31. Thea
THEA
Klaus took a bullet. For me. Except not for me.
That’s the part my mind keeps obsessing over. I know Klaus well, and I’m certain that Klaus Vernigora never truly cared if I lived or died. I was merely an accessory to him, like a fashionable handbag that can plan parties. He wouldn’t have even crossed the street for me.
But he took a bullet for the lime.
It doesn’t match what I know about him from eight months up close. It sits in my chest, huge and wrong-shaped, and I can’t make it fit with who he is.
But Maxim’s mind is elsewhere. “I’m not going anywhere. Understand?”
“Yes.”
He studies me for a moment. “What’s on your mind?”
“He didn’t know.” Maxim and I sit in two worn chairs against the wall of the waiting room, with my hands in both of his.
I’ve to say it aloud because it’s been gnawing at me since the study, “Klaus. What Kirill mentioned at the end. Klaus thought the plan was a ransom, believing they would take me alive and force you to pay Sokolov to retrieve me, expecting you to kneel to do so.”
“Niklaus sought to humiliate me.”
“That was all he signed up for—to hurt your pride and get paid. He wasn’t aware that the actual order was to kill me. Kirill told him that Sokolov never told him the truth. That’s when he moved in front of the gun.”
Maxim pauses beside me, holding his breath. “He thought he was bringing you to a temporary cage, not a coffin.”
“Yeah.”
He falls silent for a moment. Then, in a calm and steady voice, he murmurs, “Kirill is dead. I’m not sorry for that. The men Sokolov sent into my house are dead, all of them.”
“Good. They should be.”
His thumb moves over my knuckles, slow, steadying himself more than me. “Alexei believes he has won. He will pay for this. For all of this.”
The way he says it, flat, factual, a scheduled event, puts a cold line down my back, and I ask him straight out. “How? You told me you’d stay with me all night.” I hear my own voice climb. “You can’t go anywhere, Max. The police will—”
“I sent Lev to collect him.”
And my heart sinks, because I’ve been around long enough to understand better. “Lev. You sent Lev to kill a pakhan. Alone?”
Maxim’s jaw is set. “Lev alone is worth ten of anyone else.”
I turn in the chair to face Max. “Won’t that look weak? To the other families, whatever they are. Sokolov comes into your house, hits your family, and you don’t handle him yourself—you send your sovetnik while you’re sitting in a hospital? Doesn’t that, in your world, come across as weak?”
In his world, weakness is like blood in the water. A vulnerable Vernigora is one whose pregnant girlfriend and unborn child suddenly become much easier to reach.
“It might,” Maxim says. “I don’t care.”
“You have to care, that’s the whole—“
“I told you I wouldn’t leave your side, and I mean it,” he says firmly.
“I’ve broken many promises to many people, but not this one.
Not for my reputation or for Alexei Sokolov’s corpse.
They can think what they want. I will stay in this chair until the doctors arrive, and afterward, I will be wherever you are, come Hell or high water. ”
God help me, it’s the most romantic thing anyone’s said to me. We’re in a room smelling of antiseptic and old coffee, with blood on my shirt, and I love him so much it scares me. That’s why I say the insane thing. “Then I’ll come with you to Sokolov.”
He turns his head slowly and looks at me, left brow rising.
“I’m serious. If you won’t leave me, fine—don’t. Bring me along. I’ll sit in the car. I don’t mind. If it has to be you, if your reputation requires it, then we both go. Sokolov still—“
“Are you serious right now?”
“Yes.”
“No.” His tone is flat and final as both of his hands close around mine.
“Absolutely not. I’ve spent months and all my resources keeping you out of that room, and I didn’t do it just to hand you over to Sokolov tonight because you’ve decided to challenge me.
You’re not going near Alexei Sokolov. This isn’t up for negotiation, and you can throw whatever you want at me—sugar bowl, fists, I don’t care. Go ahead.”
For half a second, I wonder what he’d do if I just left?
A strong, terrifying Maxim is a Maxim nobody dares touch, and a Maxim nobody dares touch is a father whose child grows up safe. His reputation is my baby’s insurance policy, and I would do anything to keep that policy paid up. I would walk into—
“Family of Pasha Kagan?”
The voice cuts the thought off clean, and a surgeon in scrubs stands in the doorway, pulling off a cap. I’m on my feet, Maxim rising with me.
“That’s us. Him. Is he—how is he?”
The surgeon’s face is tired. “He’s out of surgery. It was close. We lost him twice, and each time we brought him back was harder than the one before. The bullet did a lot of damage in there. But the bleeding’s stopped, and he’s stable.” He exhales.
It’s like a new part of my lungs opened up when he said that. “Thank you, doctor.”
“He’s got a long road ahead, with months of rest and rehab. He won’t be able to work for a while, but with no infection, he’s on track to fully recover. He’s going to be just fine.”
Fine. He’s going to be fine.
The morning catches up to me. Tears come up out of nowhere and everywhere. The hole through the door. Galina’s hands on Pasha’s gushing stomach. His head in my lap. Everything I’ve been pushing away so I could keep functioning pours hot down my face, and I don’t try to stop it.
Pasha is still alive. He will continue to be terrible at teaching me chess for decades. He might also have a life he can someday comfortably live out loud.
Maxim’s arm comes around me. “This is very good. Now I can yell at him.”
I pull back and stare at him. “You can what? He almost died, Maxim. He took a bullet! You want to yell at him? For what, exactly?” And it clicks what he means, and I go cold. “Is this about what he said? If you’re about to be homophobic in a hospital, this relationship—“
“Thea.” He catches my face in both hands. “I do not care that Pasha loves men. That is not the thing.”
“Then what’s the thing?”
“He didn’t trust me.” And there’s something raw under the dryness now, something that surprises me. He… his feelings are hurt. “He thought he had to hide it from me. From me, who trusts him with your life and mine.”
“You’re offended?”
His jaw works. “Some of the old men in my world would make his life hell for it. I’m not those men, but he believed I was. It’s an insult. I spent all these years thinking he knew me better than that, and tonight I learn he looked at me and saw one of them anyway.”
“Max—”
“That’s a crack in our relationship.” His thumbs gently wipe beneath my eyes.
“When he’s able to sit up, I intend to sit beside him and inform him that he’s a fool, and that he’s always been safe with me, and continues to be so.
That is the yelling I refer to. If you like, I’ll refrain from yelling, but he and I must have that talk. ”
And there it is again—the thing that always catches me off guard about this notorious man.
Beneath the empire and the body count, he’s different from the world that shaped him.
He runs a criminal family, launders money for cartels, and plans to have a man killed today.
Yet, he’s also the man who wants to sit by a hospital bed and gently tell a scared man that he was always safe in his care.
I’m still looking at him when the second set of doors opens.
Different doctor. Worse expression. His face is grim in a way Pasha’s surgeon’s never was.