16. Maxim
MAXIM
Lev closes my office door, turns his phone face-down on the desk, and pours two glasses of Armenian brandy. “The ports. It’s started.”
“Tell me.”
“There was a customs hold on two of our containers at Newark. Paperwork queried that has never been queried in nine years. The next day, the crane crew on Berth Fourteen worked at half speed. We had to call a mechanic to come fix it. Suddenly, the shop steward developed a toothache and could not be reached. Two days later, he bought a vacation cabin in the Swiss Alps.”
“Bribed. And bribed well.”
“This morning, an insurance surveyor walks our pier in Elizabeth, taking photographs of bollards.” He drinks.
“Any one of them is nothing. Together they are a picture.”
“A test, I think.” A long swig. “Four years, Maxim. He wants to know who you are now.” Lev turns his glass a quarter turn.
“He knows who I am.”
“I’ve handled the small ends. But the probing will continue and escalate, because Alexei has never let sleeping dogs lie.”
“Let him probe. It’s all he’s got. He will wear himself out.”
“And when the small tests run out, he will try a larger one. A container that goes missing. A truck that has an accident. Something with a cost attached, to see what you charge him for it.” Lev studies the brandy.
“It’ll cost him more than he expects.”
“Or,” Lev says, and sets the glass down, and squares his shoulders. “There is the old way, Maxim. The cleaner way. Anya is still single.”
“No.”
“Twenty-four, educated in Geneva, a true beauty. She’s already running his legitimate holdings, and by every account, she has twice the mind her father has.”
“Bully for her.”
He takes a breath, but I see the argument in his mouth. His lips tighten in a particular way while he plans to talk me into something.
“A marriage ends the war before it truly begins. It’s how the old families did it, and I’d be failing you as sovetnik if I didn’t put it on the table.”
“Lev. The subject is closed. It stays closed if Alexei himself proposes it himself. Move to the next item.”
A lesser counselor would push. A pettier man would sulk. Lev looks at me for one long moment across the brandy. “Next item, then.” He reaches into his jacket. “You should see these before anyone else decides you should.”
Photographs again. He likes physical evidence over digital. I lay them out on my desk and turn on the desk lamp to see them more clearly.
I wish I hadn’t turned on the desk lamp.
A restaurant I do not recognize, Brighton Beach by the signage. My son at a corner table, animated, gesturing with a fork. Across from him is Ruslan Volkov, the man who has managed Sokolov’s shipping interests for a decade.
The second photograph is a parking lot at night. Klaus leans against a black G-wagon, talking with two men I can name and one I cannot. The two I can name are criminals that Alexei bought a judge for.
Third photograph, the same restaurant, different night, different jacket. Different criminal across the table from Klaus.
The dates in the corners span the eleven days since I fired him. “It would appear that he took his firing rather hard.”
“He surfaced in their orbit within seventy-two hours of being fired,” Lev says, pouring more brandy into his glass.
“Whether he went to them or they came to him, my people cannot yet say. For what it is worth, in the first photograph he is doing all the talking, and Ruslan is doing all the listening, and that particular arrangement has never once ended well for the talker.”
“No. It has not.” Everyone knows what Ruslan does to talkers.
Eleven days. That’s all it took before my son walked himself into the one dining room in this city where his surname is worth more dead than alive. He’s playing a dangerous game.
He has picked a family. It’s not mine.
I stand at the window for a while after Lev leaves. The city flows, taillights, bridges, ten million people going home to rooms where nobody betrays each other.
My brandy sits untouched. There’s work on the desk. There’s always work on the desk.
I have a son at Ruslan’s table. A war simmering at my piers. A marriage refused.
I want to forget tonight. Forget it all. The toothaches, the bollards, the fork in my son’s hand. What does forgetting look like? Not whiskey. Not work. Not the gymnasium in my building’s basement.
Her. It has looked like her every night this week.
I have the car brought around.
The estate’s quiet when I arrive this late. The ground floor banked to embers. Pasha’s silhouette straightening by the east stair as I pass. Under her door, a line of lamplight.
I stand in my own hallway in my coat, fifty-six years old, Pakhan of a family at the edge of a war, and I knock like a supplicant.
She opens the door in a T-shirt worn thin and reading glasses I didn’t know about, a pen pushed into her hair.
Behind her, the bed is covered in my company’s paperwork.
The sight of that, of her, the glasses, my son’s wreckage spread across her blankets, undoes some final knot the brandy never reached.
