11. Mikhail
MIKHAIL
My first thought is that I am surprised, and for a man like me, that is an insult to my bloodline.
I am not a man who survives by being surprised.
Surprise is for men who do not have enemies, men who sleep deeply, men who believe locked doors mean safety.
I have built my life around expecting the knife before it appears.
And still, when Taylor Hayes follows me into my office in a little skirt and pale blouse, clutching a visitor badge like it might save her, I am surprised. She is a knife in my back, a gun against my skull.
My second thought is that for all the effort she has put into looking proper and professional—and I can tell she has put in effort—she has come out the other end looking sexy.
The outfit is modest enough by most standards.
A light green blouse, silky and flowing, tucked into a tight black skirt that goes all the way down to her knees, tights, and shoes that close around her toes with a heel she will not trip over.
Her hair is brushed back into a low ponytail.
The makeup from last night has been covered with more makeup.
She has on new mascara, but I can still see the old rings around her eyelids.
When she swallows, my eyes cannot help but dart to her throat, where I see a faint mark beneath her jaw that she has tried to cover and failed. My mark.
My cock twitches behind my zipper, and I run my tongue over my teeth. “Well, Miss Hayes, I hear you were late this morning.”
She flinches at the formality. Good. Let it cut. Let it remind both of us where we are.
“Yes, I was,” she says, and there’s enough acid in it to clean blood from tile.
I turn to Viktoriya, who watches us with her eyes moving back and forth as though they’re mounted on a track, ready to identify whatever electricity is buzzing between us. “Miss Milova, you may return to your desk. I will finish the tour.”
Viktoriya looks between us and nods slightly, dawdling at the door for one moment before disappearing.
I should send Taylor away before the others become curious and start to pry as well.
It would be easy. A placement error. An administrative conflict.
Move Miss Hayes to another department, another building, another country if necessary.
I have done more difficult things before breakfast.
But if I do that, people will ask why. Not directly, of course. No one asks me why unless they have forgotten what I am. But they will think it. They will wonder what I have done, whether I am afraid of a little girl. They will ask amongst themselves. They will chatter.
“Punctuality matters here.”
“I understand.”
“Do you?”
Her eyes narrow. There’s the knife.
“Yes,” she says. “I understand being late on my first day is bad.”
“Then do not do it again.”
Her mouth opens, then closes. I can see her fighting with herself. She was late because of me. We both know it. Because I brought her home, kept her in my bed, and then sent her across the city with less than half an hour before she was expected here.
I press on the wound anyway. The girl from last night would snap at me. The intern standing in front of me knows she cannot. That awareness pulls something hard through my body that I like. “This cannot happen,” I say.
She laughs once, quiet and humorless. “You think I don’t know that?”
“I am speaking about your lateness.”
Anger flashes through her like oil catching fire, and I can’t help but smile at it. There’s the girl bold enough to fantasize about me in my own bed while lying beside me. The girl who turned away the boy who wanted her and went home with a stranger twice her age.
Viktoriya enters with a folder and a tablet. Her eyes move once from Taylor to me, quick and careful. “The intern packet, Governor Korolev.”
I hold out my hand, and Viktoriya places it in my palm. “And your mother is on line two. She said it is urgent.”
Everything in me goes cold. “My mother?”
“Yes.”
Taylor sees the change. I hate that she sees it.
“Miss Hayes, we will finish this later.”
Taylor’s gaze snaps back to mine. For half a second, something like protest appears on her face, but it’s quickly replaced with relief. She follows Viktoriya out of the room before I can say anything else.
I force myself not to watch the curve of her tight ass as she walks away, and I force myself not to be seen rushing back to my desk.
When the door closes, I lock it and cross to the phone too quickly, knocking the receiver against its base before lifting it. “Mama.”
For a moment, I hear only breathing. Thin. Shaken. Wrong. “Misha,” my mother says.
I turn away from the door and face the window. Moscow spreads beneath me, gray and gleaming. “What happened?”
“They came to the house.”
My hand tightens around the phone. “Who?”
“I don’t know them.”
“How many?”
“Three. Two came to the eastern gate. One stayed in the car.”
The eastern gate. Her gate. The entrance closest to the private wing where she lives. My free hand is already reaching for my mobile phone. “Did they get inside?”
“No. The guards stopped them.”
I send Arkady a message without looking away from the window.
Take the six men into custody now. Separate rooms. No contact between them. I want every telephone, every account, and every person they have spoken to since yesterday.
