13. Thea
THEA
I didn’t know a sugar bowl could catch air, but when you throw it hard enough, they sail far.
But I didn’t throw it at him. I threw it at the wall beside him, a foot wide of his shoulder. Sugar and ceramic catch the light as the bits spray out. Potato bolts under the couch, not that I blame him.
Maxim doesn’t move one inch. Cocky bastard.
So, I throw the dish towel too, which is not aerodynamic, and flutters to the floor between us like a sad flag that gave up its post.
“You don’t get to do this.” My voice is something between a whisper and a shriek.
“You don’t get to tell me to pack a bag.
That’s not—people don’t—this is my apartment.
I have a job! I have a dentist appointment!
I have a life, Maxim, a small dumb life, and it’s mine, and I love it, and you don’t get to just—“
“Thea—”
“I’m not done throwing things, and so help me, if you finish that sentence, the next thing I throw will be aimed at your stupid face!”
He breathes, then glances at the counter, assessing my remaining arsenal.
A mug, a banana, the good scissors. Every one of them is a good option.
Then he reaches into his coat, and the part of my brain that read a think-tank PDF tonight goes very quiet, but what comes out of his pocket is an envelope.
Not a gun.
“You want a reason?”
“Yes!”
He pauses. “I would have spared you this. Remember, you’re the one who insisted.”
Two photographs.
The first one empties my lungs. It’s me. Me in the hallway of the Meridian the morning of our hookup. The picture is taken from an angle that makes me think of a scarred scalp and a bloody smile.
The creep. He took that picture.
The second photo is worse, because it’s daytime. The garage at work. Me, a few days ago, crossing to my car with my sunglasses up and my mouth open mid-sentence, because I talk to myself on the way to my car. Someone photographed me doing it from an upper ramp.
In daylight. At my job.
I flip them over because there’s handwriting showing through one of them. Two words in Russian. Pretty face.
But I won’t give up my secrets that easily. Not even when I can’t stop shaking. The words shake, too. “What… what does that mean?”
If he lies, then this is some kind of trick.
“Pretty face.”
Fuck. Not a trick. “Oh.”
Maxim’s voice is pure gravel and not in a sexy way.
“The man who took these works for a rival of my family named Alexei Sokolov. The photographer has been following you since the hotel, and as of tonight he is no longer in anyone’s custody, and he does not stop, Thea.
It’s not in him. I’ve known this man for decades, and he doesn’t stop.
The only reason you still breathe is he wasn’t ordered to kill you. Yet.”
“That doesn’t mean—”
“It does,” he growls firmly. “The last time Alexei said a woman had a pretty face, Kirill peeled it off.”
Normally, I have a slight ringing in my ears. Hearing damage from too many concerts with no ear protection when I was in my teens. My sister loves music, so I used to take her to them, and neither one of us was smart enough to protect our ears.
The ringing isn’t there anymore. Neither is my hearing. Not after what he just said. My vision narrows, too, black at the edges.
Kirill. The creep has a name. The man who might peel my face off is named Kirill.
I can’t breathe. “But… you captured him, right?”
“He escaped. He always escapes.”
I grab the edge of my countertop to stop from going down as my knees buckle some. “Oh.”
“Are you—”
“I’ll be okay. I think.” Not sure when my hearing and vision snapped back online, but my brain is, too.
Too fast, actually. The rival of my family.
Not my company. He said family, and he watched me catch it, and neither of us reached for the fiction, and that’s how the last polite curtain in this kitchen comes down.
No confession. Just the facts. Just a peeled face.
And the facts drain me. No more fight left. I don’t even want to throw the mug.
Maxim is a serious man. Maybe the most serious man I’ve ever met. And a man like that does not do everything he’s done over a woman he’s slept with twice because he’s being dramatic. Serious men don’t do drama.
He’s telling the truth. I can taste it. If I close my eyes, I can see the faceless face of a screaming woman—
Stop. Focus.
