Over His Knee, Part Three by Hannah Ford
Chapter 7
LILLIANA
Grayson puts me in car and tells me he’ll see me at the office.
He tells me it’s best if we don’t ride together, so that people don’t see us arriving together.
I can’t tell if he thinks I’m just supposed to go to work like everything in normal. Does he really think I’m just going to continue being his assistant, acting like he never spanked me in his office yesterday and then locked me in his torture room after coming all over me last night?
When the car pulls up in front of the building, I take a deep breath and get out of the car.
I’m hurrying through the lobby to the bank of elevators, about to slide my employee pass through the turnstile when I heard a commotion over by the security desk.
A bike messenger argues with our security guard, Michael.
“I have to get this upstairs to Grayson Carlisle,” the messenger says. He’s dressed in a dirty black t-shirt and black shorts. His hair is greasy and hangs to his shoulders. He’s holding a manila envelope, and his fingers are stained with something brown that has left fingerprints all over it.
“Sir, you can leave them here at the desk,” Michael intones, sounding firm but also bored, because this is the kind of shit he has to deal with all day.
“I was told to hand them directly to Mr. Carlisle.”
“Mr. Carlisle doesn’t take visitors.”
I walk over and hold my hand out. “I can take them to Grayson Carlisle.” The messenger glances at me and I smile. “I’m his assistant. I’m going up there right now.”
“I can go with you then,” the messenger says, giving Michael a smirk.
“Do you want to take him up as your guest?” Michael asks me, raising his eyebrows. He’s asking me if I’m willing to take responsibility for letting this guy up to the sixty-first floor, if I’ll vouch for him. Which I’m not willing to do – Grayson won’t be pleased.
“No,” I say quickly. “Mr. Carlisle doesn’t like visitors.”
The bike messenger’s eyes become cold and dark. He sneers as he tears open the manila envelope, and then dumps its contents on the floor.
Papers go scattering, and then a flash drive pops out and skitters across the marble floor before bouncing off the security desk.
“Cunt,” he mutters and then he’s gone.
I bend down to pick up the papers on the floor, hoping they’re not important contracts or something that will have to be reprinted and redelivered. Instead, I’m surprised to find they’re not contracts at all, but medical records.
For someone named Andrew Croft.
They’re stamped with the name of Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, and from what I can tell, they’re pretty in depth – x-rays and lab results, doctors notes and lists of prescriptions.
I gather it all up, including the flash drive, and head for the elevators.
* * *
“This came for you.” I thrust the papers at Grayson when he opens his office door.
He takes the papers, a look of surprise coming over his face. “Where did you get these?” he demands.
“A messenger dumped them all over the floor downstairs. Whatever company he’s from, you should probably –”
“Who else saw them?”
“What?”
“Who else saw these?”
“No one.”
A look flashes in his eyes, and he goes to shut the door, effectively dismissing me.
But I put my arm out, stopping me.
“That’s all?”
“Was there something else?”
“You could say thank you.”
“For doing your job?”
“For going out of my way to make sure you got those.” I cross my arms over my chest. “And for not calling the police when you kidnapped me last night.”
“Is that what you think? That I kidnapped you?”
“Well, you kept me in a locked room, so yes.”
“Against your will?”
I open my mouth, then close it. Was it against my will? I’m not sure.
“We need to talk about this.” I square my shoulders. “I deserve to know what’s going on.”
“Kovax is working on getting a subpoena so that we can find out where the texts you’re getting are originating from. I also have other people working on it.”
The way he says it makes me afraid to ask any more questions. Questions like what other people and how they’re going to answers before we have a subpoena, but something tells me I don’t want to know the answer to that.
He wouldn’t do anything illegal,I tell myself. He runs one of the largest tech companies in the world, of course he’s going to put his resources to work.
“I appreciate that,” I say. “But you know that’s not what I’m talking about. I want to talk about what happened last night.”
His eyes swirl with something cold and hard, and for a moment, I’m sure he’s going to send me away.
But then he opens his office door, and I walk inside.
He sits behind his desk, and I sit in the chair in front of it, the same way I did yesterday, when he called me in here to talk about my Instapost account.
He regards me over the desk, and then he reaches into his desk drawer and pulls out the contract from yesterday, the one I called a sex contract.
He slides it across to me, with a pen on top of it, presumably for my signature.
“Does that contract say you’re allowed to lock me in that room whenever you want?”
“It says I will protect you by any means necessary.” He leans back in his chair, the picture of ease.
“If you think I’m going to sign that, you’re crazy.”
“You haven’t even read it.”
I reach over and pull the contract toward me, the same kinds of phrases I saw last night jumping out at me.
“You can’t have access to my phone,” I tell him. “So immediately that’s a non-starter.”
His eyes never leave mine as he reaches across the table and pulls the contract back toward him. He draws a line through that part, and then slides the papers back toward me.
“What, so this is a negotiation now?” I ask.
“I’m willing to compromise, Lilliana.”
“Shocking,” I mutter under my breath, and he reaches out and grabs the table, his knuckles tightening. I know that any more sarcasm from me will result in a punishment, and the reckless part of me wants to do it just to see what that punishment will be.
But just as she did last night, my mother saves me, this time by sending me a series of text messages that make my phone chime five times in a row.
I reach down to silence it, but the first text catches my eye, and I open all of them.
THIS IS WHY I DON’T WANT YOU LIVING IN NEW YORK!
Then another one.
ISN’T THIS RIGHT NEAR YOUR WORK?
And yet another.
PLEASE CALL ME ASAP.
Accompanying these all caps missives is a link to a live video that someone is streaming on their Instapost account.
I click on it.
Someone’s broadcasting from a couple blocks away from Grayson’s office. On the New York City sidewalk lies a crumpled body, not moving.
“Guys, wow, so we’re just standing here, right? Getting ready to cross the street?” the girl broadcasting the video says. “And like, this car just came out of nowhere and ran this guy over. Like, on purpose. Didn’t it seem on purpose?” she asks the guy she’s with, swinging her phone in his direction.
“Yeah,” he says, looking way more rattled than she sounds. “Yeah, it did.”
She turns the phone back to the poor soul on the pavement, and I go to click out of it, not wanting to see. But before I do, a flash of greasy hair catches my eye, and I look closer.
Black shorts.
Black t-shirt.
A twisted bicycle lying just a few feet away.
It’s the bike messenger.
The one who just brought those medical records to Grayson.
It has to be a coincidence, I tell myself.
There’s no way that guy was killed because he may have seen those papers.
Is there?
Daniel Croft. That was the name of the patient. Who the hell is he? And why does Grayson have his medical records?
“What is it?” Grayson asks.
I turn the phone toward him and watch carefully for his reaction…
END OF PART THREE
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