24. Maxim
MAXIM
Thea’s second sentence takes the warmth out of the car. “Max. The shipments aren’t drugs. They’re weapons.”
Her first sentence wasn’t a greeting. It was a demand to be on speakerphone, because she knows Lev is with me. She walks us through it. The weights, the container profiles, the buyer chains that die at transit hubs, all of it. I wish was wrong. Thea is many things, but wrong is rarely one of them.
“How sure are you?”
“Sure enough that I’m wondering whether the hospital bag is about to be a bugout bag. Come home safe.” The line goes dead, and Lev stares at me across the car. Neither of us says anything for a mile.
So, it is not a negotiation. Since my return to the States, Alexei has been toying with me. Delaying me from noticing what he’s truly up to. He’s bought an arsenal and stored it across the globe near my ports. Staged the weapons for a simultaneous attack.
It’s a very risky move. The more you move weapons, the more likely they are to be noticed by officials you cannot bribe. The risk-averse Alexei would not risk exposure unless he thought he would win.
Once in the office, we set about figuring out the date of his attack.
“The ribbon-cutting,” Lev says. “It has to be. Alexei on the invitation list, the Port Authority chairman with him and us on the dais, press on the risers. If Alexei is there, too, he’ll appear to be an innocent witness to your murder.
A bystander. It’s the perfect day to level an attack of this size.
The other attacks across the globe will be blamed on other people—he likely has scapegoats lined up already—and since you’re the only person who could contradict his story… ”
I look at the dais picture for a long time. It fits. Alexei’s performance will go down in history. All he has to do is watch me get shot.
“Then we let him commit to it. I will attend, announced, front row. I’m the bait the event is built to catch, so we let him catch me.” I move three markers across the map.
Lev’s brow lines. “You have a plan that does not include your death, I presume.”
“We salt the crowd, the risers, the stacks, the water. We take his shooters out before the ribbon is cut.”
“You are making yourself the target.”
“I’m the target regardless. I will be sure to stand very close to Alexei before the event happens, and I will remain at his side the entire time.
Let him sweat whether his sharpshooters can get a clean shot.
” It makes me smile to think of that bastard worrying the whole time, while my men take his shooters out.
“I hate this.” He sighs at the dais picture, because he knows there’s no other option.
“Then find me the version where I’m not the target.”
He studies the map for a long time. “There isn’t one. He built all of this on you.” When he looks at me, Lev’s aged another five years. “You’re putting a lot of trust in our men, Maxim.”
“Comes with the job, doesn’t it?”
Another sigh. “Right.”
“Thea doesn’t leave my estate. Not for any reason. If I’m on that pier being a target, my house must remain her safe fortress. I want double the guards that day at both locations.”
“She found the weapons,” Lev points out. “She won’t like staying home for this.”
“She’ll be alive to resent me.” I look at him until he nods.
He goes to set up security, and I take a moment to breathe before I return to battle strategy. But my mind circles the drain after a while, so I go home to my office. I cannot stop thinking of what comes next. After me.
There, I open the locked drawer and take out the two documents I pray I’ll never have to use. The first is my will. There’s a child now, and I write the child in so they are provided for in perpetuity, and Thea, because she’s more than earned it.
The second is her exit package. If the pier goes wrong, Lev puts her and the child on a plane within the hour, gone and safe. I wish there was more I could do for them in the event of my death, but there’s only so much a man can do.
Then I call my son.
Four rings, which means he’s looking at my name and deciding. Or perhaps, he’s with his new father now. Laughing that I’d reach out to him.
In the end, it doesn’t matter why he lets it go to voicemail. He’s made his choice. The tone sounds.
“Niklaus,” I pause, as the words I had prepared escape me.
Thea has recently encouraged me to embrace honesty, which now guides my expression.
“I sincerely apologize. For the boarding schools. For the couriers. For the years I believed I was providing protection, and you perceived it as abandonment…”
I hate the truth of it.
