Chapter 7 Rae
RAE
—but before my first foot even lands on the marble acreage of the fiftieth floor, Lukas’s hand clamps around my bicep.
“Come with me.”
It isn’t a question and he isn’t waiting for an answer.
He whisks me off my feet and drags me through a door I didn’t notice when I arrived here yesterday.
We make our way down a completely unlit hallway.
It’s small and cramped, and his sea-salt-and-mint cologne fills the space like an oil diffuser.
I’m scrambling to keep up with his huge strides until, just as suddenly as he grabbed me, he releases me.
We’re standing in a windowless room I didn’t know existed.
It’s shabby in some places and bare in all the others. There’s a single rickety table in the center, ringed by six chairs. Five of them are already occupied by men I’ve never seen before.
They’re all big. Not as big as Lukas, but close. Their suits are dark and thick. Their faces are blank.
“Sit,” Lukas orders.
He points at an empty chair in the corner. It’s pushed back from the table. Clearly not meant to be part of the conversation.
I do as he says.
Lukas takes the remaining chair at the head of the table. The second he does, the atmosphere in the room morphs. The men straighten. Their attention sharpens.
“Report,” Lukas says.
One of the men starts talking. He’s got a thick accent I can’t place. Eastern European, maybe. Based off Lukas’s phone call yesterday, I’d assume Russian? I don’t know for sure, though. Nor do I know what he’s talking about. He’s rattling off numbers and names and locations that mean nothing to me.
“—shipment cleared customs Tuesday. No issues. The Bratsk route is holding.”
Lukas nods. “And the terminal?”
“Operational. Rymbayev’s crew finished ahead of schedule.”
“Good.”
Another man jumps in. This one is younger, with a wicked scar running down his left cheek. “The situation in Red Hook is getting a bit testy, sir. We need to discuss—”
Lukas holds up a hand. “In a moment.”
That’s all it takes. The scarred man shuts his mouth and doesn’t open it again.
Lukas’s gaze cuts to me. “Ms. Everett.”
Every head in the room turns.
“Y-Yes?” I stammer out. “Er, yes, s-sir?” I hope to God he’s not about to ask where Bratsk is or what Rymbayev should do about this whole Red Hook fiasco, because I have no clue what any of that means.
“Why aren’t you taking notes?”
I freeze. My hands are empty. I don’t have a pen. I don’t have paper. “I didn’t know I was supposed to—”
“You’re my assistant,” he reminds me in a frigid monotone. “What did you think you’d be doing?”
My face burns. The men are all watching me now. Judging. I can feel it.
“I d-don’t have my… I didn’t get to go to my… my desk, Mr. Lazarev. I can’t—”
Grimacing, he reaches into his jacket and pulls out a small leather notebook. The fountain pen that was sitting on his desk yesterday is clipped to its spine. He sets both of them down on the table next to him and looks me dead in the eye.
His instruction is obvious: I am to get up and walk over to retrieve them.
I feel every single pair of eyes on me as I cross the room.
Everything about me reminds me how female I am, how vulnerable, how alone.
Heels tapping, skirt swishing. Why’d I wear a skirt today?
Dumb, dumb. My hair long… the thin silk of my blouse…
the bra strap falling off of one shoulder beneath it…
My wrists, when I reach out to grab the notebook from next to Lukas’s elbow, look fragile enough for him to engulf in a single hand and snap like matchsticks, if that’s what he wanted to do.
And as for him… He’s all male. King of the jungle. Huge in his chair, consuming a half of the room all to himself, radiating his scent and his power, both equally intoxicating, almost too much to be believed.
Lukas doesn’t budge an inch as I approach. He just watches me. His gray eyes track down to my heels. Back up—slower now—over my hips, my waist, the rise of my chest.
He lingers there. Then he meets my eyes.
My throat goes dry and I look away.
I snatch up the notebook with the pen and clutch it to my chest like a battle shield before I turn and scurry away.
The walk back to my corner chair takes forever.
I can still feel them all watching. These big, scary men in their dark suits, their shoulders twice the width of mine, their bodies built for violence.
The room has no windows. No one knows I’m here.
If I screamed, no one would hear. If I ran, I wouldn’t make it two steps before one of them caught me and did whatever it is he intended to do. If that happened… would Lukas stop it?
I sink into my seat and cross my legs. My skirt rides up. I tug it back down with shaking fingers.
Lukas’s mouth twitches. Just slightly.
Like he noticed my fear.
Like he liked it.
He turns back to his men. “Continue.”
The scarred man picks up where he left off. I start writing, though my handwriting is shaky and terrible and I have no idea what I’m actually supposed to be summarizing.
But I don’t dare ask questions. I just jot down the names, numbers, and locations I catch, and make up the things that I miss.
Truthfully, the whole thing is baffling. It doesn’t sound like any board meeting I’ve ever sat in on with Kir. There’s no talk of quarterly earnings or market projections. No PowerPoint slides. No corporate jargon.
These men talk about shipments. Routes. Crews. Territories. A whole different kind of game. At one point, someone mentions “the cleanup” and everyone nods knowingly.
I look around, but no explanation is forthcoming. As far as I can tell, they’ve all forgotten I exist.
The meeting lasts forty-five minutes. When it’s over, the men file out without a word to me. They don’t even glance in my direction.
Lukas stays seated. He waits until the door closes, then turns to look at me.
“Questions?”
I have about a thousand. But I get the feeling that’s not what he wants to hear, so I just say, “No.”
“Good.”
Then he’s gone, too.
I wait until I can’t hear any signs of life in the hallway. Then I rise and make my way back to my desk on shaky legs.
The mahogany doors to Lukas’s office are shut. I have no idea if he’s in there or if he left through some other exit I don’t know about, or if he maybe turned into a bat and flew out the window like Dracula.