If I want to keep living my small dumb life, or any life, I’m going to do what he says. It doesn’t matter that I don’t want to. Wanting just left the building.
That doesn’t mean I’ve to like it.
“Okay…” It comes out smaller than I’d like, so I say it again, corners up. “Okay. But I’m bringing the good scissors.”
“I have scissors—”
“You don’t have my scissors.”
His mouth opens to argue, but he must think better of it. “What else of yours don’t I have? I can help you pack.”
“I’ll do it.”
“I don’t mind—”
“Maxim, just…” I don’t even know where I’m going with that sentence. Or him. “Just let me do this.”
He nods and steps back, hands in his pockets.
Packing takes minutes. I’m not sure if that’s better or worse.
A life should take more than a few minutes to pack, shouldn’t it?
I shove essentials into the duffel I use for the beach and try to think of what to pack for Potato, but all I can think of is how bad my hands are still shaking, and why the hell am I fleeing with a pakhan in the middle of the night, and how much PTO this will cost me.
But since I’m fleeing with my boss, it better not come out of my PTO.
“There is also this.” He puts a bus ticket on my counter. Port Authority to Scranton, one adult.
My stomach drops through the floor because I know that route. That’s the route to Tiny. “That’s my sister’s town.”
“Yes. You purchased that ticket with your credit card on your phone, which will remain here, powered on.”
“Excuse me—”
“Tomorrow a woman of your build wearing your coat will board that bus.” He says it the way he assigns meetings.
“Sokolov will learn you panicked and ran home to Pennsylvania. It’s what a frightened civilian does, and it’s boring, and boring is safe.
He’ll confirm it, lose interest, and look elsewhere because doing that would mean you are not my woman and you are not my spy. ”
I blink at him. “Confirm it?” The floor of my stomach keeps going. “Confirm it how? By sending someone to Scranton? To Tiny’s street, where her kids catch a school bus, are you… no. No. You are not painting a target on my sister to take one off of me—”
“There’s been a man on your sister’s street since this evening.
” He doesn’t raise his voice. “My man. He watches the house, the school route, the husband’s garage.
He will be there as long as this lasts, and your sister will never know his name or his face, and nothing, Thea, nothing will happen on that street.
My man is on it. She and her family will remain safe. ”
My tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth for a beat. “You have one guy on a family of four? That math does not work.”
He pauses. “I will add another. Any other requests?”
“The kids. My niece and nephew. They deserve their own detail.”
“Consider it done.” He pulls out his phone, presumably handling it as I stand here. This is what serious looks like when it’s on your side.
There’s more. So much more. But right now, I have to stay focused.
Where’s Potato’s carrier? I yank it from the hall closet, so he takes off to hide in the curtains.
“He hates his carrier, so I need to grab some cheese from the fridge to put one of his sedatives in it. It’ll take just a minute, and then the sedative will kick in about five minutes later—the vet gave me the good stuff. ”
Maxim looks at Potato’s curtain lump. Potato peeks out at Maxim. It is not warm, in either direction.
“No,” Maxim says.
“You don’t want him traveling without it. Trust me.”
“That’s not what I meant. You cannot think to take him with us.”
I frown at him. “You cannot think I’m leaving him behind.”
“It’s a cat.”
“He’s my cat.”
“The estate is secure. Cats are not securable assets,” he gestures at Potato, who has begun washing a foot with his leg straight up in the air, having forgotten about the carrier.
“You bought a decoy bus ticket, an actress, and you’re adding security guys for my family like it’s nothing, so I think your empire can absorb a litter box.
” I plant myself. Five-foot-five in fuzzy socks, giving the most feared man I’ve ever met the face I give vendors who tell me something can’t be done by Friday.
Not my most dignified argument, but at the moment, I’m out of fucks to give.
“Thea—”
“You’re taking my apartment, my job, my dentist appointment, my entire life, tonight, on your word.
Fine. You’ve got the photos, you win. You have officially creeped me out.
But the cat is not negotiable. The cat is the line.