“Might I come in?”
“Maxim,” she says, taking me in, coat and all. “You look like the picture they use for bad news headlines.”
“It has been a long day.”
“Well… Mine was fine, thanks for asking. Your son labels things like a lunatic with a grudge against a label maker, but I found the pattern in the invoices, which you’d know if you answered my texts.
Come in.” She steps back, and then she looks at me again, closer, the glasses coming off. “What happened?”
“I would prefer not to discuss it.”
“That good, huh?” She stands there, reading me the way she reads a room she is about to run, then pulls the pen out of her hair and tosses it onto the nightstand.
“Okay. Come here. But I should warn you—you’re wearing your negotiating face, and I’ve spent three weeks watching you with it, and honestly, I think it’s a bluff.
I don’t think the control goes all the way down. ”
“Thea—”
“There it is. The voice.” She backs toward the bed, one step, unhurried, her chin up, eyes bright with intent.
“The careful hands. The measured everything. You’ve been managing me since the archive, and I keep wondering what happens if the management fails.
What does it take for you to lose control?
A war? A bad day at the office?” Another step back.
Her mouth curves. “Or can you just not do it? Is that the secret? All mask, no—”
The paperwork survives because I sweep it to the floor first. That is the last courtesy of the evening.
I take her wrist and pull her into me. Her heat warms me through, as if my blood wasn’t already boiling. My hand finds the hair at her nape and closes, tilting her face up, and the sound she makes cuts through the noise. “Say stop,” I tell her against her mouth, “and everything stops.”
“Don’t. Don’t give me Good Guy Max.” Her hands are already at my collar, wrecking the knot of my tie. “You can lose control with me.”
I can’t. She just doesn’t know that.
I take the ruined tie from her hands, and understanding arrives in her face one delicious second before I spin her, catch both wrists at the small of her back, and bind them with the silk.
Her breath goes ragged against the wall where I put her, cheek to the plaster, and I strip her from behind, shirt shoved up, sleep shorts down, my mouth at her ear taking its time while my hands do not. Her hot skin is addictive silk.
When my hand skates over her round ass, she whispers, “Oh God.”
I bend her over the foot of the bed with her wrists still bound and open her with my fingers, spreading her wide. Pink and glistening for me already. I blow on her there, and she swears into the blankets. Those dirty words get louder when I taste her like that, all helpless and at my mercy.
Sweet candy heaven on my tongue.
She dances against me and every time she gets close, I stop, so she calls me something filthy. Makes me smile every time.
I wait, and she learns her manners.
The third time she’s past all reason. She moans something that has surrendered language, and only then do I unleash myself and drive into her from behind. I keep one hand on her bound wrists, one on her hip.
There’s no patience left in me anywhere.
It’s not gentle. My hips slap against her ass, and she grunts like a wayward beast. The headboard knocks the wall, and behind the pleasure of it all, I vaguely wonder whether Pasha hears the sound.
Whether he would storm in here, in worry or jealousy.
Whether I would bother to stop.
She fights me for control the entire way down, and loses, and wins by losing. When I feel her start to break, I reach around and work her clit in rough circles. “Come for me, bratty girl.”
“No!”
“You want to. I can feel it. Come for me.”
“No!”
“Guess I’ll have to make you.” I dig down with my cock, grinding against her G-spot while I work her clit in that way she craves. “Right… fucking… now!”
She does, hard, wailing into the mattress, clamping around me so fiercely that I follow her over with my teeth in the birthmark at her nape and nothing in my head at all.
Nothing. A damn miracle.
I fumble to untie her wrists, then scoop up her shaking legs so her body is on the bed fully now. I rub the feeling back into her hands, and she flexes her fingers, face still in the blankets. This is all I ever want to do.
“There he is,” she says, hoarse. “I knew you had it in you. Better?”
“Yes.” Mostly. But she doesn’t need to know that.
“Towel?”
“Right.” I nearly tumble over my own feet when I try to stand on my way to her bathroom. There, I find a hand towel that is not going to be used for hands.
She’s asleep before I return. I stay awake for a while, cleaning her up first before I allow the relaxation to seep in. Once it does, it drags me under the weight of my last thoughts.
The piers, Alexei, my son at the wrong table.
Tomorrow’s problems do not get to haunt me tonight. Tonight, I kiss her nape birthmark and find solace in the press of her body.