19. Thea
THEA
Heaven looks a lot like a doctor’s office.
White walls. A vitals monitor blinking to itself. A blood pressure cuff on a hook, cabinets with little steel handles. I’m in a real bed under a quilt that doesn’t belong in a medical facility, and the quilt smells like the estate’s lavender detergent.
So, not heaven. Vernigora country. And the smells are still killing my stomach.
The second thing I notice is Maxim, asleep sitting up in a chair beside the bed. Collar open, jaw silvered with stubble. His right hand rests on the blanket near mine. He looks ten years younger asleep and a century more tired.
I’ve to swallow to wet my throat enough to speak. “Where am I?”
He’s awake instantly and on his feet. “The clinic.”
“What clinic?”
“I keep a clinic on the property. Dr. Rappaport stays in a cottage past the greenhouse, and the clinic occupies its ground floor.” He pours water from a carafe and hands it to me. “You fainted in the orchard. Do you remember anything?”
“Cold ground. Not much more.” I do a body scan. Sore but present, an IV line taped to the back of my hand. “You have a clinic. Of course, you have a clinic. Does the greenhouse have an embassy?”
“The greenhouse has tomatoes and strawberries for most of the year. Not an embassy.” He takes the empty glass.
“Men in my work cannot always use hospitals. Rappaport has been here fifteen years. There’s no better doctor within a hundred miles, and before you ask, yes, he has delivered babies. Four. One in a snowstorm.”
My gut tightens. “Why would I ask that?”
“You were going to ask that eventually.”
He isn’t wrong, but I let it go, because something is wrong with him.
I know this man’s faces. The boardroom face, the garage face, the face he wears when he loses control on purpose. This is none of them.
His eyes are bloodshot. A crease is pressed into his cheek from the chair, but that’s not it. His hand keeps almost reaching for mine and pulling back, and his mouth is tight. Crow’s feet linger at the corners of those frosted blue eyes.
He looks scared. Truly scared.
It hits me all at once. “You know.”
“Dr. Rappaport found it in your bloodwork.” His voice is careful. “He didn’t know it was news.”
I look at the ceiling. There goes my graceful reveal, dead on arrival, killed by a lab panel. “Oh.”
“Thea. I owe you an apology before anything else gets said.” His jaw works.
“I assumed you had prevention handled. I never asked. A man my age, and I never asked… I behaved no better than a horny teenager, didn’t think…
and now you are five weeks pregnant in a war I brought to your door.
This is my doing. All of it. I’m so sorry. ”
“Max, it takes two people to—”
“It takes two people, yes, but not when one of them has enemies who peel faces.” He stands. He can’t sit still, and he goes to the window and comes back. “Do you understand what I did? Alexei wanted leverage on me, and I’ve handed him a pregnant woman.”
“Max—”
“When he learns, he will not see a complication. He will see a gift. I’ve made you the most valuable target he could ever ask for, and I did it in a hotel room because I was a fucking selfish asshole.”
The monitor blips. I’ve never heard him talk this fast. “Maxim—”
“So, here is what happens now.” He sits, elbows on knees. “I’m going to end Alexei Sokolov. Not contain him. End him. And before I move against him, we marry. Thursday.”
“We—what?”
“I would do it sooner, but thought you’d want to recover first. We’ll keep it small, here in the orchard, if the weather holds.
Father Grigori can drive up to perform the ceremony.
He baptized me, and he’s discreet. Your sister can stay here Wednesday night.
I’ll send a plane. A small one. Nothing alarming. ”
He’s not making sense. “Just hang on a second—what are you talking about?”
He meets my gaze with a look that could level a building.
“When I go after Alexei, it may go wrong. Men die on the hunt, better men than me, and if it goes wrong, a wife inherits everything faster than anyone else. The company, the accounts, the buildings, all of it will be yours. No lawyer on earth able to touch it, no matter Niklaus’s objections. ”
My head throbs. “Stop—”
“Unmarried, you are a former employee with a complicated story. Married, you are untouchable whether I live or I don’t. Rings are the only difficulty on the timeline, but there’s a man on 47th Street who owes me a favor and works fast, so it won’t be a problem—“
“Max. Stop.” I sit up straighter, and the quilt pools in my lap. “This isn’t happening. No.”
He goes still. “Thursday doesn’t work for you?”
“No to all of it.”
Something shutters behind his eyes. The fear doesn’t leave. A wall goes up in front of it. “Then Saturday.”
“Oh my God, Maxim, no.”
