18. Maxim
MAXIM
I return to the estate at seven with the Newark problem half solved and a bottle of the Sancerre she mentioned once, and I find a house holding its breath.
Thea is at dinner and not at dinner.
She is beautiful, always, but tonight something is wrong. Her stick-straight brown hair has lost its glassy sheen. Smudges decorate the spaces beneath her eyes. The mild smile that always occupies her lips is gone.
She sits across from me with her disturbed plate. Disturbed, not emptying. She’s pretending to eat.
“How was your day?” Perhaps I’ll get an answer there.
Half a beat later, she mutters, “Fine.”
Is she ill? She’s pale, but she’s always paler than I recall.
Has Niklaus found a way to reach her? The phone I gave her reaches four people, and he’s not one of them.
“The Rotterdam contract closed this afternoon,” I offer.
She has tracked that contract for a month like a horse she bet on. But her only response is, “That’s great.”
“Aertsen sends his regards. He asked whether the woman from the gala had been promoted yet.”
“Sweet of him.”
“Do you think—”
She stands abruptly. “I’m sorry, but I have a terrible headache, and I’m not hungry. I’m going to bed.”
That’s it. That’s all I get for an excuse. Odd.
She zips out of the dining room and takes my appetite with her. I find Galina in the kitchen, drying the silver by hand.
“Something’s wrong with Thea. What do you know?”
Galina sets down the pot and folds the towel over the rail. “If you want to know about Thea, ask Thea.”
“Galina.”
“Maxim.” She challenges me with a glare. Challenging me to push her, something I never do. Not anymore. The last time I pushed Galina on a matter, she changed the house menu completely and served vintage English recipes for a month.
I don’t want a month of unseasoned boiled dinners, so I do the cowardly thing, and I ask Pasha.
He’s at the east stair, and he comes to attention. “Sir. Yes. One thing. Thea went out again after her nap, before you arrived. Said she wanted air.”
“Alone?”
“I kept a distance. It wasn’t a stroll, sir. She walked the orchard boundary. Slow, stopping, looking at the wall.”
“Looking at what on the wall?” A signal, perhaps from someone on the outside.
He hesitates. “The gardener’s gate. The one she used before. She stood a long time there. Then the tree line, the sight angles to the drive.” Tension rides his brow.
“Say the rest.”
“It looked like route work, sir. Like she was looking for another escape.”
A weight sits on my chest. But I won’t let him blame himself for that. “Thank you, Pasha. Say nothing to anyone.”
“Not even the other guards? They could—”
“No one.”
In the study, I sit down in the lamplight without turning on the fire. My head swims. What is this? Betrayal? Anger would be simpler. But it is not anger.
It is loss, arriving early.
She wants to leave. This isn’t a surprise. Not really. She’s wanted out of this since the moment I knocked on her door. This isn’t new information.
But I had thought things changed between us.
Had I misread her this badly? A woman who baits a man into losing his control does not fear him. A woman who sleeps like the drowned against a man’s chest when she does that with no one else… it means something, doesn’t it?
Or I wanted to believe it did.
I’ve never told anyone about Irina. Not the year of hospitals, not the fear of my own hands, not to Lev, not to a priest. Years of silence, unlocked by a woman doing paperwork in my bed with a pen in her hair.
What else could it be? I didn’t read her wrong. You can’t fake that.
I even tolerated the cat. The animal sat on the window seat through the entirety of the other evening’s proceedings, and I minded so little that I forgot it was there.
Well… That’s not completely true.
I minded slightly. It watched the entire time, and I’ve known interrogators with less presence. But I permitted it. I permit her everything. Why would she want to leave me?
Somewhere between a ruined shirt and a snowless October I’ve fallen, for a woman I’ve no business falling for. And I believed that the fall wasn’t one-sided.
She spent this evening measuring my wall for ways to leave.
Very well.
The truth of the matter is that my walls were always one option among several. There were other avenues available from the first night. Relocation, reconstruction, a guarded life elsewhere, expensive and complicated but buildable. Happens all the time.
But I presented the estate as the only door because I wanted to keep her safe. To keep her, period.
I called that desire “protocol” and made her believe my lie. The rest of it is true, of course. Alexei, Kirill, the danger of them, all real. But the cure to the disease? That’s the lie.
A lie she may never forgive, if she were to discover it. And then she would feel justified to leave.
Then again, she wants to leave as it is. Were she to learn the truth of the matter, she would demand to leave, and I couldn’t blame her.
She will leave safely, or she will stay freely. There’s no other arrangement I’m willing to own.
It takes two hours and four phone calls to men who ask no questions to build her that exit she so desperately wants. A new name with new documents. A passport, a driver’s license, a history, employment records for a communications manager from Harrisburg, references that will answer the phone.
A new home. A house in a coastal town in Portugal where an associate owes me a debt the size of a harbor.
Should she prefer to stay stateside, a duplex in Asheville held by a shell company will do nicely.
She won’t like that she’s not close to her sister, but she will like living, so that should help ease the burden of visitation travel.
An account in the new name, seeded deep, structured as an inheritance from a fictional aunt. Clean, boring.
A security team for my peace of mind.
