40. Maxim
MAXIM
She stood there with her mouth still open and nothing coming out of it. Some part of me had spent three hours alone in this room quietly hoping for a version of tonight I could still forgive, and it finally understood there wasn't going to be an answer worth hearing.
I had pictured this night a dozen different ways on the drive home from the jewelry shop, a quiet dinner, the two words I already meant to say twice over, a ring that fit exactly right on a hand I'd memorized without meaning to.
None of those versions had prepared me for standing in her doorway watching her search for an explanation and finding nothing, because somewhere underneath the fury I still expected her to have one, some sentence that would put the last few hours back the way they'd been before I opened that drawer.
"Maxim, please." Her voice found itself again, thin and fast, the words tripping over each other in a way I had never once heard from her before tonight. "Let me explain. Let me actually explain, not the version you've already decided I'm giving you."
"Don't."
"You're not even going to let me try?"
"I let you try for eleven weeks." The words came out of me low and steady, which surprised me more than anything else happening in that room, because everything underneath them felt like a building coming down.
"Every conversation, every quiet night I thought meant something.
That was you trying. I don't need another version of it. "
"That's not fair. You have no idea what those eleven weeks cost me just to survive them."
"Fair." I picked the word up and turned it over like it belonged to a language I used to speak fluently and had suddenly forgotten.
"You want to talk to me about fair, standing in a room with my ring on your dresser and my child's photograph on your bed, both of which I found out about the same night, from a drawer, because you didn't trust me enough to hand either one to me yourself. "
She flinched at that, actually flinched, and some small, ugly part of me noted it and filed it away as a victory before the rest of me recoiled from wanting one.
"I was going to tell you. I told you that already."
"Everyone in my life who's ever lied to me had a version of tomorrow they were saving it for.
" My hands had curled into fists somewhere in the last minute without my permission, and I made myself unclench them, made myself remember whose room I was standing in.
"My father taught me that lesson personally.
I didn't expect to relearn it from the person I was about to marry. "
"I am the same person you were about to marry."
"You're a federal agent who spent eleven weeks collecting evidence against my family while I fell in love with a story you built to make that easier.
" I heard my own voice crack on the word love and hated it, hated that even now, standing in the wreckage of every plan I'd made for tonight, some part of me still couldn't say the word without meaning it.
"I don't know which parts of you were ever real. I don't think you know either."
"That's not true, and if you'd just listen for one minute instead of deciding what I'm going to say before I say it..."
"I'm done listening."
The words landed harder than I meant them to, flat and final, and I watched something in her face close the way a door closes when someone finally accepts it isn't going to open from the other side, and I told myself that was better, that a woman who could lie this well for this long didn't deserve one more minute of my patience.
Some smaller, quieter part of me that I didn't have room for right now knew that wasn't the whole truth either.
I crossed to the door and opened it, and Kirill was already there in the hallway, close enough that I understood he'd been standing guard the whole time, giving us the room but never far enough to be useless if I needed him.
"Get her out. Now."
Kirill's eyes moved past me to Sofia, then back, weighing something I didn't have the patience to let him finish weighing.
"Maxim..."
"Within the hour. Someone packs a bag for her, someone drives her wherever she needs to go, and nobody on this property speaks to her again without going through me first." I heard how it sounded even as I said it, cold and absolute in a way that belonged to a version of myself I hadn't needed in years, and I said it anyway.
"I want her gone before I have to see her face again tonight. "
"You don't mean that."
"I mean every word of it."
Kirill held my gaze a long moment, the kind of look he only gave me when he was deciding whether tonight was the night he finally told me no, and then something in his shoulders dropped, resigned rather than convinced, and he nodded once.
"Sofia." His voice gentled the second he turned it on her, careful in a way it never was with me. "Get what you need. I'll walk you down."
I didn't watch her gather anything. I couldn't have stood there without breaking, so I turned my back on the room and walked the hallway instead, my own footsteps too loud against the quiet, my chest doing something I didn't have a name for, half fury and half a grief so raw it felt like it belonged to someone else entirely.
I made it as far as the top of the stairs before Kirill's radio crackled at his hip, one of the men reporting in about the gate, about a name that had come back on the burner phone's call log faster than I expected anyone to find it.