“I’m telling you I may die doing what must come next, and I’m trying to make my death useful to you and our child, and you’re quibbling about the calendar—”
“You proposed to me with your own funeral!” Louder than I planned. “That’s not a proposal, Max. That’s estate planning with cake and a pretty dress!”
His frown lines go deeper than I thought. Or maybe it’s the unflattering overhead lighting in here. “It is protection—”
“This is not happening. Get it through your head.”
His jaw tightens. He stands, walks to the window, looks out at the dark, and for a minute the only sound is the monitor and my pulse in my ears. To the window, he grumbles, “You’re refusing my proposal.”
“I’m refusing to plan a life around your death.
” I pat the edge of the bed, and after a long pause, he comes and sits, careful of my legs.
Up close, the fear is still there, and that’s what undoes me.
“Here’s my counteroffer. We’re honest with each other.
Every day, even when it’s ugly. We try, every single day, to figure out this thing between us. Whatever this turns out to be.”
He’s quiet for a breath. When he speaks again, there’s dust in his throat, scratching up his voice. “And?”
“Anything that happens between us happens because we want it. Organically. Not because there could be a baby. And definitely not because you’ve scheduled your own death for easy paperwork.
” I take his hand in mine. “If we end up somewhere, we end up there for us. That’s the only reason to do any of it. ”
He studies me for a long moment. I brace for the counter-counter. I’ve watched this man spend forty minutes improving a catering contract. And then, as simple as anything, he says, “Agreed.”
I blink. “Just like that?”
“You asked for honesty and effort. I’m capable of both, and I’ve no interest in a wife who was cornered into a chapel.” One corner of his mouth lifts. “Also, you have thrown crockery at me. I take your refusals seriously.”
A laugh gets out of me, and it pulls something loose in my chest that’s been knotted since the bathroom counter. “That’s not true. If I had thrown it at you, I wouldn’t have missed.”
He raises his brows in silent question.
“Two years of high school softball.”
“Ah.” He tucks a strand of hair behind my ear, and his hand stays at my jaw longer than the errand required. The rest of that tension subsides from his touch alone. “Understand one thing. The proposal does not expire. It converts to a standing option, exercisable by you, at any time, in any place.”
“Romantic.”
He sits back. “Your turn. You said honesty.”
“That’s right. Honesty, starting now.” I fold my hands on the quilt. “Tell me about the Yakuza, Maxim. There’s all sorts of evidence in the study and your office. Probably other spots in the house. And I want to know the rest of the business, because I’m done with surprises.”
The room changes temperature. Not colder. More awake. “You’re a thorough guest.”
“I’m an unbearable guest, but if you were going to set me up to inherit your world, I would need to know all of this anyway, wouldn’t I?”
“That’s a fair point.” So, he begins without a lecture about snooping, which I appreciate.
“Real estate. Money made in certain trades cannot be spent until it is cleaned, and cleaning requires legitimate assets at scale. I’ve those.
Buildings, developments, logistics contracts.
Organizations pay for access to that legitimacy. ”
“The cartels pay you.”
“The cartels are clients. Not partners. There is a difference, and I keep it clear. I wash proceeds through property. I charge heavily. I’m very good at it.”
“And Japan?”
“The same service, reversed. When I built the Pacific routes, the Yakuza provided what I provide here. Cover, introductions, protection while I was a stranger in their ports. There is a kumicho in Osaka, an old man now. He likes to be called Sensei by foreigners.” He smirks to himself.
“He’s the nearest thing I’ve to a friend outside this family, and if you ever meet him, he’ll pretend to speak no English but understand every word you say. He finds it very funny.”
“How does a Bratva Pakhan make friends with a kumicho?”
“Years of courting him. The first year, tea and the weather. The second year, tea in his garden. The third year, tea, and at the end of it he slid a contract across the table that he had drafted months earlier. Patience is his entire business, Thea. You cannot rush Sensei, so I took my time. I paid my respects. And I’ve been rewarded. ”
I sit with all of it. “But… Yakuza, Maxim. They’re dangerous—”
He chuckles. “As am I. You’ve known that for a while, and don’t seem that put off by it.”
“Should I be scared of them? Your clients. Your kumicho. Any of it.”
He takes my hand, folding my fingers into his. “No. My connections do not touch what’s mine. You have nothing to fear from them.”
“Max—”
“You’re mine to protect now. Both of you.” His hand tightens. “And I do not fail. Not at this. Whatever else I’ve failed at, I won’t fail you.”
I want to believe him. Wanting isn’t the same as believing.
But for tonight, I’ll let it be.