Pregnant by My Ex's Bratva Dad

1. Thea

THEA

The ice sculpture’s started to sweat, and I know exactly how it feels.

I’ve been on my feet since six this morning. The florist called to report my centerpieces were stuck in a delivery truck on the Queensboro Bridge. By eight, I’d rerouted them through the Midtown Tunnel.

But that was only the beginning.

By ten, I’d confirmed the string quartet, re-confirmed the caterer, and talked the Meridian’s banquet manager out of a breakdown over the champagne fountain. He thinks the huge fountain is tacky. I agree with him, but Klaus wanted a fountain, so the Vernigora Industries autumn gala has a fountain.

Klaus doesn’t care about tacky. He cares about showing off.

Now, it’s nine at night. The ballroom glitters exactly the way two months of my planning promised it would.

Four hundred guests are drinking, laughing, and grinding canapé crumbs into marble.

I’m standing behind a pillar, or maybe I’m hiding, eating a stolen bacon-wrapped date, because I haven’t sat down or had a meal since yesterday.

Executive assistant to the CEO. That’s what I am. And when the recruiter said the role offered “unmatched proximity to leadership,” she wasn’t wrong.

Mandy from Accounting presses a glass of cabernet into my hand, says, “You’ve earned this,” and keeps walking, because she understands the kindest thing anyone can do for me tonight is keep moving.

She’s an angel, and tonight, she looks the part.

Her brown and copper finger coils shine in every light, and her dark brown skin glows from within.

But it’s her magnetic smile and the white dress that give her a heavenly vibe.

I take the wine, and I’m grateful.

From behind my pillar, I have a clear view of the champagne fountain, which means I also have a clear view of Klaus.

My boss wears the midnight blue suit I picked up from his tailor in March. His hair is up in the man bun a magazine once called “daring.”

Sure.

One arm is draped around a woman named Sofiya, who’s six feet of collarbones and, according to everyone, a model.

I’ve noted that his hand started at her waist. But it has since relocated south, in full view of two board members and the head of HR, and no one says a word, because his last name is the one on the building.

Klaus Vernigora also dumped me two weeks ago. By text. While I was in a dentist’s chair with half my face numb.

Hey, so I’ve been doing a lot of thinking and I feel like we’ve become more of a work thing than a real thing? You’re amazing tho. we’ll talk Monday.

We did not talk on Monday. On Monday, he asked me to book a table for two at Marea, and I did, because booking his tables is my job, and because the alternative was crying in an open-plan office.

I knew better than to date my boss. I grew up in Pennsylvania where my father taught me to check the oil myself and my mother taught me that a man who needs an audience will always find one.

I moved to Manhattan with those lessons packed in with the towels.

Then Klaus leaned on my desk during my second week, read my horoscope aloud in a fake fortune-teller voice until I laughed, and told me I was the only person on the whole floor with a soul.

I’m an idiot. And now, I’m paying for it.

He was handsome, charming, and bored in a rich way, as if money were weather that simply happened to him. When he looked at me, he made it feel like I was the only woman in the world for him.

But as it turns out, every woman is the only woman in the world for him. Sofiya is this week’s only woman. Before me, there were more. So many, many more.

I watch his hand migrate again and drink half my wine in one go.

The worst part isn’t that he’s grabbing her like he’s showing off. The worst part is that I built this party. I chose the lighting gels giving Sofiya’s skin its glow. I picked the cabernet she keeps sipping from his glass. I made this space a beautiful place for them to enjoy.

Fuck my life.

The quartet slides into the waltz I scheduled for nine, right on time. Small mercies. I straighten my dress and step out from behind the pillar, because a gala doesn’t run itself. Hiding is for people whose names appear on the program, which is why my boss gets to do it if he wants to.

Over the next hour, I circulate around the edges of the room.

I offer the Rotterdam client a scotch and a chair after finding him stranded near the dessert table.

The senior VP of logistics wants to share his boat story with a new group before his current audience complains, so I introduce him to someone new.

Moving a waiter with shrimp away from the seafood-allergic general counsel is simple, and I also sign for the second case of champagne that the fountain has already started to consume.