I will get on that bus for real before I leave him here to starve because you don’t like animals. ”
“I like animals. Horses. Dogs.” He regards Potato with the cold assessment I last saw aimed at a champagne fountain. “That is a mop with claws. And I didn’t say to leave him to starve. I thought we could leave him at a kennel or with a neighbor.”
“The mop comes, or I don’t. It’s that easy.”
Maxim closes his eyes in the manner of a man consulting a distant and patient god. Then he sighs the first words he says, “The carrier. Five minutes,” and turns to stand at the window with his back to us. As if he cannot look at the two creatures that made him make a compromise.
Maybe the first of his life.
I get to the closet before I let myself smile. I won the battle. But I lost the war, so the smile is short-lived.
The upstate drive lasts about two quiet hours. Maxim sits beside me in the back of a tinted black car, absorbed in his phone, while I hold the carrier on my lap as Potato yowls a continuous, formal complaint through the mesh. I’ve had worse trips.
Past the city line, I stop watching for headlights following us and start focusing on the dark shapes of trees. The world becomes emptier and quieter. I’m used to the city. Driving to the country feels like life slipping away.
The gates to his empire are dark iron and taller than my apartment.
Feels like we’re driving onto a movie set or something equally fake.
Maybe because I don’t want this to be real.
They open without anyone touching anything, and the driveway after them goes on for so long that I have time to pretend this isn’t happening.
The house appears out of the dark like something out of a horror movie.
Stone. Three stories. Wings. Windows lit amber. The scale of it is obscene, because houses like this aren’t homes.
This is a fortress. And I’m its prisoner.
“Will I be shackled in the basement dungeon?” Is it smart to give him ideas?
He smiles. It’s a little one, but it’s there. “I know you like to be tied up, but proper shackles chafe, so I don’t recommend them.”
A light laugh escapes me, but I’m not sure if I feel any better. We get out of the car, and he grabs my bag, leaving me Potato to carry. Gravel crunches beneath my feet as I stare up at the front door. “That’s a big ass door.”
“For a big ass house. This way,” he says, leading the charge.
When the door closes, there’s an echo on the hardwood. The entry hall is stone and tall as a chapel, and I’m two steps in, cat carrier banging my knee, when I see the portrait.
It hangs next to the entryway, placed to be seen. Oil, full length, old. Maxim, dark-haired, younger, standing behind a seated woman in blue with pale eyes and a mouth on the edge of laughing. And leaning against her knee, small, blond, maybe four years old, a boy.
I’d know that boy anywhere. I dated that boy.
A woman stands waiting deeper in the hall. She is sixty-something, wrapped in a quilted house robe, her gray hair in a long braid. Soft features, hard eyes.
“Galina,” Maxim says. “This is Thea. She will be staying.”
Galina looks at me, takes in the sights I’ve brought, and one eyebrow ascends a full inch nearer to her hairline. Then she looks back at me, and her face settles into something that isn’t warm, exactly. “There is soup from yesterday. The cat eats chicken?”
“The cat eats everything.”
“Good. Come.” She turns and walks into the house, robe swishing, done with Maxim. My chest unclenches a tad, because whatever this place is, there’s a person who responds to a crisis with soup.
And I love soup.
My quarters are on the second floor of the east wing.
A whole sentence I never thought I’d think.
Now, I’ve a bedroom bigger than my whole apartment, a bathroom with heated floors, a window seat overlooking dark gardens, and a bed I could land aircraft on.
It’s all dark wood and pricey, Brobdingnagian furniture. Sturdy and vintage.
Now, it’s just me, a beach bag, and a cat. I sit on the edge of the enormous bed, and it doesn’t creak like my old bed. I doubt anything creaks here. Not even the floorboards.
There’s no dust. Not anywhere. I imagine Galina won’t allow it. She commands this house the way Maxim commands his company. And me, apparently.
Is it better to be a mutilated corpse or a face-having, living prisoner? That’s the question of the hour. For now, I’ll go with prisoner.
And as far as prisons go, it could be worse.