14. Maxim
MAXIM
Breakfast at the estate is served early, and my houseguest arrives late, carrying the cat.
I’m at the long table with coffee and my morning newspapers, and I watch her take in the dining room. The grand windows covered in dark velvet drapes. My great grandmother’s silver place settings. The general acreage of my usual morning.
If I had to choose a word to describe her expression it would be nonplussed, though if one must make an effort to appear nonplussed, I think it contradicts the look.
She sits down across from me. The cat installs itself on the chair beside her.
There’ll be brown fur on that chair. Galina will be displeased, and I will never hear the end of it. “We will discuss the rules of the house.”
“Will we?” She reaches for the coffee pot. “Do I get a handbook? An orientation video?” She sets it back down. “Is there a lanyard?”
“Rule one. The cat stays in your room.”
“Potato goes where I go.”
The animal regards me across the table with its flat yellow stare, one ear folded, and I return the stare until it yawns at me, which no man has dared in thirty years. He wears nonplussed better than she does.
“This is a working estate, Thea. There are dogs at the perimeter. Men who move fast through hallways at strange hours. Galina’s kitchen won’t tolerate an animal on its counters.”
Her stubborn chin juts defiantly. “He stays with me.”
“Your room is large. He will endure.”
“What else?” She ably sweeps aside my objections.
I would be impressed if it were not so annoying.
“You will clean up after yourself. Galina keeps this house, and she is not your staff. You will strip your own bed on Mondays, return your dishes to the kitchen, and give her no grief of any kind, because she has run this property since before you were born and she outranks everyone on it, including me.”
She doctors her coffee with three sugars and cream. “Keep going. This is the most information I’ve gotten since Queens.”
“You will not leave the walls without an escort. You will not post on social media, contact the office, or use any device but the phone I give you. It will reach me, Lev, Galina, and your sister through a relay that cannot be traced. Your employment continues here at full salary. The audit files are being driven up this afternoon.”
Her mint green eyes narrow. “You’re paying me to be kidnapped.”
“I’m paying you to work in a location that inconveniences my enemies and keeps you in one piece.” I fold the first newspaper. “That is all of it. The rules are few, and they are not up for debate.”
Perhaps four people live who argue with me.
One shares my blood. Two are on my payroll and argue as part of their professional duty.
The fourth is buttering toast at my table in a sweatshirt, the least formal wear this table has ever seen.
I appreciate her spine, but now is not the hour for it, and so I stand and collect my jacket from the chair.
“Where are you going?”
“We may resume this conversation at dinner, but I have places to be. You may bring motions. The cat stays in the room.”
“The cat stays with me.”
My teeth gnash against each other as I exhale. “I look forward to the conversation.”
I meet the staff in the kitchen. Galina, arms folded. The groundsman and the house detail, six men on rotation, of whom the youngest, Pasha, stands straightest. I keep it brief.
“The woman staying in the east wing is under this family’s protection. Alexei Sokolov has his eye on her, and his dog Kirill is loose. Until that changes, she does not exist outside these walls. No name on phones, no name in town, no deliveries under her name.”
Galina sighs. “Allergies? Preferences?”
“Ask her yourself. She’s a guest, not a prisoner, and she is not to be troubled. Anyone who troubles her will discuss it with me.” I look at them each in turn. “She will cause no problems. Questions?”
Pasha wants to say something. I see it on his handsome face. Thirty-nine, broad, earnest, unusually kind for a man in his line of work. “Sir. The east wing rotation. I would like to take the nights.”
“The nights are the long shift.”
“Yes, sir. I don’t mind it. I’ve already read the Sokolov file, and I walked the sightlines to her windows this morning before breakfast.” He stands there, spine like a flagpole, ears red, and any fool could see what has happened here. A young man, a young woman, one morning of proximity.
He has developed a crush.
I remember all my crushes. They were ill-advised, much like this one. It does not matter. Crushes rarely ever do. It will fizzle out, and one day, when he is settled with a wife and babies, he will look back on this time fondly the way all men do.
It is a mild irritant. Not Pasha himself.
He is loyal to the marrow and twice the shot his father was.
The comparison is the irritant. He is unattached, unscarred, uncomplicated by empires or sons or far too many years.
By any sane measure he is the suitable man for someone like Thea, and the suitable man just volunteered for night duty.
A wiser version of me would find this convenient. Do I? I give the boy’s broad back one long look as he goes, and then I put it aside. I did not bring her here for myself. I brought her here because of what waits outside. Not because of my prurient thoughts.
“Take the nights, Pasha. Thank you for volunteering.”
He grins, then goes at a pace just under a jog. Eager. Good.