Nobody sees any of it happen. That’s the job, done correctly. I’m refilling my own glass at the far bar, as a reward for the shrimp save, when the room changes.

Nothing announces the shift. A man comes in through the doors by the terrace, alone, and the space around him simply reorganizes. Conversations dip. Two waiters alter course. Whispers and furtive glances follow.

The man’s older, silver-haired, tall and well-built, in a black suit cut close enough to speak to a phenomenal tailor. He stops a few steps inside and surveys the ballroom without hurry, corner to corner. Straight spine, chin even, and cold blue eyes observing every detail.

I’ve planned every executive event this company has thrown for a year and a half. The board, the major clients, the investors, and every plus-one with a food restriction, there’s not one detail I don’t know about these people.

But I’ve never seen this man in my life. He’s not on my list, and my list is perfect. So, who the hell is this intruder?

Then again, uninvited guests are officially Klaus’s problem. Last spring, a crypto founder wandered in off the street mid-gala, and Klaus shook his hand for a photo while I called security. The division of labor here is well established.

Across the ballroom, my boss has gone still with a champagne flute halfway to his mouth.

The looseness that lives in his shoulders is gone.

Sofiya says something to him, and he doesn’t answer her, which I’ve never once seen him do to a beautiful woman in the presence of an audience.

He’s staring at the silver-haired man by the terrace doors, and there’s a word for what has come into his posture.

Bristle.

Klaus mutters something, but his date doesn’t react, so I assume it’s to himself. A curse, perhaps. He sets the flute down, scans the room, and finds me.

He crosses to the bar at a pace meant to look unhurried, and by the time he arrives, he has his public face back on, warm and easy. But up close, the warmth has a crack in it. There’s sweat at his temple that the ballroom’s climate control cannot explain, because I set it myself.

“Thea.” He angles his body so his back is to the terrace doors. “Party’s a hit. Great work.”

“Thank you. Who is that?”

“Who’s who?”

“The man you just saw come in. Silver hair, black suit, not on my list. You made a face.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” He glances over his shoulder anyway, quick, and the crack in the warmth widens. “He’s nobody. A crasher. Probably smelled free liquor.”

“Why, exactly, do you think I’ll buy that?”

He ignores me. “Handle him.”

“Handle him how, exactly?”

“Figure out what he wants and keep him away from me. Get him a drink, give him a tour, walk him to a cab, whatever works. You’re good at this.” He straightens his lapels and dials the smile back up for the room. “I’d do it myself, but I’m hosting.”

“You think I’m an idiot, don’t you? Klaus, just tell me who he is—”

“Thea.” His voice drops one more notch. There’s something under it I haven’t heard from him before. “Please.”

Klaus does not say please. Instead, he says ‘you’re the best’ after the fact. And only when someone else is watching.

I study his face for another second, and the fear looks back at me before he can dress it in anything else. “Fine. Go host.”

Ten steps away, the champagne’s back in his hand, the laugh’s back in his throat, and the show resumes as if it never stopped.

Sofiya folds under his arm again. Whatever the silver-haired man means to Klaus, it’s been filed behind the smile with everything else he doesn’t intend to deal with tonight, because now there’s a person assigned to it.

That person tops off her cabernet.

I look across the ballroom at my assignment. He’s accepted a glass of something from a passing tray and sets it down untouched on a cocktail table. He checks his watch. Even from here, the gesture looks disciplined and allotted, like a man giving the evening a deadline.

He then surveys the room, his gaze methodically shifting across the crowd. I would confidently wager this month’s rent on what he’s doing—because I do the same. He’s counting. Whether it’s exits, faces, or dollars, I can’t decide, but he’s definitely taking stock of my ballroom.

And I don’t like it.

His gaze crosses the champagne fountain, where Klaus is performing a toast for his corner of the crowd. It stops there. From fifty feet away, I watch a stranger look at my boss, and his expression does not change, but something in it sinks, becoming the bleakest thing I’ve seen all night.

A chill runs down my spine.

I drink the rest of my wine faster than a good cabernet deserves and set the glass down before I can think better of any of this. I have a job to do.

Another mess for me to clean up.