2. Elena
ELENA
A nother Monday.
I turned off the engine of my car and stared out the windshield at the ugly parking lot. The same square of broken pavement as always, cracked with scraggly weeds poking up because my father refused to upgrade something as irrelevant as the parking lot surface.
Another workweek.
I supposed in a vague way that only a numbed-out employee who had let “burnout” become her whole personality could feel, the parking lot didn’t matter.
It wasn’t supposed to be pretty. It shouldn’t make a difference in the overall sense of business happening here.
It was just a flat place to leave our cars to bake in the Nevadan sun while we tried to avoid truly shitty posture in our sedentary existence in the building of Morovov Financials.
Another episode of busting my ass.
Nothing mattered anymore. So long as I was my father’s daughter, and so long as John Morovov owned and ran his financial consultation firm, this would be my life. This would be my routine until…
“Forever,” I muttered to myself as I stayed perfectly still, lacking the energy to move.
I couldn’t see an end to my employment here. And I couldn’t see a break in the low level of interest in doing a single accounting task again.
Another employee parked next to me, and her cheery, hip hop music barely cut through the haze of burnout I mellowed out in. The radio was silenced as the secretary got out of her car and headed inside, happily chatting away to someone on her phone.
Another mundane spell of being in the office and losing any semblance of a real life.
I swallowed hard, despising how I had ever let it get to this morale-less point of depression and hopelessness.
When my mother died when I was a little girl from an infection that never should have happened, my father had become all the family I had left.
His style of parenting was to bring me into the office.
Bored and a fan of numbers and math, I started doing little projects for him as a kid.
By the time I was a teenager, he had me handling invoices no one else wanted to waste time on.
And once I hit adulthood, I was a full-time—no, over time—employee.
Another car parked and that employee hustled inside.
I sighed, finally reaching for my packed lunch. “May as well get in there.”
Two more employees braked roughly, exited their cars, and ran inside.
I didn’t. Because no matter what I did or didn’t do, I would always and forever have this job.
It wasn’t nepotism. It wasn’t because I was the only human in the Vegas area who could figure out her way around a spreadsheet or invoicing system.
It was because my father needed me to do this job. Administrative manager could’ve sounded like a lofty career goal. But it wasn’t.
Grabbing the handle that usually stuck on the heavy metal door, I cringed at the weight.
Once I slid inside, I pushed my butt against it to ease all the way inside.
As I passed the closed door to my father’s office and heard his chuckling laughter from inside, I flattened my lips and didn’t care who saw me this annoyed.
No. I’m not annoyed.
I’m too far past that now.
I’m just… dead inside.
Because this job would always be mine.
Lucky me.
I reached my office, closed the door, and eyed my desk with disdain. Then I set my brown bag lunch on the edge of the surface and dropped into my chair.
There wouldn’t be any point to dawdling or procrastinating. Like every other day of the week, the same old things would be waiting for me once I logged into the system.
Invoices to review. Payments to verify. And… secrets to take to the grave.
Someone knocked on my door, and before I could reply, the secretary breezed in. “Morning, Elena!”
Forcing on a polite smile, I nodded at her. “Morning, Sadie.”
Without any more fanfare, she dropped a couple of folders on my desk—legitimate invoices—and spun to leave.
“Please close my?—”
She was already gone, not closing my door. Despite working here for years, despite my kindly asking if she could close my door again, she carried on taking papers to others in the building.
I sighed and searched for the energy to get back up and close the door myself.
I didn’t need it closed. I was seldom on the phone.
But due to the illegal nature of what my father set me up to do, it seemed like a layer of security to have my office door closed.
No one could know what I was doing in here.
Because if anyone found out…
I swallowed and cringed at the nightmarish what-if scenarios that danced in my head.
Cops could come and arrest me as an accomplice to covering up crime families’ businesses and transactions.
Federal agents could rightly accuse me of being complicit in money laundering, corporate fraud, and major felonies.
The worst fears, though, were that the “clients” my father had me handle could try to kill me for all the knowledge I held in doing their private banking.
