17. Thea
THEA
I wake up before I’ve been asleep an hour. There’s an ache settling into my wrists. My body is one deep satisfied throb.
Telling Maxim to lose control was the best idea I’ve had in a while.
But now, my head wants control. It’s just going.
The invoices on the floor. Whether Pasha or anyone else heard the headboard.
Klaus’s mislabeled folders. The tie, and the way it felt when he tied me with it.
What it means that the scariest man I know knocked on my door like an upset teenager, and what it means that I let him in.
That I wanted him to come in and be with me and tell me his problems.
Not that we talked much.
His heartbeat is slow and even under my ear. Mine is running a full staff meeting levels. I hold still. Deer-quiet. Maybe if I don’t move, my brain will run out of tabs.
“You’re awake—”
I startle in his arms, but they close in around me. Some stupid part of my brain likes that.
“I didn’t mean to frighten you.”
“You didn’t. I wasn’t—I was awake. My brain doesn’t have a well-developed off switch. It has a dimmer, and the dimmer’s on the fritz.”
His fingers start moving through my hair, slow. For a while that’s all. Soon, it’s all that matters. I’m nearly yawning from his simple touch.
And then, out of the blue, he says, “Her name was Irina.”
“Who?”
“Niklaus’s mother. We were twenty when we met.
She threw a snowball at the back of my head because, she claimed to her dying day, I looked too serious for a boy my age.
” A breath moves through him, almost a laugh, worn smooth from time’s erosion.
The pain in his voice is the tired kind, there but without structure, like a ruined mansion with half a roof and missing walls.
“We were married at twenty-two. Niklaus came shortly after.”
“And then?” Soft as I can make it.
“A pain in her side turned out to be ovarian. There was a year of hospitals, and then there were no more hospitals because they couldn’t do anything for her. There was no enemy, no bullet or poison. Nothing I could pay or fight. A cell divides wrong, and the world ends, and the doctors apologize.”
I don’t say anything. There’s nothing to say, and he doesn’t need my nothing dressed up as something.
“Klaus was ten. He had her laugh. Her exact laugh. I would hear it from another room, and my heart would soar for a breath, then stop working entirely.” His hand stills in my hair.
“My grief wasn’t… not the dignified quiet of a sad man.
It was the kind that comes out of the hands.
That needed a target. And there was a boy in my house with her laugh, and I was afraid. ”
“Of hurting him?”
“I couldn’t imagine doing that, and yet, I was terrified of it. Of what I was becoming in that house, living with her ghost. Of him growing up watching it, learning it, thinking that is what a man does with pain…” A slight shudder in his breath says it all.
“So, you sent him away.”
“Boarding schools. The best ones, Switzerland, then Choate. Summers with Galina here. Holidays and birthdays, we managed dinners in restaurants with elaborate gifts.” Regret coats his every word. “I told myself it was protection. Distance from the business, distance from me.”
“And every year the distance got easier to maintain.”
“And harder to cross. By the time I trusted myself again, my son was a stranger who flinched into a smile whenever I entered a room.” The ceiling gets his next words, not me.
“Everything he is, I built. The vanity, the hunger to be seen, the performing instead of working. A boy nobody watches learns to make people watch.”
“Max—”
“Whatever he’s done now, the first signature on it is mine. This is my fault. All of it.”
I could argue the details. I could say Klaus is thirty-one and owns his own choices, and it would bounce off this man like rice at a wedding. You can’t argue a man out of a verdict he spent decades reaching.
I switch gears. “Can I tell you a weird fact about me?”
The pause has a frown in it. “Certainly.”
“I can’t sleep next to people. Ever. Not once in my life.
Boyfriends, girlfriends at sleepovers when I was twelve, my sister on road trips.
She came the closest to breaking that streak in me.
But still, no. When there’s somebody else in the bed, I lie there rigid until sunrise, wide awake and deeply uncomfortable. ”
“Is that right?”
“Your son and I dated for eight months, and I slept over maybe six times and hated all six. Can’t really call it sleeping over if you don’t sleep, right?”
A soft chuckle out of him. “I suppose not.”
“I used to leave at two in the morning and tell him I had early meetings. There were no early meetings, Max. There was just me, needing my own bed like other people need oxygen.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“Because I sleep next to you. I go out like a light when I’m with you. And I wake up hours later, drooling on your scar.”
“Didn’t notice.”
I squint at him.
He gives up with that smirk of his. “Very well. I noticed the drool. Seemed ungentlemanly of me to mention it.”
I snort and prop up on his chest to look him in the eyes. “My body has spent twenty-seven years running a background check on every person who gets near me while I’m unconscious, and everybody failed. Everybody but you. The legitimately scary one.”
He smiles fully now. “Is that my nickname in your head? The legitimately scary one?”
“Sometimes, smart ass. So, you can’t be as terrible as you think you are. I could never in my life fall asleep next to a bad man. Not a truly bad one. My nervous system wouldn’t allow it.”
