My Billionaire Boss Dared Me to Say No, So I Locked the Door novel · Chapter 5 of 24

Chapter 5: Six

The floor was dark by six, and the cleaners had finished the north side an hour ago.

Bartek locked the office door and stood with his back against it.

Ingmar sat at the walnut desk with his sleeves turned back, reading a file.

"You're hovering," he said, without looking up.

"I have a question."

"Then ask it."

"Six assistants," Bartek said. "In two years."

Ingmar turned a page.

"Everyone on the floor knows the count. They bet on how long I'll last." Bartek came away from the door. "Nobody talks about where they went. They just stopped being at their desks."

"That is a question?"

"It's a wound. I don't have the question yet." He stopped in front of the desk. "I want to know if I'm the seventh."

Now Ingmar closed the file.

He laid his hands flat on top of it and looked up, and in the lamplight his eyes were the color of a winter sky.

"Six," he said. "Yes. That is the number."

"And?" Bartek said.

"Ask me what I paid them."

"What did you pay them?"

"Two hundred thousand dollars each," Ingmar said. "And a letter of reference. They left on my orders, every one, inside a month."

That landed hard.

"So I'm right," he said. "You use people up and pay them to disappear."

"I did not say that."

"You said it in numbers."

"I said what I paid. I did not say why." Ingmar stood, slowly. "And you have not asked me whether any of them was ever in this room after dark."

Bartek stared at him.

"Were they?"

"No," Ingmar said.

"Not one?"

"I have not touched anyone who works for me." Ingmar came around the desk. "Not in nine years. You are the first. I want that said, so that you will stop looking at me that way."

"Then why did they leave?"

"That is for another day," Ingmar said.

"That's not an answer."

"No." The long, grave face didn't change. "It is not."

Bartek's chest was tight with anger, and with something worse, the plain relief of hearing it.

He had walked in here to pick a fight, and he had been handed the thing he wanted, and he still wanted to hit something.

"I don't know what to do with this," he said.

"Then tell me what you need."

"I need to stop thinking." The word came out of him cracked. "That's it. I want you to make me stop thinking for ten minutes. Hard."

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