Bought by the Boss

CHAPTER 8 — The Photograph

She brought it to him immediately.

Not because she was afraid — or not only because she was afraid. Because in the forty-eight hours since Victor Reyes had appeared in the lobby she had been thinking carefully about her situation, and what she had concluded was this: she was in a world she didn’t know, with threats she couldn’t fully assess, and the only person in this building who had both the information and the capability to deal with those threats was Luca Morano.

Her pride had limits. Her common sense did not.

She set the envelope on his desk. Watched his face as he opened it.

He looked at the photograph for three seconds. Then he set it down with the careful deliberateness of someone managing a reaction rather than expressing it.

“When did you find this?” he said.

“This morning. Under the office door.”

“You came directly to me.”

“Yes.”

He looked at her. “Most people would have panicked.”

“Panic is inefficient,” she said. “What does he want? Actually want — not the performance of it.”

Luca was quiet for a moment. “He wants me to understand that he has reach,” he said. “That the walls of this building are not the limit of what he can do.” He held her gaze. “This is not a threat to act on. Not yet. It’s a demonstration.”

“A demonstration of what?”

“That your mother is vulnerable,” he said. “That I care about that.” He paused. “That he knows I care about that.”

She looked at him across the desk. At the carefully controlled stillness of him. At the thing underneath it — the specific quality of a person managing something that wanted to break the surface.

“Do you?” she said. “Care about that?”

He looked at her for a long moment.

“Yes,” he said. Simply. Without qualification.

She nodded slowly. “Then we need to move her.”

He looked at her. “We.”

“She’s my mother,” Aria said. “And she’s apparently connected to your world in ways I’m still understanding. Both of those things make this my problem too.” She held his gaze. “I’m not going to sit in an office doing bookkeeping while Victor Reyes uses her as a chess piece. So yes. We.”

Luca sat back in his chair and looked at her with the expression she had come to think of as his closest equivalent to being startled — the fractional recalibration, the slight adjustment of his assessment of the situation.

“I’ll make the arrangements,” he said.

“Tell me what you need from me,” she said.

“Right now? Nothing.” He picked up his phone. “Go back to work. I’ll handle the immediate logistics.” He paused. “And Aria — don’t go anywhere in the building alone until I tell you it’s resolved.”

She looked at him. “That’s a restriction.”

“Yes,” he said. “This time it is.”

She held his gaze for a moment. Then she nodded. And left.

He watched the door close behind her.

Then he made six calls in forty minutes, and by the end of them Diana Bennett was being moved from her apartment in Seattle to a location that Victor Reyes did not know about and would not find easily, and Marco was driving to the south side with instructions that were specific and unambiguous.

At noon, Aria appeared in his doorway.

“Lunch,” she said. “Rosa made something. She’s insisting.”

He looked up from his desk. “I’m in the middle of—”

“You’ve been on the phone for three hours,” she said. “Twenty minutes won’t break anything.”

He looked at her.

She looked back with the expression he was getting used to — the steady, direct, entirely unimpressed expression of someone who had decided he was a person rather than a force of nature and was going to treat him accordingly regardless of what he did about it.

He stood up.

They ate in the kitchen. Rosa had made something with pasta and the kind of aggressive garlic that suggested she felt strongly about the matter. Luca ate in silence. Aria ate efficiently, the way she did everything.

“She’s safe,” he said. Partway through. “Your mother. She’s being moved today.”

Aria set her fork down. She looked at the table for a moment. Then up at him.

“Thank you,” she said. Just that. No performance around it.

“She matters,” he said. Simply.

She looked at him. “She matters to you.”

He didn’t answer. Which was, she was learning, sometimes its own answer.