23. Thea
THEA
The bump arrives without warning. I catch it in the full-sized mirror after my shower. A distinct, small curve where I used to be plain soft.
So, it begins.
Twelve weeks, Dr. Rappaport says. The size of a lime, according to the internet.
Last night Maxim talked to it for a full ten minutes in Russian, something about the sea and a boat and a name I didn’t catch.
I pretended to sleep while I listened in.
I was tempted to tell him I know a little, but I realize that’s not a fight I’m up for.
Today has something else in mind for me. It starts with the litter box.
I’m halfway to the mudroom with the scoop when Galina materializes. I don’t know how she does it, but she always knows where I am.
“No,” she says in that tone that brooks no argument. “Not you. Toxoplasma. Bad for the baby. I will do the box now. You do not need to think about the box. The box is finished for you.”
“Galina, I will be fine—”
But she’s already walking away with my scoop, my box, my last unsupervised chore, and Potato happily trots after her like a little defector.
It’s not about the box anymore. Now, I have to resist taking the stairs two at a time.
The coffee was switched to decaf without even a chat.
Soft cheeses disappeared from the kitchen overnight, as if they’d been deported.
The whole house seems to have shifted around the lime, and I’m the last to be asked about my own midsection.
I might feel resentful if it weren’t also kind of comforting—to know it’s the thing I spent twenty-seven years not quite getting.
They’re taking care of me. Of the lime. And parts of that are annoying, but it’s also kind of nice.
Then there’s the garden. With Pasha.
For weeks, he quietly observed my walks from a respectful distance, pretending to be interested in the tree line while really taking in everything about me.
This week, he’s no longer hiding it. Now, he joins me at the terrace doors, walking beside me along the gravel paths at a gentle pace—like someone carefully guiding something precious and fragile, which, according to the doctor, I might very well be.
I tell him, on the third lap, that he doesn’t need to do this every day. “I’m walking in a circle inside a fenced area with dogs, cameras, and you. The cardio isn’t risky. If you can even call this cardio.”
“I enjoy the fresh air,” Pasha replies, gazing at the distance, and I notice his ears turn a distinct shade of red I’ve grown familiar with.
“It’s November. The air’s trying to kill us both.”
“The cold, you mean? This is nothing compared to Russia.”
Pasha is good company, to be fair. He tells me about the dogs by name and temperament, which one is a coward, which one would die for you and which would only pretend to.
Then we usually talk about chess for a while, and he uses all the real terms, while not rolling his eyes when I still call the rook “castle” and knights “horsey guys.”
But I can’t be alone with my own head if I’m never alone, and my head has things it wants to work on.
And when I really think about it, Pasha worries me. A man does not volunteer for daily walks with a pregnant woman at a pace this careful unless something in him has tipped in a direction it shouldn’t.
His eyes never stay on mine longer than a second. He blushes for no reason around me. Maxim says he asked for the night rotation—notoriously, the worst rotation, according to him—and at this point, I’m wondering when the man sleeps.
I’m not going to embarrass him by calling him out.
So we do our laps, and I mention Maxim early and often.
I need that border between us, so he doesn’t get the wrong idea.
Pasha doesn’t seem bothered when I mention Maxim, and I don’t know if that’s because he thinks he can outcompete him for me, or what. He’s impossible to read completely.
It’s harmless. But it’s one more detail in this world that I cannot control, and it’s starting to wear on me.
By the fourth lap I’ve had enough of being walked like a valuable dog. “Thanks for the walk, Pasha. I need to go inside.”
“Too cold?”
“Yeah,” I lie. Truth is that I’m getting more weirded out by him by the day, and I have something else to occupy my time anyway. The paperwork.
I did not talk my way out of a Pennsylvania town of nine hundred people and onto an executive floor to spend my time being decorative. I’ve made the office mine during the days, fire lit, Potato planted on the windowsill.
I continue from where I stopped yesterday.
I looked into Meridian Atlantic, the ghost subsidiary, along with its shipping records—those that survived the shredder because I had already made copies.
It’s the one professional instinct I always trust—making duplicates—and listening to that instinct has never let me down.
I’ve been looking at these as a simple money issue.
A laundering shell moves product—by product, I mean the cartel clients Maxim mentioned, and the manifests are just the cover story wrapping around drugs.
I’ve been reading them mainly to track the money—linking each vague shipment to its offshore payment—to piece together a story a prosecutor might find useful.
But today, I’m focusing on the freight itself because something didn’t quite add up yesterday.
It’s the weights. Drugs are light when compared to a lot of other cargo.
But these recent shipments are heavy. Dense. The declared weights against the container dimensions give a cargo packed solid and low, sitting heavy, the kind of profile you get from metal and machined parts. Crates built to a specification instead of thrown together.
The buyers have also changed. For years, the endpoints were always the same laundering route—Cyprus, Dubai, Kabul, with shells feeding shells feeding shells. But over the past three months, the endpoints are different, and they aren’t banks anymore.
Instead, they are freight-forwarders located in places I had to look up on a map—transit points and grim logistics hubs where things get moved on and never actually sold. The final recipients go dark in a way that even Klaus’s lazy laundering never bothered to hide.
Heavy cargo. Buyers instead of banks. I sit back in Maxim’s chair with my hand on the lime and make my brain say the word it’s been circling for an hour.
Weapons.
Not drugs. Not cash. These shipments are weapons, moving under Vernigora cover. Legally, Maxim would be on the hook for this shit, and I will not let that stand.
Moreover, a man does not stockpile weapons to win a negotiation. Maybe Sokolov is just selling them—it’s possible. But selling them to repeat customers, for months at a time, seems like stockpiling.
At first, I thought it was a simple matter of a hard man leaning on another hard man to get a better price on some ports. But this has nothing to do with the ports themselves and everything to do with the cargo.
Alexei Sokolov has been stockpiling weapons near strategic places—Maxim’s ports and storage locations—and that’s the kind of staging that happens before a war. He isn’t planning to out-negotiate Maxim.
He’s planning to end him.
My tongue has gone parched. I want to be wrong about this. I need to be wrong about this.
Maybe the weights are padded for insurance. People pull that shit all the time, and Klaus is stupid enough to go along with anything as long as he profits from it.
Maybe it’s a typo. Maybe I’m grasping at straws.
I do the math over and over, but it comes up the same each time. Shipments with these weights and these internal structures could be either very specific tools or guns and armor. The destinations don’t require tools to be shipped to them—they have skilled machinists and their own manufacturing.
They don’t need anyone to ship those things to them. And tools certainly don’t usually have a single buyer conveniently located at each port Maxim controls.
But weapons probably do.
The fire pops. Potato lifts his head, checks the room, then sets it back down. My thoughts have gone somewhere ugly. The math is against us. But Maxim has no idea.
I have to fix that.