Alexei hunts by appetite. He has no code to slow him, and no patience to steady him, and the one thing he cannot tolerate is time.
The bus ticket says Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania will check out, and then it will not, and then his people will circle back through Queens. They will explore her building, her sister’s street, and find nothing. I will sponge away his time, minute by minute, day by day.
Every day she wakes behind these walls, drinking her three-sugar abomination, is a day Alexei Sokolov loses even more patience. It will infuriate him, and he will do something stupid.
Which is the point.
The question is, how long will he wait before doing the stupid thing? A month, I estimate. Perhaps six weeks, at most.
The day he fouls up is the day Alexei Sokolov learns who truly owns this city.
As I pull on my suit jacket, my phone rings. “Yes?”
“You need to come down.” Lev, and there is a note in his voice I’ve heard perhaps five times in my life. “Now. And Maxim, know that I’ve already taken Niklaus’s phone. I’m asking you, as the man who has kept you out of prison for thirty years, to keep an even head about this.”
The knot in my gut has its own knots. “What did he do?”
“Best discussed in person—”
“He still breathes? No serious injuries?”
“None yet. But if he keeps struggling against security, I cannot promise that will stay true.”
The drive takes longer than it should, and not long enough. Without knowing what I’m walking into, I want more time to prepare. But one cannot prepare for something Lev holds back, so there’s no point in preparation. He rarely holds anything back from me, and when he does, it’s never a good thing.
Two of the house security stand inside my office door, and my son sits in the chair across from my desk with his collar wrenched sideways. A red mark rises on his cheekbone.
I pause at Konstantin, who guards the door with Oleg. “I’ll assume he earned that.”
Konstantin closes his eyes. Nods. “He swung at us. My apologies—”
“None needed, but appreciated nonetheless.” I walk in, hearing the solid thunk of the door closing behind me. Lev stands by the window, a grim countenance on his face. I nod toward the banker’s box atop my walnut desk. Pale confetti droops over the edges. “What am I to make of that?”
Lev’s eyes stay on Niklaus, but his words are for me. “I suggest you read the tabs.”
My eyes fall to the small white label. Meridian Atlantic. Authorizations. Niklaus sought to shred the evidence against him.
The fury that arrives in me then is not hot. It’s cold and all-consuming. “Shredding documents. On a machine you had to badge into.”
“They’re my files.” His voice cracks in the middle, and he grimaces. “My projects, my—you took my company, you don’t get my—“
“Your files carry the name of a subsidiary that launders Alexei Sokolov’s money through my freight lines.
You’re not destroying documents, Niklaus.
You’re destroying evidence, and the only question this office has ever needed you to answer is whether you knew what you were signing, and you have just answered it with a shredder.
You knew exactly what you were doing and why.
” The air flows out of my lungs as my disappointment increases.
“I had held onto the pretense that you were just confused or, hell, too stupid to know better. But you fucking knew exactly what you were doing—”
“I didn’t, I…” he starts, and stops, and his eyes go to the box, to Lev, to the door, everywhere but to me. The boy who cried at a boarding school gate looks out of the man’s face for one unguarded second, and my gut twists. Then the man sneers, cornered. “You’d never believe me anyway.”
“Give me a reason to believe you, Niklaus. Give me something I can point to as to why my son was signing off on my enemy’s movements.”
His jaw clenches as he shakes his head and glances away.
“I wanted to believe anything but what the evidence told me.” It comes out quieter than I intend, and truer. “You have no idea, in your pampered life, how much I wanted to think you were simply an idiot. And even that, you could not live up to.”
There’s a fire in his eyes that reminds me so much of his mother that it hurts. “I suppose I get to surprise you yet again. You know how much I live for it.”
“If you wanted to surprise me, you should’ve done something right.”
“Fuck you.”
“Niklaus Vernigora, your employment with this company’s terminated, effective immediately, for cause.
Your badge, your accounts, your titles are revoked.
Danilov will contact your attorney regarding the rest, and you will need one, I can promise you that.
I suggest, for the first time in your life, that you listen to him.
” I nod to the men at the door, and they come quickly to either side of him. “See him out.”
He comes up out of the chair, swinging off their hands, tears standing in his eyes and his voice tearing loose from whatever moored it. “You can’t do this to me!”
“I already did.”
They take his arms and walk him backward through my office door while he strains against them toward me. “You took everything from me! Twice!”
“Be grateful I still see you with a father’s eyes and pray I never see you through the eyes of a pakhan. Pakhans do not suffer traitors to live.”
“Fuck—”
The door slams shut on his retort, and my hand aches from gripping the gun in my pocket.