Page 44 of Claimed By My Ex’s Brother

For days now I’ve been telling myself he’s only busy, that this is a season of deals and late nights and nothing more than that. The excuse gets thinner every single morning.

He comes to the office less than he used to, and when he does come, Yelena is always on his arm. He’s never once introduced her to me. I had to type her name into a search bar at midnight just to learn anything at all about her.

Everything changed the afternoon she walked through that door. The late kisses against my desk, the hand at the small of my back, the low voice in my ear, all of it evaporated overnight and left nothing but paperwork in its place.

Heartbreak doesn’t excuse me from the rest of my life, though. Milo still needs feeding. My reports have somehow doubled, and I stay late every night processing documents that seem to multiply the second my back is turned. Even after the dishes and the laundry, sleep won’t come, because the moment I close my eyes I see him with her, listening to her the patient, gentle way he never once listened to me. My dark circles deepen a shade every day.

I’ve gone over that afternoon a hundred times, looking for the moment I read him wrong. I keep landing on the same answer. I read a man who breaks noses and buys buildings, and I decided he had a soft center reserved for me, because he learned my brother’s name and let me kiss the ugliest scar on his hand. People don’t change their whole nature for a girl who fetches their coffee. I let myself forget that, and this is the bill for forgetting.

I choke down a few bites of breakfast, send Milo off to his bus, and rush to catch mine. There’s no time to sit around in the wreckage of it, and there’s certainly no one standing by to pull me out of it if I let myself sink.

I’ve barely settled at my desk when the door opens and Yelena walks in alone. She sets her purse down directly on top of my files.

“Water,” she says, as though I’m a tap on the wall.

I stand, because fetching water is, apparently, part of my job now. As I pass her, the smell hits me, and it is cedar, Lev’s cedar, worn into her skin and her clothes, and I refuse to let myself imagine how close he held her to leave it there, or whether the two of them did anything more than hold each other at all.

I walk stiffly to the break room and watch the dispenser warm the water to lukewarm, keeping my eyes on the little dial instead of my own face. I know Lev’s exact coffee temperature by heart. I learned it in two tries. I had not known he was keeping a place set for another woman the entire time.

When I come back, Yelena is sitting in my chair, flipping through an open folder.

I set the glass down and close the folder in front of her. “Those documents are internal. They’re off-limits to visitors.”

She’s not the least bit embarrassed to be caught. “It took you five whole minutes to bring one glass of water,” she says, not touching it, staring at me instead.

“The break room was crowded this morning, and the machine is slow.”

“You have an answer for everything, do you not.” Whatever softness pooled in her eyes the day she first arrived is entirely gone now. “Sitting up here collecting a salary and slacking off whenever you please.”

“I was gone four minutes,” I say. “I timed it, because I’ve learned to time everything around here.”

“How diligent.” She lets her gaze travel over me, slow, from my flats to my cheap blouse. “And still it takes you five to fetch a glass of water. I suppose some people simply are not built for this kind of work.”

“My job includes keeping people out of Mr. Volkov’s files,” I say. “So I would say I’m earning every cent of it, especially right now, standing here with you.”

She stands, and her frame is painfully thin, her posture flawless, the kind of carriage that gets drilled into a girl from the cradle onward.

“Do you honestly believe you’re doing well here?” she asks, and the arrogance sits strange on that delicate face.

“At least I understand what the word confidential means, which is more than I can say for some guests.”

Her smile thins out at that. “Loyalty is a sweet quality,” she says. “It doesn’t put you at his side, though, does it?”

My chest pulls tight, but I keep my face perfectly still.

“Whatever this little arrangement was, it was novelty. Nothing more than that.” She tilts her head. “He wanted to try something young and interesting for a while. A new body isn’t the same thing as a serious woman, sweetheart.”

The insult goes in sharp and clean, and I wonder, sick to my stomach, whether he told her everything, whether the two of them sat somewhere warm together and called me nothing but a way to pass the time. I think of every night he came to my bed. I think of the word he gasped into my hair in the dark, the one I hoarded like it meant something, and I have to wonder now if it was ever mine to keep at all.

She’s watching my face while I think it, and I can see that she knows exactly which nerve she has found.

I grip the glass I never took back, the untouched water trembling at the rim. I decide to handle her the way I would handle a difficult client and nothing more.

“Did you come all the way up here just to review my body?” I ask.

“I came to remind you where you actually stand.” She smooths the front of her white dress. “We’re from different worlds, you and I. Lev would never let a clueless little assistant into his real life.”

“You’re very sure of what he would and would not do,” I say. “For a woman who left.”