Page 33 of Forbidden Boss

She turns.

“Mari,” I add.

She stops.

“If there’s something you need to tell me, say it now,” I say. “It’ll go easier if you do.”

“There’s nothing,” she says, and walks out.

Back in my office, I call my team leads. Yuri gets exterior routes. Pavel loses her detail for a week, he’s too easy to read. Thom takes building access. Elyan keeps cameras. Marcus runs everything else and sends summaries at ten. They’re to stay off her nerves unless they see exit behavior. Then they have my permission to intervene at the highest level of force.

I map worst-case timelines. Thirty minutes to pack, ten to reach a car if she times an elevator and calls a ride early, twenty to vanish into a tunnel with traffic as a shield. I close each gap in my head and then in the system. I have Yuri install lock codes that change twice a day. He puts a hold on her SIM so it pings me if it leaves Manhattan.

If she’s working with the Feds, she has a handler who’ll want proof and times and files. If she’s gathering evidence, she’ll probably be clumsy about it because she doesn’t know what she’s doing.

I open the drawer and look at the card again. Agent Graham Cole. Manhattan Field. Dead eagle. Wrong hyphens. No microline. We should’ve caught the fake sooner. Someone wanted her rattled and it worked. Someone wants me rattled, and that worked, too.

I get home at eight. She’s there before me, curled in the corner of the couch she brought over, laptop open, earbuds in. She looks up when the door clicks and goes back to the screen, ignoring me again.

In my room, I watch my phone until ten. Marcus’s summary of her day lands. There’s nothing of note. It won’t stay that way. I sleep fitfully, noticing every sound in the apartment, wondering if this is the night she chooses to run.

The hall cam shows her in the kitchen, drinking water in the dark. She stands a while, glass held at her chest, like she’s bracing against something no one else can see.

She wants out.

That can’t happen.

15

MARI

Iwake in the penthouse and stare at a skyline that feels heavy and far away. I can’t keep doing this, flinching at every knock and waiting for Lev to go cold and lethal. It’s not just me anymore. I have a child to protect now. Maybe. I still haven’t decided what to do about the baby, but either way I can’t stay here and let Lev control everything.

I start small, coffee and then my calendar. I take my phone to the bathroom, turn the fan on, and run the water. I open a private browser, because it’s clear my computer is hacked. I can only hope they’re not monitoring my phone, too.

I look for cities where it’s easy to disappear. Denver, Austin, and Seattle stand out as top options, mostly because they’re so far away. I star jobs that fit my qualifications and find hospitals with good OB-GYNs, just in case. I create a blank résumé and strip out the experience that ties me to him. I set up a new Gmail account and generate a new phone number with an app.

I have to deal with the money issue next. They’re watching me 24/7, so I can’t make withdrawals from an ATM anymore. I reroute a sliver of my direct deposit to an old credit union I usedin college and request a digital prepaid card that can’t be traced back to me. My heart pounds. It could all come down to one tiny detail. One small slip and everything could fall apart.

At work, I open spreadsheets and keep my face neutral. I answer emails with one-word replies and say “fine” when people ask how I’m doing.

I should hate Lev. He’s a controlling, impossible tyrant who treats me like an object, not a person. He’s a jerk, but he’smyjerk. The thought slips in when I’m not paying attention.

It started when he filled a water bottle and left it outside my door so I wouldn’t have to go to the kitchen in the middle of the night. At first, I was annoyed that he was still watching so closely, still controlling me so completely. But then I realized it was all he could do to show he was paying attention. He cares about me in his weird, controlling way.

But small gestures don’t change the fact that I have to leave. I can’t keep living with the fear that he’s going to find out about the baby. The fewer ties I have to him when this is all over, the better.

I turn my focus to my work. I’ve been mapping the embezzlement, going through old ledgers to make sense of everything I’m seeing. I’ve added new columns to the master ledger and started trawling through old reports for any inconsistencies.

At noon I compare invoices from two shell vendors that supposedly supply “premium finishes.” The shell names are so legitimate that whoever set them up is smart enough to rob a bank in broad daylight. Checks were cut with dummy numbers, split across subsidiaries, reconciled with careful bookkeepingmost people would miss. But the dummy numbers show a pattern, and I’m able to crack the code.

By one, I’ve mapped out the transactions. Not all of them, but enough. The siphon started three years ago. It started small, twenty-five grand here, fifty there. Then it jumped. Last summer, a run of transfers was made between accounts that don’t belong to us but somehow slipped past our company controls, and then fees ate the trail. Whoever’s doing this is good. Clever and arrogant in equal measure.

I pull up the pivot table one more time, and there it is. Five million, give or take, redistributed across “renovations” that were never made and “consulting” that never happened. I take a screenshot and save it to a drive only I can access. My hands shake and I flatten them on my thighs. Five million is a lot of money.

If I hand this to Lev, he’ll go savage. If I don’t, he’ll only be more suspicious of me. I can’t afford that right now. I thought I was good at hiding my intentions, but he clearly sees right through me. If I’m not careful, he’s going to find out about the baby.

At three, one of my new guards knocks on the glass and jerks his chin. Lev wants me. He says it like a request, but we both know it’s a command. Lev doesn’t like to be kept waiting. I grab my laptop and follow the guy down the hall.