32. Maxim
MAXIM
Inoticed everything. That was the whole premise of my life, the skill that kept my men breathing and my enemies guessing, and it had apparently taken a full week off without telling me.
Sofia bolted from the kitchen table again that morning, one hand pressed over her mouth, the door to the downstairs bathroom clicking shut a half second later.
I heard the water run, heard her voice come out thin when she finally called through the door that she was fine, and I believed her, because believing her was easier than sitting with the alternative.
"You've barely touched your coffee all week," I said when she came back, pale around the edges, sliding into her chair like the trip to the bathroom had cost her something.
"I switched brands. It's off."
"You loved that brand two weeks ago."
"Tastes change." She pushed the mug an inch farther from her, like proximity alone might set her off again. "Stop interrogating my coffee."
I let it go, because I had a shipment coming in that afternoon and four men still recovering from the gate ambush and a running list of Doyle's known associates that needed updating before Kirill's contact called back with confirmation.
I told myself stress explained it. Doyle's threat had named her specifically, and any sane woman would carry that weight into her stomach eventually.
I had spent twenty years reading rooms for a living, and I still read that one wrong for seven straight days.
Three mornings before that, she'd nearly knocked over a vase reaching for the bathroom, and when I asked if she needed anything, she waved me off with a laugh that didn't quite reach her eyes, blaming a bad piece of fish from the night before.
"You're staring," she said, catching me watching her from the doorway. "Bad fish. I promise it's not contagious."
I laughed and went back to my coffee, congratulating myself on being understanding instead of asking a single useful question, and I would spend the rest of that week paying for the laziness of that morning.
Kirill caught the tail end of it three mornings later, wandering into the kitchen partway through the conversation the way he always did, helping himself to coffee from a pot Sofia hadn't touched.
"Is she doing the bathroom thing again?" he asked, nodding toward the hallway she'd just disappeared down.
"She's stressed. Doyle named her in a message a week ago. I'd be sick too."
"Sure." He took a slow sip, studying me over the rim of his mug with an expression I couldn't immediately place. "Does stress usually pick a specific time of day for you? Because it's doing that for her. Every morning, same window, gone by nine."
"What are you getting at?"
"Nothing. I grew up with four sisters, that's all.
I've seen this exact morning routine more times than I ever wanted to.
" He set his mug down, entirely too pleased with himself for a man delivering what felt, in that instant, like the single most disorienting sentence of my adult life.
"You might want to consider the other explanation before you assume it's the shipment schedule making her sick. "
The words landed somewhere behind my sternum and detonated.
"That's not funny."
"I'm not joking. When's the last time you saw her drink a full glass of wine? Or eat those pickled things she used to steal off Yuri's plate at poker night?"
I opened my mouth to argue and found I had nothing to argue with, because I'd noticed both of those things without letting myself connect them to anything, filing them away the same careless way I'd filed the coffee and the mornings and the faint new softness that had crept into her face over the last several weeks.
I was a man who tracked shipment weights to the pound and men's tells down to the twitch of a finger, and I had missed the most obvious pattern of my entire life because some part of me hadn't wanted to see it yet.
"You're guessing," I said, though my voice had lost most of its conviction.
"I'm observing. There's a difference, and you're usually better at telling them apart than this." Kirill grinned, unbearable, delighted with himself in a way that made me want to throw the coffee pot at him. "I'd start being a lot gentler about the shipment schedule, if I were you."
"How long have you known?"
"Since she turned down a glass of wine at dinner two nights ago and told Elena she just wasn't feeling it.
Elena caught my eye across the table before Sofia had even finished the sentence.
I've got four sisters, Maxim. I know that look better than I know my own face in a mirror.
" He shrugged, clearly enjoying every second of this.
"I didn't say anything sooner because it wasn't my business to say.
I'm only saying it now because you looked like a man about to talk himself out of the obvious answer for another week straight, and I don't have the patience to watch that happen twice. "
He left before I could respond, whistling something tuneless down the hallway, and I stood there alone in my own kitchen feeling like a man who'd just been handed a live wire and told to figure out which end was safe to hold.
I found Sofia twenty minutes later in the sitting room, curled into the corner of the couch with a book she wasn't actually reading, the pages sitting unturned for longer than made sense for someone genuinely absorbed in it.
"How are you feeling?"
"Fine. Why does everyone keep asking me that?"
"Because you've spent every morning this week introducing yourself to my downstairs bathroom, and I've apparently been too distracted to ask the right question about it until now.
" I sat on the arm of the couch, close enough to watch her face for whatever she wasn't saying out loud.