It’s another dumb life, as she might call it, but it’s far safer than the one she has now. Her new documents give her darker hair and brown eyes—dye and contacts will do a lot of the heavy-lifting to complete her transformation.
I seal the folder and set it in the drawer that locks and sit back.
It’s done. A gourmet severance package of sorts.
It’ll take a day before the passport and driver’s license are delivered—I don’t have the proper printer for all of that, so I had to put in an order.
But once they’re in my hand, I’ll store them alongside everything else.
Thea will be protected and happy, which is all I can ask for, given the circumstances.
To hold her here is to lose her. To free her is to lose her slower, with her goodwill. There’s no answer in which I win, so minimizing the damage is the next best—
“Sir! Sir!” Pasha, from outside, his voice cracking open in a way I’ve never heard from him.
I’m out of the chair and through the terrace doors without a thought, because that is not a perimeter alert. That is a man screaming for help. “What is—”
“The orchard, sir, come quick! She fainted, but she’s breathing, I didn’t move her just in case. Hurry!” He races into the dark.
The orchard at night is cold grass, faint lantern light swinging through some of the trees until the orchard gives way to the forest. My footfalls are all I hear as I race to catch up, and suddenly, there’s Thea on the ground between the apple rows.
She’s on her side where Pasha eased her, one hand curled open by her cheek, and the world becomes that hand. She is listless, not here at all, even with her eyes half open.
Poison? Kirill? A dart, a fall, did she strike her head?
I’m on my knees in the grass with her pulse under my fingers before I’ve chosen to kneel, and the pulse is steady. “Any visible wounds? My night sight is poor—”
“Nothing I can see,” Pasha says.
There’s no blood, nothing but a fainted woman and wet grass. Her eyes flutter and find me, confused. “I’m on the ground?”
My heart resumes some function. I rasp out, “Yes.”
“Hmm.” Then, she’s out again, and I cannot think.
Until I can. “Doctor—”
“He’s on his way. I already paged him.”
Seconds later, Rappaport crosses from his cottage past the greenhouse, bag in hand, coat over pajamas.
Fifteen years on this property of bullet wounds sewn shut at the kitchen table, and he has never once asked a question that wasn’t medical.
His focus is his gift, and mine too, for I’ve none at the moment.
He briefly examines her, then orders, “Get her to my clinic. Now.”
We haul Thea’s limp body to the clinic, set her on his table, and stand back to watch him work.
An IV, blood draw, and all manner of things are checked out, all while I stand there helplessly passing him equipment as he asks for it.
Once he is done, he motions for me to join him in the clinic hallway.
Dr. Rappaport says, “She’s fine. Resting. You don’t need to stay.”
“Explain why she fainted.”
“Blood pressure on the low side, blood sugar low, too. Either alone, fine. Together, the ground comes up at you.” He checks a readout. “I ran the standard panel to be thorough. Iron adequate. Thyroid fine. Hydration poor, so she keeps the IV whether she likes it or not for now.”
“But.”
“But nothing sinister.” He is still reading the panel. “The hCG is elevated. Consistent with roughly five weeks. So, it all tracks, and the guidance changes.”
“The guidance?”
“Folic acid, no alcohol, small frequent meals, no sushi, no processed meats, the usual. I’ll arrange an obstetric ultrasound. Discreetly, I assume, as with everything in this house.”
“What—I don’t. What?”
He looks up from the readout into whatever is occupying my face. “Congratulations are premature this early, of course. But she’s pregnant, and healthy, and the faint is most likely nothing sinister.”
The world turns strobe-like. I’ve to stop blinking. “Come again?”
“Your guest is pregnant. Was this not… You should sit down.”
Five weeks. The Meridian was five weeks ago. What did he just say?
“Mr. Vernigora. Sit.”
I snap to his voice. “What did you just—”
He grabs my shoulders and shoves me into the seat behind me. “I already had one fainter on my table. I don’t need another.”
Truth is, my legs feel weak. Like my heart.
He passes me a cup of water from a dispenser at the end of the hall. “Drink.”
His tone says it’s not up for debate, so I drink. It’s the best thing I’ve tasted since Thea the other night. “Thanks.”
He nods once. “You turned green, and falling and hitting your head would not help anyone. Is the water helping?”
“Yes.”
“Good. I presume the patient is yours.”
She wouldn’t word it that way, but “She is.”
“Then I hope you figure out how to make her eat something, because no one wants a feeding tube. I will go check on her. You finish that water, then you can visit, too.” He leaves me there without waiting for a response.
The corridor is very long and very quiet, which is likely what I need right now, even though I do not want to be alone with my thoughts at the moment. They’re unpleasant.
I fucked up. In the worst way possible.
When it comes to sex, I’m usually very careful. Being that Thea is as put-together as she is, I assumed she was on birth control. It never even occurred to me to ask, because I trusted that she had the matter in hand.
I’m as much of a fool as Niklaus, it would seem.
It’s one thing to keep her under guard here. It’s another to put a baby in a target. The pregnancy will not dissuade Alexei’s wrath. If anything, he would be delighted to learn of her pregnancy, because he will know that hurting her now would hurt me even more.
I made her a bigger target. What the fuck do I do now?