Chapter 20
PAVEL
Fedor did this on purpose.
That is my first thought, standing in the courtyard with the security lights burning white against the stone and my men waiting to be told what to do next.
Not the hanging itself—the location. He selected my rock garden, with these sight lines, and the precise center of the most visible space on the property.
He knew the layout of my home in detail, which means Vladimir—or the spy—told him.
Fedor now knows the mansion the way he knows the rest of my operation—from the inside, with the granular accuracy of a man who has been thorough.
Nowhere is safe. That’s the message. Not the city, not the distance, not the stone walls or the perimeter or the men I have positioned around my estate. Fedor can reach whatever he decides to reach, and he wants me to know it, and the knowing of it is the point.
I stand in the courtyard light and look at what has been done. It is not anger that digs into me and settles in. Anger is heat, is motion, is the thing that moved me across a restaurant toward Yuri Snigir without a decision being made.
This is different. This is the cold settling of a man who will communicate, with perfect clarity, that declarations of this kind do not go unanswered.
Vladimir was not a man I liked. I will not pretend otherwise, even standing in front of his body in my own courtyard—he was a complainer and a grievance-collector and a man whose loyalty had the specific texture of something held in place by adequate compensation rather than genuine commitment, which in the end proved to be exactly what it looked like.
Perhaps he fed information to Fedor. He let himself be turned, for whatever combination of money and resentment drove the decision, and he paid for it.
Or, he was an innocent, albeit annoying, man who Fedor learned I doubted.
Killing him makes fact-finding more difficult.
Regardless of Fedor’s reasons, Vladimir was still mine. He was in my organization, under my protection, and Fedor reached into my home and took him, used him to send a message.
I will send a message in kind.
Igor is beside me, close enough for a quiet conversation. I look at the body for one more moment before the plan is solid in my mind.
“You will take Fedor’s dog.”
The sound Molly makes beside me is immediate and sharp. “You can’t hurt a dog!” She steps forward, her focused energy that of a woman who has just seen her first hanging body and is nonetheless prepared to go to the mat over animal welfare. “I don’t care how important Vladimir was. You cannot—”
“I didn’t say hurt the dog.” I turn to look at her, briefly, so she can see that I mean it. “I said to take the dog.”
She blinks. “Oh.”
I turn back to Igor. “Take the dog. Find it a good home, or a nunnery—” I think briefly of Sister Mary Patrick, who would accept a dog with the same practical grace with which she accepts everything. “Care of Pavel’s Animal Rescue. Leave a business card with that and my personal number.”
Igor nods, and I catch the fractional quality of his amusement.
Fair enough. Fedor hung a man in my courtyard, and I am stealing his dog, and the disproportion of the response is deliberate.
Let him receive it and understand what it means, which is that I am not rattled, that I am not moved to the kind of heat that produces errors, that I will escalate this on my own timeline, and my full answer will cost him considerably more than a dog.
His dog is just the beginning.
Igor leaves. My men work quietly and without unnecessary motion to process the body. Molly is beside me, and she is very still in the way she’s still when she’s managing something difficult.
I watched her look at the body with the full, honest attention of a woman who had decided to see it clearly rather than look away, and I understood in that moment, with a completeness that I had been building toward for some time, that she is not the woman I need to protect from my world.
She is the woman who looked at my world, in its ugliest available manifestation, and stayed beside me anyway. That is not nothing.
It is everything.
“I’m sorry,” she says quietly. “About the dog thing. I should have—this is the first time I’ve seen—” She stops, then starts again. “I lacked faith in you.”
“You have just seen a hanged man,” I say. “Your reaction to the dog is reasonable, Molly.”
“Still.” She looks up at me with those brown eyes, and there’s something in them that is not quite steady and is trying very hard to be. “I know who you are. I should have known you wouldn’t hurt a dog.”
I look at her for a moment. “Come inside with me.”
She does.
The house settles around us in the way it does at night, and I take her through the corridor, away from the courtyard and the lights and the organized efficiency of men doing the work that needs doing.
By the time we reach the interior of the house, Molly breathes out slowly beside me in a way that means she’s releasing something she has been holding.
“That was a lot.”
I nod once, firmly. “It was. How do you feel?”
There it is. The way she glances to her right when she has something on her mind, but is scared to say it. “I’m not sure.”
“Want one of those seltzers?” She’s been knocking them back for her pregnancy nausea.
“Yeah, okay.”
When I return with it, she seems more at ease by a fraction. “Thanks.” She doesn’t drink the seltzer.
Perhaps she needed a moment alone. Maybe more would do her some good. “I hate to say it, but I have other things that must be handled tonight—”
“Right. And I interrupted you. Sorry—”
“Don’t be. You’re my favorite interruption.” I kiss the back of her hand. “See you upstairs?”
She smiles wanly. “Yeah. Okay.”
“If you don’t want to be alone—”
“I’m fine. Or, well, I’m not. But I will be. You go handle your business. I think a long hot shower is in order.”
I smile and nod and watch her head upstairs for that shower.
When she’s gone, I do what I do when I lose a man.
His family will be taken care of—a year’s salary and an equal bonus is sent to them immediately, as are funeral expenses.
