The Boss(hole) by Penelope Bloom
Juliette
The time for subtle, carefully calculated risk was over. My father had gone nuclear after Adrian left. I’d never seen him so angry. I’d seen him fume, glower with disappointment, and coldly lash out. But the rage he’d shown was entirely different. He had thrown his plate against the wall to shatter as soon as Adrian left the room. He pushed his chair over, then grabbed me by the arm and dragged me up to my room. He even locked the door and swore to me I was going to be in there until he had a suitor for me to marry.
It was a ridiculous claim, I knew, but I also knew Adrian well enough to assume he wasn’t going to wait forever. Adrian wouldn’t wait weeks for me to let my father cool down and relax his guard on me. I had to figure Adrian was going to come get me before long and I had to act like I had no time to waste.
I sat on the edge of my bed and assessed my situation. It had been about three hours since everything happened. My mother had tried to talk to me through the door and assure me she’d find a way to get my father to calm down. That was wonderful, except I knew she had no influence over him.
I’d heard her speak to the man guarding my door before she left and noticed I didn’t recognize his voice. There was a bathroom in my room that I could access, so other than needing food and water, they probably assumed they didn’t need to let me out at all.
I’d spent a few hours forming a very rough, very risky plan that I had a strong feeling was going to fail horribly. I spent the last hour trying to decide if there was any better, less risky way, and realized I only had one shot at this. I needed to think about which plan was most likely to get me to that laptop, not which one was the least scary.
So I sucked in a deep breath, then went to my bathroom. I unrolled about half a roll of toilet paper and tried to flush it. As I hoped, the toilet clogged and water started to fill the bowl. After about a minute, water was splashing noisily on my bathroom tiles.
“Uh, I have a small problem!” I shouted from the bathroom.
“Deal with it,” called the unfamiliar man’s voice.
“Not an option! The toilet is flooding and I’ve really got to go. Unless you want to tell my father you made me piss on the floor, I think you should get in here!”
The man sighed heavily, then I heard a set of keys jingle. A moment later, he unlocked my door and started through the bedroom and toward the bathroom.
The toilet was to the left once you came through the doorway, so I waited to the right. I was banking on him looking at the toilet first, which would hopefully expose his back to me. My father made me take jiu jitsu for self-defense until I was twelve. I had the muscle memory to take down a large man if the conditions were right. I hoped. Of course, I hadn’t practiced at all since then.
Not the time to be thinking about that, Jules.
The guy came through the doorway and my jaw dropped. He was huge. He actually had to duck his head slightly to get through. Worse. He didn’t look at the toilet. He looked to his right, where he saw me crouched with my hands out like I was getting ready to pounce.
“What the-” he started.
I cut him off by leaping for his neck. I’d been hoping to get on his back and get my arms around his neck. The idea was I’d choke him out, snag the keys, and run.
But he stuck out a meaty palm and I felt like I hit a small, hand shaped brick wall. I bounced off, smacked into the wall, and slid to the ground to land hard on my ass. “Ugh,” I groaned.
“What the hell are you doing?” he asked.
“Blurry,” I said, slurring my word a little and letting my eyes go out of focus.
The man scratched the back of his huge head, looking around. “Shit,” he muttered. I had no doubt my father would be furious if he knew one of his men hurt me. He knelt down and reached for my eyelid, opening it and peering into my eyes. “You’re fine, right?”
“My medicine,” I muttered. “It’s under the sink. I have a condition… if,” I made a croaking sound, then put the back of my hand to my forehead.
“Right,” the guy said. He was on his hands and knees, sloshing around in the toilet water. He scooted to the cabinet beneath the sink. There was no medicine there.
I let out a warcry and jumped for his back. I landed on him like he was an oversized horse, then got my arms locked around his neck, which was about as thick as a tree trunk. I could barely reach my elbow to pull the arm lock tighter on him.
