Claimed By the Boss (Ruthless Mafia Daddies #2)
1. Celine
CELINE
The eggs are burning. Our smoke alarm has a short in it, and instead of beeping, it makes this low, defeated whine, and it’s been going for six minutes while Lena sits at the kitchen table in her robe, telling me about a dream she had where she was a marine biologist living in Portugal.
“You were there too,” she says. “You kept trying to speak Portuguese, and it was embarrassing for everyone involved.”
I flip the eggs. They are, in fact, destroyed. I plate them because she needs the protein, and she has never once in twenty-three years complained about food. It’s the one quality she has that I would describe as saintlike.
She looks at the plate. Then at me. “These are cremated.”
“Eat them.”
She eats them.
This house smells like old wood and the dish soap our mother used to buy in bulk from the store on Mercer. I’ve never checked if they still make it. I buy the same bottle every time without checking the label, and I intend to keep doing so for as long as the option exists.
Lena is talking again, filling the kitchen with whatever is running through her head. I used to find it overwhelming before I understood it was her way of keeping me out of my own numbers in the morning. She knows I do that.
Today’s numbers are not good.
Not catastrophic. Not yet. But the last round of treatment pushed the credit balance somewhere that makes me do the math twice when I wake up, just to confirm it’s real. It’s always real. Debt doesn’t revise itself overnight out of consideration for your feelings.
“You’re doing the thing,” Lena says.
“I’m not doing anything.”
“You’ve stirred that coffee four times, and you haven’t tasted it.”
I drink it. It’s cold.
She watches me with those steady eyes she has, too calm for someone who spent two days in the hospital three weeks ago while I sat in a plastic chair in a corridor that smelled like antiseptic and learned in precise detail how small the word helpless can make a person feel.
She looked fine that morning too. That’s the cruelty of lupus. It gives her good days that look indistinguishable from health, right up until it doesn’t.
The house around us holds the morning the way it always has. Our parents bought it before we were born, paid it off slowly, and left it to us in a will that was two pages long and surprisingly organized for two people who kept their documents in a shoebox.
It’s not a large house. The floors creak in three spots, and the second bathroom has water pressure that’s more of a recommendation. But it is ours, without mortgage, without condition, which is the single reason I’m not completely underwater.
Lena doesn’t want me to sell it. I raised the idea twice, and both times she ended the conversation with one look.
The second time, she said she didn’t want me left with nothing if the worst happened, said it plainly. I told her to stop talking. She said she was being practical. I told her I was aware of what she was being. We didn’t speak for the rest of that evening.
By morning, she’d made coffee and left it on my side of the table, and we never brought it up again.
I rinse my cup, kiss the top of her head, and go fix my hair.
Volkov Holdings doesn’t have its name on the outside of the building. Just a street number in brushed steel beside the door, the kind of understatement that belongs to organizations that have never needed to advertise themselves.
The building sits on Park Avenue and is the kind you look up at rather than across, glass and steel going quiet and deliberate into the midtown skyline.
This is my third time here. Final stage.
The lobby is cool and smells like expensive candles and money, or maybe money just smells like expensive candles. The floors are pale marble. The chairs in the waiting area are cream-colored and look like furniture nobody is meant to actually use.
Behind the reception desk is Oliver, who introduced himself at my first interview with the energy of someone who had been waiting specifically for my arrival.
He has immaculate eyebrows, an expressive face with no setting for neutral, and opinions about everything which he has so far chosen to share with me freely.
He looks up from his monitor and takes me in. “Ten minutes early,” he says. “Every single time. Consistency is a love language.”
“Morning, Oliver.”
“The hair is giving.” He gestures at his own head with great feeling. “Down was absolutely the right call.” He picks up his phone and waves me toward the seating area.
I sit in one of the cream chairs, which is exactly as uncomfortable as it looks, and I wait.
The interview runs for forty minutes. Two members of the legal team, same faces as before, no HR presence. I noted the absence of a hiring manager at the first interview and filed it under things to think about later.
They are thorough in a way that makes the questions feel like confirmation rather than inquiry, as though they’re checking items off a list that existed before I walked in.
I answer everything. I’m good in rooms like this, have learned to be, have been reading people across tables since long before I had a reason to call it a skill.
By the end, I have the job.
I keep my face level. I say thank you and mean it in a way I couldn’t explain to anyone who hasn’t spent months watching a number climb while the options for managing it narrow.
A third member of the team enters and sets a package of documents on the table.
He walks me through it at a pace that suggests this is not the first time today he has done so.
Employment terms, loyalty agreements, corporate waivers, offshore compliance forms, NDAs.
Sign here, initial this page, date there.
I sign. I’ll read through the full package tonight when Lena is asleep and the apartment is quiet and I can give it the attention it deserves.
The package is heavier than I expect for a personal assistant position. I tell myself large corporations generate large amounts of paperwork. I slide it into my bag and follow him to the elevator.
Oliver sees me the moment I step into the lobby. He performs a silent celebration behind the desk, both hands raised, face doing several things at once. I give him a small wave. He presses both palms to his chest.
I’m almost at the door when the main entrance opens.
The lobby changes. Not with any sound, not dramatically. The air just shifts the way a room shifts when the pressure in it does. The two women near the seating area go still in a way that is not stillness at all. Oliver freezes mid-reach, phone forgotten. Even the marble seems to drop a degree.
A man comes through flanked by two others, both large, both scanning the room with the detached focus of people paid to read spaces for threat. Nobody looks at them. He walks a half step ahead, unhurried, moving through the lobby the way people move through spaces that have always belonged to them.
He’s silver-haired. The suit is dark, cut close, and looks like it was made for no other purpose. He is not young and makes no effort in that direction. There’s something in him that age has made sharper rather than softer, and it’s not an easy thing to look at directly.
His cologne arrives before he does, filling the lobby without announcing itself. It’s the kind of scent that belongs to late evenings, closed rooms, and decisions already made. I will catch traces of it for the rest of the afternoon without understanding why.
He’s looking ahead, and then, without reason, he isn’t.
His eyes find me and stay. Not the general sweep of a man entering a room. Direct. Steady. The kind of attention that doesn’t ask for permission or explain itself.
I stop walking. “Good afternoon, sir,” I say, because I was raised with manners, and something about the weight of his gaze makes my voice come out more formal than I planned.
He looks at me for one beat longer than a passing glance allows. Then he nods once and walks past.
I push through the revolving door into the heat of Park Avenue. The city swallows me immediately, noise and exhaust, the vendor cart on the corner running a steady afternoon trade. I walk half a block before I notice I’ve been holding my breath. I let it go.
I got the job.