Silence. Then his chest moves under me, and a sound comes up out of him that I’ve never heard before, low and rusty, and I realize Maxim Vernigora is chuckling. Truly chuckling. In the dark. In my bed. At me.
“I’m unsure of the standards by which your nervous system measures safety, especially considering you tried to escape my estate when you know there is a dangerous man hunting you. But I will take your advice under advisement. Time for sleep, Thea.”
“Hey, I had a good point there—”
“You did. I’m not saying otherwise, merely stating all the facts.” His arm pulls me in tighter, and he presses his mouth into my hair, and the last thing I register is his heart under my ear, slowing toward even. “Sweet dreams.” Darkness swallows me whole.
I wake up alone.
Well, not quite alone, because Potato has taken the warm spot where a pakhan used to be. He’s curled into an unfrosted cinnamon roll with his bent tail over his nose. When I lift my head, he opens one yellow eye, confirms I don’t have food, and closes it.
No Max. No note. Okay. Fine. Wars don’t run themselves.
Then I sit up, and my stomach sits up half a second later, on a delay, like bad video conferencing. Must have overslept. Time for breakfast.
Galina made the good eggs, the soft ones with dill, that I’ve devoured for a week. Two bites in and my body says no. “That’s weird.”
“What’s this weird?” she asks from the kitchen while she cleans up.
“You know how I love your eggs?”
“Da.”
“I can’t…” I set my fork down. “Can’t eat. My stomach isn’t cooperating.”
“Toast?” she asks as she delivers my coffee.
But my stomach protests the mere thought. “I think I’ll skip breakfast, actually.
Lunch is the same story. Galina’s chicken soup, which I’ve dreamed about, smells like a swamp today. An old one. I eat four crackers and push the bowl around, and Galina watches from the doorway with no expression whatsoever.
By dinner I’ve stopped pretending. I take one look at the roast chicken and excuse myself, because everything smells. Smells surround me. I can’t escape them.
Outside. I need to go outside. The autumn garden has cold, clean air. That should do the trick.
But the garden ambushes me with wet leaves going to rot, the last roses doing their dying-heavy perfume thing, chrysanthemums that smell like pennies, all of it an assault.
Every scent arrives in high definition, each with its own version of nausea.
One lap and I’m back inside, breathing through my mouth like a woman escaping a candle store.
If I get to my room, at least I can control the smells.
I bolt for that heavenly space, but going down the hall, I catch a faint whiff of smoke. And it smells like a cure.
The fireplace in the study is lit, dry oak and char and warm stone, goes through me like a hand smoothing a wrinkled sheet. My stomach unclenches for the first time since the eggs.
I don’t question gift horses. I get my book, and I install myself in the leather chair by the fire, and for one hour I’m a Victorian invalid taking the cure, and it works. It works so well that I get comfortable. And comfortable is my doorway to snooping.
The study has cabinets, and one drawer is unlocked and shouldn’t be. Not if Maxim intended to keep secrets from me.
Inside are account books. Hand-kept, older than the company files I work in, and folders behind them. A small treasure trove.
Within ten minutes, I know things I would pay real money to not know. This is not a treasure. It’s a trap.
Shipping schedules for the West Coast ports matched to payments from companies whose names end in syllables I recognize from Mandy’s documentary. Kai. Gumi.
Wire transfers braided through Tokyo and Osaka and a bank in Vanuatu I assume at first is a typo. Cargo that is only ever called cargo, moving between his piers and theirs.
The photograph in the office wasn’t a souvenir. It was a board meeting. The Yakuza aren’t a rumor attached to my boss. They’re a column in his books.
I cannot keep ignoring this.
My curse, which once earned me employee of the month, now ruins my life.
I recall what I read—almost all of it on the first try—vendor numbers from two years ago, Klaus’s calendar from last March, page forty-one of a PDF.
My mind captures these images involuntarily, and there’s no erasing them.
Ever. No matter how much I want to forget.
I sit back down by the fire, because I never wanted to know any of that, and if I keep going, I’ll learn more un-unlearnable things, and I don’t want to. I don’t want to know any of this.
Stupid curiosity.
Between the eggs and the garden and that drawer, I need a nap. I climb the stairs on legs made of wet rope, promising myself sleep.
I’m reaching to wash my face when I see it. On the bathroom counter, square in the middle, where it cannot be missed, is a white pharmacy bag.
No note. No name. Galina doesn’t leave notes. But I have no doubt that it’s from her. Or what’s inside.
I unfold the paper bag’s crisply folded top and wonder. She saw me all day. She knows what it could be. I do, too. No other symptoms, given my age, and oh God, did she hear us? I don’t even know where her bedroom is here. She may have, and if so—
Yep. The bag has a pregnancy test.
I do the thing the box says. Pee on the stick. Wait three minutes. I sit on the cold edge of the tub, and I do not think about the drawers in the study, or Irina, or a man who sent his child away to protect them from himself.
I think about nothing. I grip onto nothing in my head with both hands, as hard as I can. I need nothing. I need this to be nothing.
And then, it’s not nothing. Two lines. Clear as can be.
Positive.