
I look at Chad's pleading face, at Nicole's panic, and shrug.
"Update your resume, I guess."
The hope on his face wilts. "What? But… you're our ace! Our genius!"
I turn, looking for my cubicle.
"Where's my fern?"
The question is so out of place amidst the panic that Nicole blinks, confused. "Your fern? It's in my cubicle. I watered it while you were sick."
"We're talking about the end of our careers and you're worried about a plant?!" Chad says.
I ignore him. Good to know it's alive. I peek into Nicole's cubicle and see the tips of its little leaves.
"Who are the new owners?" I ask. I don't care, but data is data.
"No one knows," Nicole whispers, as if a ghost were our mysterious buyer. "We only know the name of the holding company that made the purchase. It was in the internal memo HR sent before the email system crashed. That foreign holding… I think V-Corp or something."
Wait.
V-Corp.
V.
Volkov ?
The apathy shatters, and the fog of boredom dissipates instantly. It can't be. The audacity. The scale of it.
My posture changes. My shoulders straighten. Chad and Nicole continue to babble, but the sound of their voices becomes background noise.
I brush past Chad with a shove.
"Hey! Where are you going? What about our plan?" he shouts behind me.
I need to check this.
I walk to my cubicle. My chair. My computer. I don't sit down, just drag the keyboard closer and start typing. The operating system is slow, archaic, but it's a terrain I know.
First, the basics. The terminal. I check the list of background processes, looking for any unknown or suspicious services consuming resources.
Nothing.
Network connections. A command to list all open ports and the IP addresses the computer is sending and receiving data from. I analyze the list. Standard corporate traffic, internal servers, the network printer…
And a persistent, encrypted connection to an IP address that doesn't belong to our infrastructure.
It's subtle, buried under layers of legitimate traffic, disguised as a system synchronization process. A professional job. Sal's work, no doubt, under very specific orders.
The confirmation.
They didn't just buy the damn company; they're monitoring what I do on the company computer.
I analyze the kernel drivers. A keylogger. A screen recorder. A complete surveillance package, so deeply embedded in the system that it would be invisible to anyone who didn't know exactly what to look for, recording every keystroke, every mouse movement, every open window.
I abandon the keyboard. The plastic slides from my fingertips, and the hum of the office, the panic of my colleagues, everything disappears.
They bought the building. They bought my boss. They bought my routine—my cage . And they put a camera in every corner to watch me rattle the bars.