My mother continues, her voice trembling. “They said they had a delivery for me. Medicine. They used the name of my pharmacy.”
Something old and savage wakes in me. “What did they leave?”
“Nothing. When the guards asked for identification, they smiled. One of them said they had only come to make certain Nikita Koroleva was being looked after properly.”
My vision narrows. They know her name. My family name. Her pharmacy. Which entrance serves her wing. Only a handful of men knew the driver had been taken. If Orlov had answered before breakfast, one of the six had spoken.
“What else did they say?”
“They said I should be proud. That my son is becoming a very important man.” She breathes in shakily.
“They said important men make important enemies.” I say nothing because there is nothing useful to say.
If I speak too quickly, she will hear it all in my mouth even if I lie.
She will hear the truth of who I am. She heard it often enough in her husband. She knows what it sounds like. “Misha.”
“I will handle it.”
“No.” Her voice cracks. “No more handling. You said you were done, Misha. You are governor now. You have built a respectable life. Do not risk it, my love.”
This is not new. My mother has always hated that word from me.
Handle. Fix. Manage. All the small, clean words men use so women do not hear the uglier ones beneath.
My reflection stares back at me from the glass window, streaked with fingerprints and dust. Forty-three years old. Suit perfect. Face calm. A boy in a hallway, listening to his mother cry behind a locked door.
“What do you want me to say?” I ask.
“I want you to stop.”
The word sits between us.
Outside my office, people move through hallways and sit at desks doing work they believe is legitimate, lending legitimacy to me in the process.
Taylor is being shown how the telephone works and where the office calendar is.
She might think I am a bad man because I used her and threw her out, but she does not know she is in danger if I keep her.
My mother knows. She asks me to stop, and if I had any sense of decency left, I would.
For her. For Taylor. For the rest of them.
“Stop what?” I ask, though I know. The question itself is a lie.
My mother exhales a small, broken sound. “Do not do that to me.”
“Mama—”
“You are lying,” she says. I don’t answer.
“You have been lying to me for—you may have never told me the truth. You may have never told Moscow the truth. You smile for newspapers. You stand beside clean men in clean suits. You say words like reform and stability and responsibility. But men still come to my gate.”
“I cannot control every man who wants to frighten me.”
“No,” she says. “But they knew where to find your mother.”
I turn from the window. On my desk, the intern packet sits beside a briefing folder filled with donor names, district maps, and polling numbers. The respectable machinery of power.
My mother speaks again, softer now. “Are you a dirty politician?”
The question is so absurd that for one second I almost laugh. Then I hear what she’s really asking. Are you your father in a better suit?
“No,” I say.
“Misha.”
“I am not.”
“You promise?”
“Yes.”
“You know God hears you.”
“I know.”
“You remember that before you answer me again.”
My jaw tightens. “I am not a dirty politician.”
The words are true. Mostly. I have bought men. Threatened men. Protected men who did not deserve protection because their usefulness outweighed their sins. I have let clean hands take credit for decisions made in rooms they would deny entering.
But a dirty politician? No. Politician is still a costume I wear over something older.
“Your father promised me things too,” she says.
There it is. The dead man enters the room, as he always does when my mother is afraid.
“My father was a liar.”
“So are you.”
The words should make me angry. If I were telling the truth, they would. They should hurt, but hurt is a luxury I cannot afford while men are threatening my mother through her own gates. I put both reactions somewhere cold and unreachable.
I sit slowly in my chair. “Not to you,” I lie.
“You lie to me most of all.”
“Mama.”
“No. Listen to me.” Her voice steadies, and that is worse. My mother afraid is painful. My mother resolved is dangerous. “When your father died, you promised me that business died with him.”
My eyes lower to the surface of my desk. Dark wood. Polished. No dust. “I remember.”
“You promised me.”
“Yes.”
“The girls. The drugs. The things he did through other men because he was too cowardly to dirty his own hands. You promised me you stopped it.”
“I did.”
The answer comes immediately. That much, at least, is clean.
My father’s business was a sewer running beneath the city. Women moved like product. Children disappeared into debt. Men smiled over dinner and sold poison before dessert. When I took control, I burned parts of it so hot men still speak of that winter carefully.
I did not stop being a criminal. But I stopped being his kind.
“What are you doing, Misha?”
I look toward the door Taylor left through. “I do not know.” The honesty slips out before I can stop it.
My mother hears it. Of course she does. “Then stop before you find out too late.”