Moving money was something that my father’s firm offered.
He consulted plenty of people who needed assistance with managing their wealth—or hiding it with shell companies and complicated transactions that weren’t easily traceable.
That’s not going to happen, though.
I unlocked my screen and ignored the burn of anxiety in my stomach, a curse I experienced each time I started my workday.
So long as I shut up and basically never have a life and avoid making or keeping friends…
The burn of acid ate away at me, making me wonder again if my people pleasing attitude would earn me an ulcer or two.
And so long as I keep my head down and just do what I’m supposed to do…
My back ached from sitting in this crappy chair, all because I was “only” an accountant and I didn’t want to trouble the office manager by asking for a new, ergo-dynamic chair that would help my posture.
It’ll be fine. Everything will be just fine. The same thing every day until I die, fixing up the money that syndicated crime families want to move and hide.
I heaved out another heavy breath. Because of my expertise, my father didn’t have to worry about his firm being caught with financial corruption or any other charges.
Even if I was a target in the crimes, it would be fine .
The access I had to check the payments from the firm to the shell companies we supervised transactions for meant that I was in charge of it all going smoothly and under the radar.
But as I checked on the spreadsheets that I’d perfected last night, before I left at six o’clock, I furrowed my brow and double-checked myself.
Okay, this is not fine.
Ignoring the chatter of the office employees in the open area with cubicles, I reread and recalculated what was sent where.
Or, rather, what wasn’t sent to the right accounts.
As a third-party payment service, Morovov Financials was instrumental in hiding dirty money.
Since I was solely responsible for overseeing the big accounts, the panic attack that crept up on me was a personal affront, not a professional one.
What the hell is going on here?
These were all accurate when I logged out yesterday.
No matter what I clicked on and where I looked, I couldn’t understand why money hadn’t left one account and landed in another.
This is getting old.
Over and over, for the last month or so, spreadsheets like this one were messed up. If I weren’t such a perfectionist to triple-check everything, I might’ve missed the discrepancies. But I was. And I was looking at something that was decidedly not fine.
How is this happening?
I was the only one who managed these accounts.
Only my father could override me, but hell, I hadn’t seen him actually be on his computer in years.
He let me do it all. Sure, other employees were out there in the cubicles, handling the legitimate businesses in Sin City and around it.
But I was the only one here who had the sinister job security of enabling my father to assist crime families.
How is this possible?
“It was fine when I worked on it last night…” I covered my mouth and leaned closer. The slant was more of a hunch, and I was abundantly aware that it was a crappy posture, but I felt like I had to be closer to see, to truly read it all and know that I hadn’t screwed up.
Out in the open space of the office, the chatter grew in volume.
Since Sadie hadn’t closed my door, the celebratory chitchat and conversations reached me.
When a couple of women squeed and screeched in joy, I winced, trying to concentrate and find the reason this spreadsheet was wacky with the wrong numbers.
Insufficient funds?
No, that’s not right.
I checked it.
I verified that account was fine for this transfer to that one.
“I can’t believe it!” Sadie exclaimed in the open area.
“I know!” Another woman had replied. She sounded even more excited, and I warred with the natural instinct to want to hear more about whatever drama was going on out there.
Few things could break my focus. As a loner and desperate for anything to fill my life other than work, I couldn’t help but listen with half a brain.
“I know. It’s so soon. I just had little Madeline three months ago. And now, I’m expecting again. It’s so crazy!”
I wasn’t sure which woman was bragging about being pregnant again.
It was probably Linda-Lisa, a junior accountant whose name I never could remember properly.
It was one of the two, and as I never had to speak with her directly, and vice versa, I supposed it didn’t matter if I ever knew her name anyway.
But knowing that she’d just had a baby girl and was now counting on a sibling for her?
Oh, spare me.
I winced, trying to quell the bitterness that crept through my heart at the fact that I would never be in her shoes. Being ecstatic like that and announcing a pregnancy was a fantasy that would never, ever come true. Not in my lifetime.