The night devolves into paperwork, and by the time I reach our bed, I’m dog tired.
But when I see Molly’s pretty face, all of that falls away.
I scoot into the bed, spooning her. “Missed you.”
“Missed you too, husband.”
That’s all it takes, and I’m hard for her. I don’t know what it says about me that a single word from her sweet lips, and I’m helpless to her whims. I kiss her neck, letting her take the lead as much as I can. If she pulls away, even a little, I’ll let the night rest. I can ignore my erection.
She doesn’t pull away. Instead, Molly scoots back to me, gently rocking her magnificent ass on my cock. “Missed you a lot.”
I love that my wife tends to sleep naked. Makes life so much better.
I take my time trailing my hands all over her body, memorizing each and every curve from this angle. As if I haven’t already memorized them. But with the pregnancy, her body will change, and I have only a few weeks to enjoy this version of her.
I intend to enjoy her as much as possible.
When I reach between her thighs, I do so only long enough to ensure she is ready for me. I’m done waiting.
I pull her hip back and enter her from behind, causing us both to gasp in reverence. She whispers to a god she doesn’t believe in as I plunge deeper, biting her shoulder at the same time. I had wanted to take her ass tonight, but after that grotesque display, I need something else from my wife.
Comfort.
The truth is that I’m shaken by the memory, by what it means for us. Molly is well within her rights to flee, yet she’s here, with me, right now. Taking everything I have to give her. Begging for more.
I twist around her, propping her leg onto my shoulder as I shift around in the sheets. Need to see her face. Need those lips.
She wraps herself around me, and I let her. Breathe her in. Taste her mouth, her soft skin. Feel her hands on me. She cups my face with both hands and nods, and I drive myself deeper, letting it go, letting all of it go as we come together.
This is not the last turn of the night. There is something different about it, the closeness that follows an atrocity witnessed together, perhaps, and the need to confirm something living in the wake of something that isn’t.
In the morning, she wants flowers.
“There are already flowers. I picked them out myself—the peonies you—”
“I know. And I love them. But I need to bring new life into this place after… after last night. I can’t explain it.”
Either this is a coping mechanism or a statement of intent or both, and I find I cannot argue with the logic of it, even if I wanted to, which I don’t. Instead, I sip my coffee. “I think that’s a good idea.”
“Really? You don’t think it’s silly or—”
“Not at all. Vet will go with you.”
Molly looks at me across the table with a stillness that precedes something she’s been wondering about. “That’s her real job, isn’t it. She’s my bodyguard.”
There is no version of this moment in which lying is available to me.
I look at my wife across the kitchen table, at the warm brown eyes and the slightly crooked mouth and the full, honest attention of a woman who has been figuring things out with or without my assistance since long before I gave her any.
Lying will not help my marriage, even if it’s my instinct.
“Yes. She is.”
Molly is quiet for a moment. Is she angry? Hurt, because she’s been managed and lied to all this time? I will weather the storm of it, because I have earned that. This is my responsibility, and I will make it up to her.
She sips her coffee once more. “Thank you.”
I stare her down. This must be a trap. “Thank you?”
“For keeping me safe,” she says, with the simplicity of someone saying a thing they mean without qualification. “Thank you for that.”
“You’re not mad?”
“I could be. I have every right to be, considering everything. But I’ve chosen to be grateful because you gave me a straight answer when I asked and because you have always done things like this to keep me safe.
” She pauses. “Understand, I want to be read-in on everything from today onward, but for all the secret ways you tried to keep me safe, thank you.”
Then she kisses the top of my head, grabs her coat, and collects Vet from the parlor, where she’s been since she got in this morning.
I stand in the kitchen of my house in the morning light and wonder about the enigmatic woman who read me the riot act yesterday for keeping things from her, then thanked me for that same thing today.
My wife cannot be predicted, and that might keep her alive someday.
Igor finds me in the study twenty minutes later, and we drink coffee and look at the problem with the clear eyes of the morning after, which is a different view than the one the night before allows.
The dog has been taken. Fedor now knows his reach into my life will be met with the calibrated insolence of a man who is not impressed.
But it’s not a strategy. It’s an opening note in a conversation that will require much more development before it resolves.
“We need someone on the inside,” Igor says, which is the conclusion I’ve been circling since Kamila’s number went dead. “With Fedor. Not watching him from the outside—inside the organization, close enough to know what’s moving before it moves.”
“I know. Any suggestions?”
“Sadly, or maybe ironically, Vladimir would have been an ideal double agent. He—”
My phone rings. It’s Vet’s number, and I answer it on the first ring. I can’t make out what I’m hearing. Pocket dial? “Vet, are you—”
“I’ve been shot.” Her voice is even with the effort it takes to make it even. “En route to the flower shop. The car was rammed after the shooting.” A pause, and I’m already moving. Igor follows before I say a word. “Molly’s unconscious. Called 911.”
The cold that moves through me is absolute. “Where are you?”
She gives me the cross street, and I’m already at my garage door, Igor two steps behind me, when she says, in the voice of someone using the last of what they have, “Fedor’s man—”
Nothing.
“Vet? Vet! Stay with me!”
But she’s gone.