Bound By Debt

TAKEN

Something was wrong.

I had felt it since morning.

Not loudly. Not in the way that makes you stop and catch your breath or reach for someone's hand. Quietly. The way a draft finds you in a warm room — you don't know exactly where it's coming from but you feel it on the back of your neck and no amount of pretending makes it go away.

I had gotten dressed that morning the way I always did. Precisely, efficiently, without wasted time. I had made coffee, checked my emails, taken the subway to Midtown, and walked into Harmon and Cole at eight fifty-two looking exactly like a woman who had everything under control.

And I did. I always did.

It was just that something was wrong.

My father had called at seven forty-three. I had seen his name on the screen as I pushed through the building's revolving door, the morning crowd pressing in from behind me, and I had made the decision I always made when the day was already moving fast — I would call him back. At lunch, at the latest. We had a rule, before six always, and I had never once broken it.

Lunch came and went in a meeting that ran long.

By three o'clock I had tried him twice.

No answer.

I set the phone down and looked at my desk.

There was a photograph tucked into the corner of my monitor, small and slightly worn at the edges because I had moved it with me through three different offices over five years. My father at a restaurant in Queens, two years ago, laughing at something I had said. Eyes creased at the corners. Completely unguarded. I had taken it quickly before he noticed because he always made a face when I pointed a camera at him. He had never known it was my favorite picture of anything I owned.

I looked at it for a moment longer than I should have.

Then I looked away and went back to page seven.

I told myself it was nothing. My father was a quiet man, unhurried, entirely unbothered by the pace of the world around him. There were days he left his phone in a drawer and forgot about it entirely. There were days the family he worked for needed him from morning until evening without a gap. It had happened before. It would happen again.

I told myself all of this and went back to the quarterly report on my screen and read the same paragraph on page seven for the third time without absorbing a single word of it.

That was how I knew.

Not the unanswered calls. Not the feeling on the back of my neck. The fact that I — a woman who had never once in five years at this firm failed to finish what she started — could not read a single paragraph of a report I had written myself.

Something was wrong.

I just didn't know what yet.

I picked up my phone. Tried him again. Listened to it ring four times and go to voicemail and heard his voice, calm and unhurried the way he always was — *you've reached Aizen Reiss, leave a message* — and felt something tighten in my chest that I immediately, deliberately, put away.

"It's me," I said. "Call me back."

I hung up. Put the phone face down on my desk. Looked at page seven.

At four seventeen my assistant knocked on the glass.

"There are some men downstairs asking for you."

"They didn't say." She hesitated in the doorway, choosing her words with the careful precision of someone who understood that the wrong ones would change the temperature of the room. "They don't look like they're from a client. They asked for you by name."

I looked at her for one second.

"Send them up."

I closed the report. Stood. Straightened my jacket with two fingers the way I always did before anything that required me to be completely myself.

They came through the door two minutes later and I understood immediately why she had hesitated. Three of them. Dark clothes, plain, unremarkable in every surface detail and deeply, quietly wrong underneath all of it. The one in front was tall and older, with a face so still it looked like a decision rather than an expression. He stopped in the center of my office and looked at me and I felt, in that precise moment, the draft on the back of my neck turn into something considerably colder.

"Miss Reiss," he said.

"Ms.," I said. "Who are you?"

"We're here on behalf of the Zenin family." A pause that was not accidental. "You'll need to come with us."

The Zenin family.

My father's employer. The name I had grown up hearing spoken with a particular kind of quiet respect that I had never thought to question. I had never met any of them. I had never needed to. They existed at a careful distance from my life and that distance had always felt completely natural.

Until three men were standing in the middle of my office telling me I needed to come with them right now.

"I'm in the middle of a work day," I said. My voice was even. Completely even. "If the Zenin family needs a meeting—"

"This isn't a meeting, Ms. Reiss."

Behind him the other two shifted. Barely. Just enough to change the shape of the room.

I reached for my phone.

"Then I need to make a call before I go anywhere."

"You can make calls when we arrive." Nothing in his voice moved. Nothing in his face moved. "We need to leave now."

I looked at the three of them. At the patience in their stillness that was not the patience of men who were waiting for my agreement. It was the patience of men who already knew how this ended.

My father had not answered his phone all day.

These men were here on behalf of the family he had given forty years of his life to.

And the feeling that had been sitting quietly at the back of my neck since seven forty-three that morning was no longer quiet.

I put my phone in my bag.

I told my assistant I would be back before end of day. I said it clearly, the way I said everything, like I had no reason not to believe it.

I walked out.

The car outside was black and waiting and the door was opened for me without a word. I got in and the door closed and the city began to move past the window and I sat straight in the back seat and kept my hands still in my lap and did not let my face do anything at all.

My father had not answered his phone all day.

I was going to find out why.