That was when I learned all the people I’d practiced against when I was little were going easy on me. None of them had ever reached back and plucked me off them like I was an annoying rodent. I felt his big paw grip the back of my shirt and start to yank me free.
“Wait!” I said. “If you hurt me, my father is going to fire you.”
It was ridiculous trying to reason with a man I was attempting to choke out, but he actually paused. “What?” he said, voice tight from the pressure I had on his neck.
“You’re better off letting this happen. If you hurt me, he’ll make sure you never work again. If I get loose, he’ll just let you go at worst.”
“Really?” The man whispered. He had sank to his knees now and I could tell I was almost there. Just a little longer.
“Yes,” I said. “Just let it happen, big boy.”
“Big… boy?”
After what felt like forever, the man finally fell face first, unconscious. I worked quickly to find his key ring, pocketed it, and then got up. I looked in the mirror and saw I looked like I’d just been in a scuffle with a giant. My shirt was splattered with toilet water and stretched out from where he’d tried to pull me. My hair was a complete mess and my makeup was smeared.
I closed the door to the bathroom, then moved my dresser in front of it to hopefully wedge it shut. I wasn’t sure if it would stop that beast of a man once he regained consciousness, but it’d have to do. At the last minute, I ran to my window and yanked it open. If someone happened to come in here, I wanted them to think I’d escaped and went straight outside instead of risking them searching the house for me. With any luck, I could practically clear the house out and have a straight shot for the laptop.
I went through the open door to the hallway beyond my room, trying my best to look natural. I passed a few of the cleaning staff, but none of them would’ve known to try to stop me. They just gave me strange looks when they saw how disheveled I looked.
I thought I was going to actually make it to my father’s office unscathed until I rounded the final corner to his wing of the house. One of his security team was standing guard at the door and I could hear my father talking angrily on the phone from inside the room. I ducked behind the corner before I was seen.
Think fast, I thought.
I saw a cleaning woman heading for the stairs and formed a quick, slightly crazy idea.
“Hey!” I said, rushing up to her. “Do you know who I am?”
The woman looked me up and down, face scrunched up. “No? Are you the new girl? You can’t let yourself get so filthy. If Mr. Coleton sees-”
“Yes, that’s me,” I said quickly. But I just found the security guard in Juliette Coleton’s room passed out in the bathroom. Her toilet is overflowing and Juliette’s window is open. I think I saw her trying to climb down the side of the house.”
“Oh my Lord,” the woman said.
“Should we tell Mr. Coleton?” I asked, trying to look like I was in a panic. “Am I going to get fired?”
“Go clean yourself up before he sees you. I’ll tell him.”
I nodded, then stepped into a closet as soon as she was out of sight. I heard her speaking in hurried tones to the security guard outside my father’s room, then to my father. There was some loud cursing, then a stampede of footsteps away from my father’s office and toward my room. I counted to five, then rushed out of the closet and toward my father’s office.
I tried the door and found it was locked. Damn it. I pulled out the keychain I’d lifted from the security guy and went through key after key. There were over a dozen, and I fully expected the correct key would be the last one I tried. But the third worked, and I rushed into the office, spotted my father’s laptop, and grabbed it. I pulled open a few drawers in his desk until I found his notepad where he kept all his passwords. I flipped through it to confirm and saw a note with his laptop password.
Relief washed over me. I did it.
Except I hadn’t exactly thought through how I was going to get out of the house once I found the thing.
I was in the middle of considering a very stupid attempt to climb out the window and jump in a particularly bushy bush when my mother came in behind me.
“Juliette? What on Earth are you doing? I heard you had escaped out of your window? You know you’re not—Is that your father’s laptop?”
“Mom,” I said as carefully as I could. “I know you’ve always tried to help me. I know father doesn’t let you do much. But I could really, really use a little help right now.”
I expected her to pull out her phone and call my father, but she glanced down the hallway the way she’d come, then walked in and closed the door. “What do you need, sweetie?”