16. Maxim
MAXIM
Ididn't drive toward her apartment. I don't remember deciding not to, only realizing somewhere past the second red light that my hands had already made the choice for me, turning toward the compound instead of the neighborhood that had almost gotten her killed an hour earlier.
Sofia didn't ask where we were going. She sat with her hands pressed flat against her thighs, watching the city slide past like she was still cataloging exits, and I let the silence hold because I didn't trust my own voice yet to keep the fury out of it.
The gates came into view a few minutes later, floodlit and familiar, and the knot in my chest eased by a fraction the second they swung open ahead of us.
This was the one place on earth Doyle couldn't reach without starting a war he wasn't ready to finish.
I hadn't debated the decision so much as arrived at it already made, somewhere between the sound of her back hitting the car door and the second I put the taller man on the ground.
There had been no version of tonight that ended with me dropping her at an apartment Doyle's people already knew how to find.
I pulled through and parked closer to the main house than I usually bothered to, cut the engine, and sat there a second longer than necessary, my knuckles aching where the skin had split.
"Maxim."
"Not yet." I got out before she could ask the question sitting behind my name, needing a minute of motion before I trusted myself to explain anything to her calmly.
Kirill met us at the door before I'd even reached it, already dressed despite the hour, which told me someone had called ahead and told him exactly how the night had gone.
"She's hurt?"
"No. Shaken. Not hurt." I kept my voice low, clipped, the register I used when I needed information faster than courtesy usually allowed. "Doyle's men cornered her in a parking garage near the terminal. Two of them. I got there in time."
"In time meaning?"
"In time meaning they won't be cornering anyone else for a while." I glanced back at the car, where Sofia sat still watching us through the windshield, unreadable in the dark. "Get the east guest suite ready. Fresh linens, whatever's needed. Tonight."
Kirill's eyebrows climbed a fraction, the only sign he gave that the request had landed somewhere unexpected.
"The guest suite?"
"Is that a problem?"
"No problem. Just new." He said it carefully, the way he said most things he intended to circle back to later when I had more patience for it. "I'll have it ready in twenty minutes."
"Make it ten."
He didn't argue. He never argued with the version of me that showed up after a night like this one, and he was already moving toward the house before I'd finished the sentence, phone out, giving orders to someone still awake enough to follow them.
I stood there a moment longer, the adrenaline still running hot enough under my skin that the cold air barely touched it, and pulled out my phone before I could talk myself out of the call I was about to make.
Andrei picked up on the second ring, which told me he hadn't been asleep either, some habits neither of us had ever managed to unlearn.
"It's late even for you," he said, warmth already in his voice despite the hour, despite the ocean between us. "Something wrong?"
"Doyle's men went after someone tonight. A woman who works logistics at the terminal." I kept my voice even, giving him the shape of it with the sharpest edges sanded down. "I'm moving her into the compound. Tonight."
A pause stretched on the line, not suspicion, just my brother doing the same unhurried math he always did before he spoke.
"This is the one Kirill mentioned. The one you onboarded yourself."
"That's the one."
"You don't move strangers into that house, Maxim. You've never once done it, not for anyone who wasn't already family." He said it plainly, no judgment in it, the same steady tone he used for anything that actually mattered to him. "Is she in danger because of the business, or because of you?"
"Does it matter which?"
"No," he said, and the edge in his voice eased, like the answer had told him more than the question had. "It doesn't. Do what you need to do. I'll call the lawyers in the morning if Doyle wants to make this complicated for anyone official."
"I didn't ask for lawyers."
"You didn't have to. That's what I'm for, remember?
You handle the parts that bleed. I handle the parts that would otherwise cost you a courtroom.
" Something warm moved under the words, the easy confidence of a man who had built an entire second life out of not having to ask his brother hard questions anymore.
"Take care of her, Maxim. And take care of yourself.
You called me at midnight, which means tonight scared you more than you're saying. "
"I'm fine."
"You always say that. I've stopped believing it years ago." He gave a small laugh, more affection in it than argument. "Call me tomorrow. Actually call, not a text that says handled."
"I'll call."
"Good man." He ended the call before either of us had to sit inside a silence that might turn sentimental, same as always, and I stood there in the cold a moment longer, the phone still warm against my ear.
Kirill's voice crackled through on the radio clipped to my belt before I'd fully lowered the phone.
"Suite's ready."
"On my way."
I walked back to the car and opened Sofia's door myself, a thing I hadn't done since the second week I'd known her, and she looked up at me with an expression I couldn't fully read in the dark, wary and tired and something else underneath both of those things I didn't have a name for yet.
