All Chapters of My Boss Doesn't Know I Own Him : Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

NORAFor three seconds, neither of us breathed.I stared at the screen in Dominic Blackwood's hand. Look at the person standing closest to him. The elevator hummed around us, polished steel and soft light, and I was trapped in a box with the one person I could not let read my face."There's no one else in here," I said."No." His voice was quiet. "There isn't."He was looking at me as if I were a number that refused to balance. I had seen that look before, on landlords and on loan officers. It meant someone was about to decide what I was worth."That message isn't about me," I said. "I'm a cleaner. I mop your floors. If someone wants you to be afraid of the person closest to you, they should send it to someone you actually talk to.""You think I don't know that?" He lowered the phone, slowly, and held it out to me. "Take it."I snatched it back, my fingers brushing his. His hand was warm. Annoyingly warm, for a man who looked carved out of marble."Here is what I know," Dominic said.

NORA"Walter Vance," Theo said. "Why?"He said it so simply. Just a name, offered up like a coffee order, by a nineteen-year-old who had no idea he had just set fire to my entire life.I opened my mouth. Nothing came out.Dominic Blackwood stood perfectly still in the narrow hallway, the photograph held between two fingers. He did not look angry. That was the terrifying part. He looked like a man who had just heard a lock click open somewhere in the dark."Walter Vance," he repeated softly. He turned his head and looked at me. "Your grandfather.""Yes.""And you told me you had never seen him before.""I said I didn't recognize the man in the picture." The lie came out smooth, born of pure panic. "I've only ever seen one photo of my grandfather, and he was old, with a gray beard. He died when I was nineteen. We barely knew him. My mother said he worked in some office, and that was it."It was a good story. It was even partly true. Theo frowned, opened his mouth to correct me, and I sq

NORAThe boardroom smelled like money and old leather, and Preston Blackwood was smiling at eleven of the most powerful people in New York as if he had invited them all to his daughter's wedding."Ladies and gentlemen," he said, spreading his hands. "Six months. Six months of phantom votes. Of a shareholder who will not show his face, will not take a call, will not so much as sign a letter with a real name." He let his gaze travel the table, slow and sorrowful. "I ask you, is this governance? Or is this a hostage situation with better tailoring?"A few chuckles. One board member, a white-haired man with a watch that cost more than my building, nodded gravely.I sat in the chair against the wall with a notepad on my knee and my heart slamming against my ribs like it wanted out. Dominic sat at the head of the table, posture perfect, face carved from marble. He had not looked at me since we entered. That should have been a relief.It was not.Beside him, Samuel Greer sat with his briefca

NORAI slept ninety minutes, dreamed of stairwells, and woke to the smell of pancakes and my brother humming in a kitchen the size of our old apartment."You cook now?" I said, shuffling in. Theo stood at a stove with six burners, wielding a spatula like a scepter, still in the hoodie he'd slept in. "Since when do you cook?""Since I realized rich-people kitchens come with instructions on the fridge." He slid a plate toward me, and for one whole minute we were just us again, Nora and Theo, pancakes, a Saturday morning that happened to be a Thursday. Then he glanced at me, and his face did the thing it had done since he was nine, where he tried very hard not to ask the question he was dying to ask."The man from yesterday," he said finally. "The photograph. All of it. Nora, what's going on? You disappeared at midnight. I heard the door.""I couldn't sleep. I went for a walk." The lie came out so easily now it scared me. Two days ago I had been a woman who kept her promises and paid her

DOMINICThe key sat in my palm, heavy as a bullet, and I have never in my life wanted to throw a piece of evidence across a room more.Because it was real. That was the part undoing me, thread by thread, the weight, the patina, the worn teeth. Old brass keys have a grain, like wood, and this one had been turned ten thousand times by hands I remembered on my shoulders at a chessboard. And the tag: green paper, twine, initials looped in a hand I had seen on a thousand documents, the hand that had signed my trust fund, my report cards, once, on a hospital form.R.B."Say something," Nora said. She was pale, furious, terrified, all three at once, and she stood between me and the book with her fists clenched like she might actually fight me for a paperback copy of Wuthering Heights. "You've been standing there holding that key for a full minute, and if you don't start talking, I'm going to start, and I promise you my version is worse.""The handwriting on this tag," I said. "It's my grandf