Bought by the Boss

CHAPTER 2 — The First Night

They gave her a room on the fourth floor.

It was nothing like she had expected — which she was beginning to understand was going to be the defining experience of whatever this year turned out to be. She had expected sparse. She had expected functional, cold, the kind of space that communicated its purpose without apology. What she found instead was a room that was large and quiet and furnished with the specific care of someone who had thought about what a person might actually need.

A bed that was real — not just a mattress but an actual bed, dark wood, with linen that was soft in a way her own sheets at the apartment had never been. A desk by the window that looked out over the back of the property — a courtyard below, a sliver of Chicago sky above, the distant sound of the city going about its ordinary business. A bathroom with actual counter space. A wardrobe that was empty and waiting.

A woman named Rosa brought her a change of clothes — not her size exactly, but close — and a cup of tea she hadn’t asked for, and set both on the desk without comment. Rosa was in her fifties, compact and efficient, with the expression of someone who had seen many things and classified most of them as not her business.

“Breakfast at seven,” Rosa said. “Mr. Morano’s instructions are that you are not to be disturbed tonight.” She paused at the door. “There’s a lock. From the inside.” She said it specifically, deliberately, and met Aria’s eyes for exactly one second. “Use it if you want to.”

Then she left.

Aria stood in the middle of the room for a long time after the door closed.

She had forty-three dollars in her pocket, the clothes on her back, and a toothbrush in her bag that she always carried because the diner sometimes ran into double shifts that bled into the following morning. She had a lease on an apartment she was going to have to call and explain about. She had a shift tomorrow that she was going to have to call and cancel.

She had a father somewhere in this city who had put her name on a debt.

She sat on the edge of the bed and took out her phone and called him.

He answered on the fourth ring. His voice was the voice of a man who had been waiting for this call and was afraid of it — slightly too careful, slightly too quiet, the voice of someone arranging their face even though they were only on the phone.

“Aria—”

“Don’t,” she said. Quiet. Completely controlled. “Don’t explain right now. I can’t hear an explanation right now.” She paused. “I just need you to know that I’m safe. And I need you to know that I’m going to fix this. And then I need you to not contact me for a while.”

Silence.

“Baby—”

“Dad.” Her voice cracked slightly on the word, just once, and she pressed it back down. “I love you. And I’m so angry at you I can’t think straight. Both of those things are true at the same time and I can’t deal with both of them tonight.” A breath. “Goodnight.”

She hung up.

She locked the door — the inside lock, the one Rosa had told her about specifically — and she sat in the room that wasn’t hers in the building that belonged to a man with grey eyes, and she did the thing she almost never let herself do.

She cried. For about four minutes, quietly, into the sleeve of her jacket.

Then she stopped. Washed her face in the bathroom sink. Looked at herself in the mirror for a moment — at the dark circles and the set jaw and the specific expression she’d been wearing since she was about fourteen, the one that said I will figure this out — and then she went to bed.

She slept.

Which surprised her. She had expected to lie awake, cataloguing disasters. Instead she fell asleep almost immediately, which she attributed to exhaustion, and dreamed of nothing, and woke at 6:47am to the sound of Chicago doing what Chicago always did — going on regardless.

She was dressed and at the kitchen table by seven.

Luca Morano was already there.

She hadn’t expected that either. She had expected the household to orbit around him at a distance — the careful choreography of powerful men who preferred their mornings private. Instead he was sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee and a newspaper, wearing a dark shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and he looked up when she walked in with the expression of someone who had been expecting her at exactly this time and found her punctuality unremarkable.

“Coffee,” he said. It was somewhere between a question and a statement.

“Yes,” she said.

Rosa appeared and poured it and disappeared again with the efficiency of someone who had perfected the art of being present without being intrusive.

Aria sat across from him and wrapped her hands around the mug and looked at him in the morning light. He looked different from the night before — not softer exactly, but less theatrical. More simply human. The grey eyes were the same — flat and assessing — but without the specific weight of the previous night’s conversation they were just eyes. Just a person drinking coffee at 7am.

“You slept,” he said.

“Yes.”

“Good.” He turned a page of the newspaper. “You start work Monday. Today I’ll have someone show you the financial systems. Tomorrow is yours — there’s nothing required of you.”

She looked at him. “You’re giving me a day off before I’ve started.”

“You had a significant night,” he said. Without looking up from the paper. “A day to adjust seems reasonable.”

She studied him for a moment. “You’re not what I expected,” she said.

He looked up. “What did you expect?”

“Older,” she said. “More theatrical.”

Something moved in his expression. The fractional shift she was already learning to watch for. “I find theater exhausting,” he said.

“So do I,” she said.

He looked at her for a moment. Then back at his paper.

They sat in silence for the rest of breakfast — not the uncomfortable silence of two people avoiding each other, but the surprisingly functional silence of two people who were, it turned out, both capable of occupying the same space without requiring it to mean something.

When he stood to leave he paused at the door.

“The city is not off limits,” he said. “You can go where you want during the day. I’d ask that you’re back by dark.” He held her gaze. “Not as a restriction. As a safety measure.” A pause. “There are people who know your father owes me money. Until that information settles, being visible alone at night is inadvisable.”

She looked at him. “Are you telling me I’m in danger?”

“I’m telling you I’d prefer you not to be,” he said. And left.

Aria sat at the kitchen table with her coffee and looked at the doorway he’d walked through and thought: this is going to be the strangest year of my life.

She had no idea yet how right she was.