"Where are we?"
"Home. Mine, for tonight." I held out a hand, and after a beat she took it, her fingers cold enough that I nearly said something about it and decided against it. "You're staying here until I'm certain Doyle's people can't find you again."
"Maxim, I have an apartment."
"That apartment is exactly what Doyle's men could find in one afternoon of asking the wrong questions to the right people. Tonight proved that." I kept walking, her hand still in mine, and did not slow down enough to let her argue the point properly. "This isn't a negotiation."
"I don't remember agreeing to skip the negotiation."
"You didn't. I'm skipping it for both of us." I glanced at her, and something in my chest tightened at how steady she still looked despite everything the last few hours had cost her. "Round-the-clock protection. Effective tonight. That's not a request."
She was quiet long enough that I thought she might actually fight me on it, which some smaller, more honest part of me almost wanted, if only because fighting felt more familiar than whatever this was instead.
"Okay," she said instead, quiet, no fight left in her voice at all. "Okay."
That single word cost her something. I could see it in the set of her shoulders, the careful way she said it, like agreeing itself was a surrender she hadn't planned on making tonight.
We crossed the courtyard in silence, gravel crunching under our feet, the main house lit up ahead of us like it had been waiting for exactly this.
Our footsteps echoed longer than they should have in a house that size.
I led her through a side entrance instead of the front, some instinct telling me she didn't need an audience tonight any more than I did, and down a corridor lined with doors that hadn't opened for a guest in longer than I could easily remember.
"This place is enormous," she said, glancing at the high ceilings, the old portraits, the kind of house that had been built to intimidate before it was ever built to shelter anyone.
"It used to be smaller. My father kept adding rooms he never filled.
" I stopped outside the last door on the corridor, the east suite, and pushed it open onto a room larger than most apartments I'd ever set foot in.
"Kirill's people stocked it. There should be everything you need. If there isn't, you tell me, not him."
She stepped past me into the room, taking it in the way she took in everything, quick and thorough, cataloging exits out of the same habit I'd recognized in her the very first night we met.
Then she turned back to face me in the doorway, her whole expression gone quiet in a way I hadn't seen from her before, not fear, not gratitude exactly, something more complicated than either.
"Thank you," she said. "For tonight. For finding me before it got worse than it did."
"You don't need to thank me for that."
"I know I don't need to. I'm doing it anyway."
I studied her a moment longer, that same quiet stillness sitting in her face I hadn't been able to name in the hallway two days earlier, and I found myself wanting, more than I was comfortable admitting, to ask what exactly she wasn't saying.
"You're hesitating," I said instead, watching her hand rest against the doorframe like she hadn't fully decided whether to step all the way inside the life this room represented.
"I'm not used to rooms this big."
"That's not what I meant, and I think you know it."
She looked up at that, caught, and something passed behind her eyes too fast for me to read it properly before she buried it back down where she kept the rest of whatever she wasn't telling me.
"It's a lot to take in. That's all it is tonight."
I let her have the answer, even though I didn't believe it, because pushing further felt like the kind of mistake that cost more than it gained on a night that had already cost both of us enough.
"Get some sleep," I said instead. "Someone will be right outside if you need anything. I'll be down the corridor if the someone isn't enough."
"Down the corridor. Not exactly subtle."
"I stopped being subtle about you weeks ago. I don't see the use in starting now."
Something almost like a smile crossed her face, faint and tired, gone as quickly as it arrived.
"Goodnight, Maxim."
"Goodnight, Reyes."
I stood in that doorway a moment after she'd closed it, listening to the lock turn, an old habit from a man who needed to hear a door secured before he could walk away from it in good conscience.
She was safe. That was the fact that mattered, the only one I'd let myself think about clearly since Kirill's call about the garage came through, and I held onto it because nothing else about tonight had gone the way it should have.
I told myself the room, the guards, the whole decision had been tactical.
Closer eyes, better coverage, a logistics problem solved with the same tools I used on every other logistics problem that crossed my desk.
I could have justified every piece of it to Kirill, to Andrei, to anyone who asked, without once mentioning how it had actually felt to see her back pressed against that car door.
I almost believed it too, walking back down that corridor alone, if I didn't look too closely at how long I'd stood outside her door before I made myself leave it.
She was quiet in a way that made me want to ask what she wasn't saying. I didn't ask.
I was starting to learn that with her, the things she didn't say were usually the ones that mattered most. I stood there another minute before I finally made myself walk away, telling myself I wasn't ready yet to hear whatever that silence had been protecting. Not tonight. Perhaps not for a while.