I sit down at my computer. I stare at the screen. What am I supposed to do now?
The notebook is still in my hands. When I flip through the pages, my scribbled notes look like the ravings of a lunatic. Half the words are misspelled. Some of them aren’t even words.
I decide to type them up. That’s what assistants do, right? Take notes and make them presentable? Sure. I guess. It’s not like I have anything better to occupy my time.
It takes me twenty minutes to translate my chicken scratch into something resembling coherent sentences. I format it nicely. Bullet points. Bold headers. I decide Lukas is probably not a fan of emojis, so I leave those out. When I’m done, I hit print.
The printer beneath my desk whirs to life. Three pages slide out, warm and crisp.
I gather them up and walk to Lukas’s door. I knock, hoping he’s in there.
He grunts. I assume that means it’s okay for me to come in, so I push the door open. He’s at his desk, reading something on his laptop. He doesn’t look up.
“I typed up my notes from the meeting,” I say. “I thought you might want—”
At that, he looks up.
And something changes in his face.
He’s on his feet before I can finish the sentence. He crosses the room in huge strides. As soon as he’s close enough, he rips the papers from my grip.
“What is this?” he snarls.
“I— The notes. From the meeting. I typed them up, so—”
“You printed this?”
“Yes?”
I watch in horror as he tears the papers in half, then in half again. And again. He keeps tearing until they’re nothing but sad little scraps in his fists.
Then he glares at me with murder in his eyes. “Never,” he says, “never print anything. Do you understand me? Never.”
I take a step back. My spine hits the doorframe. “I didn’t know—”
“Now, you do.” He drops the last of the scraps at his feet. “Pen and paper only. No digital copies. No printouts. Nothing that can be traced or retrieved.”
“Okay,” I mumble. My throat is closing up with fear and shame. “I’m sorry. I didn’t—”
“Speaking of which.” He turns to face me. “The pen I gave you. Where is it?”
I look down at my empty hands. Then I remember: I set it down on the table in the meeting room when I finished writing. I was so flustered, so eager to get out of there, that I forgot to pick it up.
“I left it,” I say. “In the meeting room.”
“Clean this mess up,” he says, jutting his chin at the paper confetti that’s all that remains of me trying to do a good thing. “Then go get it.”
“Right now?”
“Do you have something better to be doing with your time, Ms. Everett?”
“No, sir. Sorry, sir.” I drop to my knees and start sweeping up everything I can reach.
The scraps are everywhere, but that’s not the issue—Lord knows I’ve cleaned up enough messes since my parents died. This is neither the first nor the worst.
The issue is that I can feel Mr. Lazarev watching me.
He hasn’t moved. He’s just standing there, towering over me, while I crawl around on his office floor picking up tiny pieces of paper.
My stupid skirt once again rides up my thighs. I tug it down. It immediately rides right back up.
I reach for a scrap near the leg of his desk and my blouse, feeling left out of the “Humiliate Rae” party, gapes open. I clamp my arm against my chest.
This is preposterous. I’m on my knees in front of my boss’s father. The position is— God, the position is so—
I grab another scrap. My face is burning. He still hasn’t moved.
Is he looking at my ass? He’s definitely looking at my ass. Or maybe I’m just being paranoid. Maybe he’s looking at the wall or the window or literally anything else.
I don’t turn around to check.
When I’ve gathered all the pieces in my cupped hands, I stand up. My legs are shaky. I hold out the scraps in both hands like an offering.
“Can I go now?” I croak.
He nods.
I flee.
When I’m back in the lobby, I dump the scraps in the waste bin next to my desk. My hands are still trembling, so I wipe them on my skirt even though there’s nothing on them.
Now, what…?
The pen. Right. I need to go get the pen.
I head back toward the unmarked door, the one Lukas dragged me through this morning. It’s still there, blending into the wall like it doesn’t want to be found. I push it open and step into the darkness.
The hallway is just as cramped and unlit as before. My heels are so painfully loud and harsh on my frayed nerves that I leave them by the entrance and sneak in on bare feet.
As I walk, I keep one hand on the wall to guide myself. I’m almost to the meeting room when I hear voices.
They’re coming from somewhere ahead of me. Low and male. Speaking in hushed tones that weren’t meant to carry.
I freeze.
“—don’t know what he’s thinking.” That’s the scarred man from the meeting. I recognize the rasp in his voice. “She’s green. Jumpy as hell. Did you see her hands shaking?”
Another voice, this one deeper. One of the older men, maybe. “She’s pretty, though. I’ll give him that.”
“Pretty doesn’t keep her mouth shut when things get ugly.”
“That’s his problem, not ours.”
My blood goes cold. I press myself against the wall. The darkness feels suffocating now.
“What was her name again?” the deeper voice asks. “The new girl.”
“Everett. Rae Everett.”
Hearing my own name in that scarred man’s mouth makes my skin crawl.
“Think she knows what she signed up for?”
He chuckles. “Does anyone?”
“Not a one. Almost a shame.”
Footsteps. Getting closer.
I hold my breath. My heart is pounding so loud I’m sure they can hear it.
“Just like the last one,” the scarred man says. His voice is right there now, maybe ten feet away. “All wide eyes and good intentions. Won’t last.”
The footsteps pass. A door opens somewhere behind me. Light spills in for a second, then disappears as it swings shut.
I stay pressed against the wall for what feels like forever. My lungs burn until I finally let myself exhale.
Just like the last one. What does that mean? Who was “the last one”? What happened to her?
I force myself to keep moving. One foot in front of the other. The meeting room door is just ahead.
I push it open. The room is empty now. The chairs are still arranged around the table. The air smells like cigarette smoke and Lukas’s cologne.
The pen is right where I left it.
I pick it up and run.