Page 20 of Boardroom Sins

My throat goes dry and I look away.

I snatch up the notebook with the pen and clutch it to my chest like a battle shield before I turn and scurry away.

The walk back to my corner chair takes forever. I can still feel them all watching. These big, scary men in their dark suits, their shoulders twice the width of mine, their bodies built for violence. The room has no windows. No one knows I’m here. If I screamed, no one would hear. If I ran, I wouldn’t make it two steps before one of them caught me and did whatever it is he intended to do. If that happened… would Lukas stop it?

I sink into my seat and cross my legs. My skirt rides up. I tug it back down with shaking fingers.

Lukas’s mouth twitches. Just slightly.

Like he noticed my fear.

Like helikedit.

He turns back to his men. “Continue.”

The scarred man picks up where he left off. I start writing, though my handwriting is shaky and terrible and I have no idea what I’m actually supposed to be summarizing.

But I don’t dare ask questions. I just jot down the names, numbers, and locations I catch, and make up the things that I miss.

Truthfully, the whole thing is baffling. It doesn’t sound like any board meeting I’ve ever sat in on with Kir. There’s no talk of quarterly earnings or market projections. No PowerPoint slides. No corporate jargon.

These men talk about shipments. Routes. Crews. Territories. A whole different kind of game. At one point, someone mentions “the cleanup” and everyone nods knowingly.

I look around, but no explanation is forthcoming. As far as I can tell, they’ve all forgotten I exist.

The meeting lasts forty-five minutes. When it’s over, the men file out without a word to me. They don’t even glance in my direction.

Lukas stays seated. He waits until the door closes, then turns to look at me.

“Questions?”

I have about a thousand. But I get the feeling that’s not what he wants to hear, so I just say, “No.”

“Good.”

Then he’s gone, too.

I wait until I can’t hear any signs of life in the hallway. Then I rise and make my way back to my desk on shaky legs.

The mahogany doors to Lukas’s office are shut. I have no idea if he’s in there or if he left through some other exit I don’t know about, or if he maybe turned into a bat and flew out the window like Dracula.

I sit down at my computer. I stare at the screen.What am I supposed to do now?

The notebook is still in my hands. When I flip through the pages, my scribbled notes look like the ravings of a lunatic. Half the words are misspelled. Some of them aren’t even words.

I decide to type them up. That’s what assistants do, right? Take notes and make them presentable? Sure. I guess. It’s not like I have anything better to occupy my time.

It takes me twenty minutes to translate my chicken scratch into something resembling coherent sentences. I format it nicely. Bullet points. Bold headers. I decide Lukas is probably not a fan of emojis, so I leave those out. When I’m done, I hit print.

The printer beneath my desk whirs to life. Three pages slide out, warm and crisp.

I gather them up and walk to Lukas’s door. I knock, hoping he’s in there.

He grunts. I assume that means it’s okay for me to come in, so I push the door open. He’s at his desk, reading something on his laptop. He doesn’t look up.

“I typed up my notes from the meeting,” I say. “I thought you might want?—”

At that, he looks up.