“You were right. I wasn’t the father you required, and I knew this even as I failed to fulfill that role. I knew better, yet I did not do better, and this regret will remain with me for the remainder of my days.
I turn the pen in my fingers.
“This is my final confession and apology. You are thirty-one, having been a man much longer than you were my boy. Whatever I damaged in your childhood, the man you became built himself into someone who dines with his family’s enemy and threatens a pregnant woman.
No childhood wound justifies this. That was your choice as a grown man. ”
The fire ticks. I make myself finish it.
“You picked a new family, and you picked badly. So I will treat you as a man who chose the other side.” A breath.
“I loved you before you were anything at all. I will always love the boy you were and the man you had started to become. But I don’t recognize you anymore, Klaus. You are no son of mine.”
I end the call before my voice can tell on me.
Then I go upstairs to the one room in this house that has nothing to do with the war.
She’s awake, reading in the lamplight. When she sees me, she lifts the blanket without a word. I go to her the way a man comes in out of weather, and when I feel her heat, everything else falls away.
Time may be short, so I don’t waste it. Our mouths meet, and her sweet lips are everything. Especially when she whispers my name.
“Quiet, bratty girl,” I tell her, against her silken throat. “I’m working.”
She laughs, and I catch the end of it with my mouth and turn it into a moan.
I strip the thin shirt off her and take my time with what it reveals.
Her tits are perfection, her belly even more so.
I make my way down her body, tasting as I tour her every curve.
They keep changing shape, so I memorize them again every night.
When I fit my head between her thighs, she unravels fast. That taste—fuck, her taste makes an animal of me. I do the same with her clit, use it to turn her from brilliant woman to fiery animal. Her hands fist in my hair and her spine lifts off the sheet as she comes on my tongue.
She gentles back into her body as I climb up her, watching her settle down as she waits for me to take her. When I set my teeth below her ear, she says something in Russian that takes the wind out of me. “Don’t stop.”
“You’ve been studying,” I murmur.
“Shut up and—”
The rest leaves her on a gasp, because I glide into her wetness in a smooth thrust. I brace on my forearms, careful of her body, and she wraps a leg around me and drags me to her.
“Careful. You’ll strain something. At your age.”
“Earning your title, eh?” I drop some of my restraint to show her whose boss. I’m certain that’s why she said it.
I take her deep and without mercy. I pin both her hands with one of mine, and when she murmurs, “Please,” I would burn the city to the ground to hear that from her again.
Instead, I whip my body into hers, harder, faster, and I hear it again. Feel her pulse against my shaft. See the pink take her glistening cheeks. She’s closing in on it.
The words growl out of me. I need to say them. I need her to hear them. “You’re mine. Your orgasm is mine to give you. This body, mine. These lips—”
She leans up, capturing my mouth as I pound into her body. “Yes, I—”
Her words break when I make her come on my cock. I dig in at that magic angle, and she gushes on me, gasping, groaning, gone as her eyes roll back in her head. It’s then that I lose myself in her and tip right over the edge into sweet madness.
There is no pier where I’m to be murdered. No Alexei. None of it. Only her breath falling on my chest as her eyes drift shut.
She sleeps like the dead beside me. Only me. It’s an honor I never knew I’d have.
But it’s one that haunts me, too. If I die, how will Thea sleep?
She should want to leave me. Me and all of this behind. A sane woman would. If she asks it of me, it’s done. She’d be a fool not to want it, and she’s no fool.
Perhaps I should send her. Force the issue. Put her on the plane and let her hate me while she’s warm in Portugal. Better than mourning me in the cold here.
Then she shifts against me and settles deeper, one leg hooked over mine. The thought of sending her away does not survive the sight of her face.
She chose this bed with me. She could have any room in this house. But she’s here. Beside me.
Thea chooses me, and God knows, I cannot stop choosing her. I close my eyes, and the woman and the child breathe against my side.
There’s nowhere else I’d rather be.