Sasha, one of the new gate hands, barely out of his teens, who'd been running perimeter checks for six months and had apparently decided somewhere in the last several weeks that a stranger's money was worth more than the loyalty he'd sworn to this house.
I found him in the security office off the main hall, already sitting under Yuri's watch, pale and sweating through a shirt that hadn't been clean in hours.
"You sold information out of my own house.
" I didn't raise my voice. I didn't need to, not with the way the room went still the second I walked into it.
"About her. About what she kept in her room, what her routine looked like, when she came and went.
Somebody paid you to hand my life over one detail at a time. "
"I didn't know what it was for." His voice shook worse than his hands did. "I swear, I didn't know what any of it meant, I just answered questions when a guy called, small stuff, nothing that seemed like it mattered until it did."
"Nothing that seemed like it mattered." I took a step toward him, and something in my own chest had gone loose and dangerous in a way I hadn't felt since long before I inherited this house, before I learned to keep every ugly instinct locked somewhere Andrei and my men never had to look at it.
"You handed a stranger the exact shape of the worst night of my life and you want me to believe you didn't know what it meant. "
"Maxim." Kirill's hand closed on my shoulder from behind, firm enough to stop me, and I registered distantly that I had closed the distance between myself and Sasha's chair without deciding to. "Not like this."
"Get off me."
"No." He didn't let go, didn't so much as loosen his grip, and when I turned enough to see his face there was none of the usual mockery in it, only something grim and steady that I recognized as the only thing standing between me and a decision I wouldn't be able to take back.
"Keep going and you'll beat a kid half to death in this room tonight, and it won't fix a single thing that's actually broken.
It'll just give you one more thing to live with tomorrow, and you've already got enough of those stacking up. "
"He sold her out. He sold me out."
"He did, and he'll answer for it, properly, once you're not the one deciding how.
" Kirill's grip didn't ease, and something about the steadiness of it finally cut through the noise in my head enough for me to hear him.
"Let Yuri handle him. Go back upstairs. Sit with whatever you're actually feeling before you do something you can't undo twice in one night. "
I stood there another long moment, my pulse loud in my own ears, Sasha's ragged breathing the only other sound in the room, and then something in me deflated all at once, the fury draining out fast enough to leave the grief standing alone in the space it had been holding open.
I let Kirill walk me out.
He didn't say anything until we'd cleared the security office, his hand still resting on my shoulder like he wasn't entirely convinced I'd stay upright without it.
"You know this isn't you." He kept his voice low, meant only for me, none of the performance he usually wrapped around anything serious.
"Twenty years I've watched you build something out of a family that used to run on fear alone.
Tonight you just ordered a pregnant woman off this property in the middle of the night and nearly put a kid through a wall for answering a phone call. That's not the man I know."
"That man got played for eleven weeks."
"Maybe. Or maybe that man is scared out of his mind and doesn't know what else to do with it besides break something.
" He let go of my shoulder finally, studying me with an expression I rarely saw on him, worry stripped bare of every joke he usually hid it behind.
"I'm not telling you what to feel. I'm telling you that the version of you making decisions right now isn't going to be the version who has to live with them tomorrow. "
I didn't answer him. I didn't have anything left in me that wasn't already spoken for by the two things I'd left laid out on that bed upstairs.
I didn't remember most of the way back to her room, only that I ended up there anyway, pulled back to it the way a tongue keeps finding a broken tooth.
The house had gone quiet again by the time I reached the door.
Sofia was already gone, her closet half emptied, a few things left behind in the hurry, and the room held a stillness I recognized instantly, the kind that only settles in a space where someone has just been forced out of it.
The velvet box still sat open on the dresser, the ring inside it catching the hall light exactly the way it had hours earlier when I'd first walked in here planning a completely different ending to this night.
I picked up the sonogram before I could stop myself, the paper soft now from too much handling, the small curved shape at its center still the only thing in this entire room that hadn't lied to me even once.
I stood there holding it, the ring box open behind me and the bed stripped of everything except the shape of where she'd sat, and I couldn't have said, if someone had demanded an answer right then, which one was going to win, the fury still simmering somewhere under my ribs or the grief that kept threatening to fold my legs out from under me.
I only knew that for the first time since I was nineteen, the year my father handed me a decision with no right answer and walked out of the room without telling me how to make it, I had absolutely no idea what I was supposed to do next.