"Sofia. Is there something you need to tell me? "
Her eyes flicked up to mine, quick, something guarded moving behind them before she smoothed it over with the ease of a woman who'd spent years learning how to smooth things over.
"It's probably just a bug."
"A week-long bug."
"They happen."
"Not to you. You've never been sick a day since I've known you." I studied her, and something in the careful blankness of her expression told me Kirill had been right all along. "You didn't answer my question."
"I don't have an answer yet. Not one I'm ready to say out loud."
That told me almost everything I needed to know, and the rest of it settled into my chest slow and strange, not fear exactly, not entirely joy either, something too big and unfamiliar to name yet.
"I want you to see someone."
"Maxim."
"Not a lecture. A doctor. Our family's doctor, discreet, the same man who's patched up my men for years without ever once opening his mouth about it to anyone.
" I was already reaching for my phone, already running through the man's schedule in my head, already three steps ahead of a conversation I hadn't finished having.
"Today, if he can fit you in. Tomorrow at the absolute latest."
"I'm fine."
"You've been sick every morning for a week and you just told me you don't have an answer you're ready to say out loud. That's not fine. That's the opposite of fine, and I'm not equipped to sit here guessing at it for another seven days."
"You're hovering."
"I don't hover."
"You're hovering." She almost smiled at that, the first real crack in the careful blankness she'd been wearing all morning. "You've checked your phone four times in the last two minutes without actually looking at it. That's hovering, Maxim. Own it."
"I'm concerned. There's a difference, and you know it."
"Is there?"
"I run a security operation with forty men under me and I have personally never once panicked in front of any of them.
I am not panicking now." My voice came out rougher than I intended, and I heard myself say it and understood immediately how far from true it actually was. "I might be panicking a little now."
That got the smile all the way out of her, small and real, and something in my chest eased just slightly at the sight of it even with everything else still sitting unresolved between us.
"You don't do this. You don't fuss over anything. I watched you shrug off a graze from Doyle's men at the gate and ask Kirill to pass you the vodka before you'd even let the doctor look at it."
"That was different. That was me. This is..." I stopped, unable to finish the sentence, unwilling to put a word to something neither of us had actually confirmed yet.
"This is what?"
"I don't know what this is. I know I'd like to find out from someone with a medical degree instead of piecing it together from your coffee preferences and Kirill's opinions about morning sickness."
Her eyebrows went up. "Kirill said something?"
"Kirill had plenty to say. He's got four sisters and apparently the world's worst sense of timing for delivering information."
She laughed at that, short and surprised, and for a moment the tension went out of her shoulders entirely, the two of us sitting there in a room gone quiet around whatever we were both suddenly circling but neither of us would say.
I thought about the safe I'd opened for her weeks ago, the key I'd pressed into her palm on that lakefront walk, every deliberate thing I'd handed her since the night she threw coffee down my shirt, and realized none of it had prepared me for how unsteady I felt sitting across from a possibility I couldn't yet say out loud.
She was quiet a long moment, turning the unread book over in her hands, and when she finally looked up at me again something had shifted behind her eyes, resigned, maybe, or something closer to relief at not having to carry whatever this was entirely alone anymore, not tonight, not with me sitting right there waiting.
"Fine. I'll see the doctor."
"Today?"
"Today. Only because you're going to stand outside that bathroom door like a nervous dog for the rest of the week if I don't, and frankly it's exhausting to watch."
I called the family physician from the hallway ten minutes later, keeping my voice level while I gave him the barest outline of what I needed, an appointment, discretion, this afternoon if humanly possible.
He agreed without asking a single unnecessary question, which was exactly why my family had trusted him for two decades running.
I stood in that hallway a moment after hanging up, phone still in hand, and caught myself grinning at nothing, an expression so foreign on my own face that I barely recognized it in the hall mirror.
All my years running this family, and I had never once looked like that walking back from a phone call.
When I came back into the sitting room, Sofia was still on the couch, the book finally set aside, her hands resting flat against her stomach in a gesture I doubted she even noticed herself making.
I sat down across from her, telling myself I would give her the space she'd asked for, and made it four entire minutes before I found some reason to ask if she wanted water, or a blanket, or the window cracked for air.
"Maxim."
"I'm not doing anything."
"You're doing the thing again." But she was smiling when she said it, small and tired and real, and she didn't actually ask me to stop.
Neither of us said the word out loud. It felt too big to be the one who said it first, too permanent, like naming it might jinx whatever we were both still learning to trust.
But it was there anyway, sitting in the room with us, impossible to ignore now that I had finally, unmistakably noticed it.