22. Maxim
MAXIM
Pasha’s careful text ended discreetly… Miss Thea recognized the wine. She wasn’t well after.
I learned that night where the wine came from. Pasha was right. Thea wasn’t well when she spoke of it.
My son infiltrated my home to frighten Thea and to prove that he could do it. I’m still deciding what to do about it when my assistant’s replacement announces Anya Sokolov.
“Let her in.”
I promised her the security would be less gentle. I keep my promises. My finger is on the desk phone before she clears the doorway. “Security to forty-two.”
“That’s fair,” she says, unbothered, heels clacking on my floor. No theater today. She does not go near my chair, does not unbutton her coat. “I need ninety seconds, Maxim.”
“You get sixty.”
“Your son wants to see his father.”
“He has a funny way of showing it.”
“San Bastien, on Green, the private suite upstairs. One hour from now. I booked it under my own name.” She sets a card on the desk, the restaurant’s. There’s nothing written on it. “Today, before he loses his nerve or finds better advice. There won’t be another.”
“Why are you delivering his invitations?”
She smiles with ice in her veins. “Because no one else in either house has the balls to do it.” A shrug, elegant. “Consider me a bridge. Bridges do not take sides.”
“Why today?”
“Because today he asked for my help.” Something in her tone thins, and underneath the polish there’s information she’s choosing not to hand me. “He’s not a patient man, your son. You have noticed.”
The security men arrive in the doorway. Fifty seconds.
“One hour. Bastien.” I look at the card and not at her. “Escort Miss Sokolov to the street.”
She goes without protest, chin high, and commands me between my two guards without looking back, “Wear something nice for him.”
I stand at the window where she last posed, and I give myself sixty seconds of my own. This is likely a trap. But knowing it’s a trap is the first step in evading one.
Bastien’s private room is brick and white cloth and one window over Green Street. Neutral, as promised. I arrive first and read the room out of habit.
One door. One window, no fire escape.
I take the seat facing the door. Klaus arrives eleven minutes late, believing it’s a power move.
He’s always pulled that bullshit. It’s nerves, but I don’t have the heart to tell him.
He’s dressed by someone else’s tailor. New watch, new confidence.
He drops into the chair across from me and spreads like he’s in his own living room.
“Dad, you look tired.”
“You look expensive.”
“Yeah, well.” He flags the waiter, orders a cognac, and pronounces it correctly for once. “Turns out there are people in this city who value me. Took thirty-one years to find them, but here we are.”
“I see.”
The cognac is served. He turns the glass, observes the legs running down the crystal, and I wait, as I don’t intend to speak first.
He cannot stand silence for long. “You want to know why. Go ahead. Ask me why.”
“I know why.”
“No. No, you think you know.” The glass comes down harder than the wood deserves. “I was nine years old, Dad. Nine.”
He counts it off one finger at a time, and his voice rises with each item.
“Mom dies, and you ship me to Switzerland with a trunk and a housekeeper’s phone number.
Birthdays were either a formal dinner of your choosing or a gift arriving by courier.
Christmas at Uncle Lev’s was like I was a dog sent to the kennel.
The head boy at school taught me to tie a tie. A tutorial video taught me to shave.”
“Niklaus—”
“Then you show up every few years to examine me, find me wanting, and leave again. The one time you hand me something real, you come home in the dark, humiliate me in front of the board, put me on a leash you call special projects, and fire me in front of security guards.”
“You were destroying—”
“So, I found people who actually respect me.”
He isn’t wrong about my flaws, and I won’t insult either of us by disputing it in a restaurant. “You’re wrong about Alexei, but right about me.”
He blinks. Whatever he expected, that wasn’t in it.
“About the boarding school. The birthdays. The distance. The rest of it. I made those mistakes, Niklaus, and I’ve made no peace with any of it. If this were a trial on my fatherhood, I would not mount a defense. I’m guilty of being a terrible father to you, and for that, I’m sorry. Truly.”
He waits for the reversal, the counterattack, the lecture.
“My mistakes were made in grief and fear, and they wounded you. But your mistakes are being made in vanity, with open eyes, and they wound the family.”
He shrugs as if he doesn’t care.
“I failed you, Niklaus, it’s true. But I never betrayed you, something you’ve been doing for three years for Alexei Sokolov’s house, and there’s no childhood on earth that makes that even.”
“That’s not, you don’t get to just—“
“I did not come to argue history, and I didn’t come to watch you drink cognac you did not pay for. I came to offer you a road back. There is one, and it will not be offered twice.”
The sneer lacks conviction. “Like the leash was a road?”
“A full confession. Everything, from the first Meridian Atlantic signature to whatever was said over the cognac at Mulberry Street. Full cooperation against Sokolov, given to me, used at my discretion.”
“You’re out of your mind, old man.”
I ignore him. “You do that, and you’re protected as my son, with a future in this family that we rebuild slowly and honestly. Starting from zero. Family suppers, family events. That’s the road home, Niklaus. It’s narrow and it’s uphill. But it’s the only path back.”
For one moment, his face forgets its script. He’s young and tired and tempted. Part of him wants this. His mouth opens.
Then it closes as he thinks better of my offer. “That’s generous. Truly. But I came with an offer too.” He leans back, arms wide along the chair, ever the showman. “You can keep the ports and all the business that runs in and out of them. Or you can keep the girl.”
Fuck. “What girl?”
“Don’t do that. Don’t play dumb. We’re above that, aren’t we? Didn’t you just promise me honesty a minute ago?”
“If you wanted honesty, then you shouldn’t have threatened what is mine.”
“You don’t get both, Dad. Give Sokolov the ports, or give Thea to me. That’s the offer.”
There’s a version of what happens next that lives behind my teeth for three full seconds. It ends with the white tablecloth turning red in spots. Gunshots are messy, inexact things. I can’t really predict how the blood will spray.
It shames me how fast the thought shoots through me.
He’s watching for it. That’s the point of this little show. My son wants to hurt me. That’s what all of this is about, even though he would never admit it.
I take the napkin from my lap, fold it in thirds, and place it beside the untouched water glass. “You may be thirty-one, Niklaus, but you have a lot of growing up to do.”
“Excuse me—”
“I’ve tried, but you keep giving me reasons not to.
” I stand and button my suit jacket. “If you were grown, your entire life wouldn’t be about your father.
You would’ve processed your grief and your anger, either on your own or with a therapist, and you would make your life about you instead of the wounds that I gave you.
That’s what men do, and I’m sorry I wasn’t around to teach you that. ”
“You are out of your fucking mind—”
“Tell Alexei I decline the offer.”
His nostrils flare. “You don’t get to decline shit! It’s one or the other!”
“Tonight I offered you a road home, and you answered with another man’s message. Always making your life about some other man instead of yourself. A pity that you have turned from my son into Sokolov’s errand boy.”
I step out of the restaurant, where Lev’s car is parked at the curb. I avoid looking back at the window, even though I sense Niklaus inside. Resenting me.
Lev asks nothing for ten blocks. The city slides past, indifferent. Eventually, his patience wears thin. “Well?”
“He is a Sokolov now.”
His face falls as he drives. “I hate this.”
“No more than I do.”
He sighs. “Next steps?”
“I go home, and I’ll think about it in the morning.”
“Understood.”
But he doesn’t. Lev has had romances, but never long-term. Never children. He cannot understand what it means to me to hold Thea. That I want to hear her voice before the next shoe falls.