Page 22

I blink at him. “Your offices. I wouldn’t even know where to find them.”

Somewhere across the city, a tower has his name buried in the paperwork, a private elevator, and a reception that takes people only by appointment. Ordinary people like me never see the inside of a place like that.

“You will find it,” he says, as if that settles the entire matter.

“And how many places like it do you have?”

“More than you need to count on your first day,” he says. He says it the way another person might mention that it looks like rain later.

The floor breaks into open noise around us, and my mind goes perfectly white. Only now does the real size of him begin to land on me.

“How much of this city actually answers to you?” I ask.

The look he gives me makes me hear how foolish the question was the moment it leaves my lips.

“More of it than you need to know on your first day here,” he says. “Do the work, and don’t ask about the rest.”

There’s a cold, deliberate calculation folded behind that faint smile that I cannot pry open, and I get the sudden sense that I have no concept of how far his reach actually runs.

“Until two o’clock, assistant,” he says, and walks out with the easy, unhurried posture that says he has already won, leaving every ounce of it sitting square on my shoulders.

The whole floor keeps staring at the door long after it has closed. Nobody has caught up yet to what just happened here.

“He fired Abernathy on the spot,” Cass says at last, one hand pressed flat to her chest. “The owner himself came down and did it for her.”

“That is the Volkov who owns this place,” another voice says. “Volkov Holdings, right there on every pay stub, and none of us ever expected a face to go with it.” Someone mimics Lev’s flat delivery, and a nervous laugh scatters around the room.

I keep my head down over my half-packed box and try to make the arithmetic work. How is the man I went home with last night the same man whose name half this staff is afraid to say out loud?

“He announced it like he was ordering a coffee,” Cass marvels.

Then Priya leans in, and her whole manner changes. She checks over both shoulders before she says a word. “You guys, the Volkov name. My cousin swears the Volkovs run half the fucking casinos on the water, and the smuggling that moves through the port, and that they are bratva. Everyone at his firm goes quiet when the family comes up.”

The room temperature drops several degrees.

“Wait, like actual mob?” someone asks.

My fingers go still around my water bottle. Across the aisle, Margo’s eyes settle on my face and stay there.

That single word, bratva, does what the last twelve hours could not. It lifts Lev out of Maksim’s vague drunken stories and sets him down in front of me as concrete, verifiable fact.

“Keep your voices down about people like that,” Priya hisses. Margo is still watching me, and I keep my eyes locked on my box.

Maksim used to talk about his brother in flat, ugly fragments. Debtors who simply stopped existing. Traitors who were tortured bloody in the dark. One night, drunk and mean, he described Lev snapping a man’s fingers one at a time and enjoying it.

He never once told me why. He gave me the action and skipped the reason every single time, the exact way he later framed our breakup, leaving out the small detail of Vanessa in my bed. That gap where the reason should sit takes a little fear off me.

“Okay, but he is rich, gorgeous, and dangerous as hell,” Cass says, her fright already curdling back into open delight. “He is more dramatic than anything on television.”

“And Delaney gets promoted to his private floor the same afternoon,” a coworker says. “That is not a coincidence.”

“Did you see how he looked at Abernathy for grabbing her? Like he wanted the man in the ground.”

Every head in the room swivels toward me at the same instant. I want to fold myself down into the box.

“So what is actually going on with you two?” someone asks outright.

“Nothing,” I say, far too fast. “He’s the boss. I’m the unlucky employee. That is all it is.”