42. Maxim
MAXIM
Three days into whatever this was, I had stopped bothering to count the bottles on the counter, mostly because counting them meant admitting there was a number worth being ashamed of.
The penthouse had never felt like home the way the compound did, which was exactly why I'd come here instead, some instinct dragging me toward a place with no memory of her in it.
I'd bought it years ago for exactly this reason, a place to disappear into when the compound got too loud with other people's problems, and it had never once failed to do its job until now.
It wasn't working this time. Every room in this city apartment had gone quiet the same way, empty in a way that had nothing to do with square footage and everything to do with the two things I couldn't stop turning over in my hands whenever I let myself sit still long enough.
I'd tried working through it the first night, spreading manifests across the kitchen island like enough numbers could crowd out everything else trying to occupy the same space in my head.
By the second night I'd stopped pretending the numbers meant anything, and by the third I'd stopped pretending I was going to fix this by staying sober enough to think clearly about it.
My phone sat facedown on the counter, the way it had for three days, buzzing occasionally with business I answered on autopilot and questions I answered with as few words as I could manage without getting someone killed by my own inattention.
"Ship it. I don't care which dock." I hadn't looked up from the glass in front of me when Pavel called about the Hendricks account, and I heard the silence on the other end that meant he'd noticed something was wrong and decided against saying so out loud.
"You sure? Hendricks likes the paperwork triple checked."
"Then triple check it yourself. I trust you to run a dock without me holding your hand through it.
" I hung up before he could answer, immediately hating myself for the tone, knowing Pavel had done nothing to deserve it except exist within reach of a man who had run out of better places to put his anger.
That had become the pattern. Everyone got a version of me sharpened down to something ugly, not because they'd earned it, but because there was nowhere left to put three days of fury that had no real target left to hit.
Yuri had asked a simple question about a maintenance schedule that morning and gotten a response cold enough that he'd backed out of my office without finishing his sentence.
I heard about it secondhand from Kirill an hour later, delivered with the quiet disappointment of a man who expected better even when he understood exactly why he wasn't getting it.
I caught my reflection in the dark window sometime past noon and didn't recognize the man looking back, shirt wrinkled, sleeves still buttoned at the wrist the way they'd been every single day since that night.
I used to roll them without thinking, before a hard conversation, before a decision that needed weight behind it, my father's habit worn into muscle memory so deep I'd never once had to decide to do it.
I hadn't rolled them once in three days, and the absence of that small, familiar ritual bothered me more than it had any right to, more than the empty bottles or the missed calls or anything else I could point to and name.
There was nothing left to roll them for, no debtor sitting across a table, no threat that needed a visible edge behind it, no fight worth the gesture, just a man alone in an apartment that smelled like whiskey and regret, sleeves buttoned all the way down because there was nobody left to be dangerous at.
Kirill let himself in around six with a bottle of good vodka and an expression that told me he'd already decided how this conversation was going to go before he'd even parked the car.
"You look like garbage."
"Thank you."
"I mean it as a diagnosis, not an insult.
" He set the vodka down hard enough to rattle the other bottles, then dropped into the chair across from me without waiting for an invitation he knew I wasn't going to offer.
"Three days, Maxim. Petrov's scared to bring you the shipping logs.
Yuri asked me if you were dying. I told him probably, just slowly, and with worse taste in liquor than you used to have. "
"Go home, Kirill."
"No." He poured two glasses, pushed one toward me, and didn't touch his own yet. "You've earned exactly one night of feeling sorry for yourself. You've taken three, and the fourth one starts the second I decide I've had enough of watching you do this to yourself."
"You don't know what you're talking about."
"I know a man drowning himself in good vodka because he can't figure out how to be angry and heartbroken at the same time, so he's settled for numb instead.
" He finally drank, wincing less than I expected.
"I know that man used to roll his sleeves up before he did anything difficult, and I haven't seen him do it once in three days.
That worries me a lot more than the empty bottles do. "
I looked down at my own wrists, cuffs still buttoned, and felt something in my chest twist at having it named out loud by someone who'd apparently been counting the same absence I had.
"Nothing left to roll them up for anymore."
"That's exactly the problem." Kirill leaned forward, all the usual mockery gone from his voice, replaced by something steadier and harder to argue with.
"You're not just grieving her. You're grieving the man you used to be, the one who always knew what to do with his hands.
I've known you twenty years, Maxim. I've never once seen you this lost, not after your father, not after Andrei nearly bled out on that dock four years ago.
This is new territory for both of us, and I don't like it. "
"What do you want me to do about it?"
"I don't know yet. But sitting in the dark drinking yourself stupid isn't it, and neither is snapping at Pavel for asking a reasonable question about a shipment.
" He refilled both glasses without asking.
"Talk to me. Not about the case, not about the badge, none of that.
Just tell me what you actually feel underneath all this vodka, because I guarantee it isn't as simple as furious. "
I turned the glass in my hand, watching the light catch it, and found the truth sitting closer to the surface than I expected once I finally let myself look for it.
"I don't know if I'm angrier that she lied, or that she stopped, eventually, somewhere in the last few weeks, without ever telling me she'd stopped.
" My voice came out rougher than I intended.
"I keep replaying every quiet night, trying to find the exact moment the lie ended and something real started, and I can't find it, Kirill. I can't find the line."
"Maybe there isn't one clean line. Maybe it happened slow enough that even she couldn't have told you exactly when."
"That's not comforting."
"It wasn't meant to be. It was meant to be true." He held my gaze a long moment. "You loved her either way. That part wasn't fake, whatever else was. I watched you become someone better because of her, and that doesn't just evaporate because the ending turned out uglier than either of you planned."
"You sound very certain for a man who's never once said he trusted her."
"I never said I trusted her completely. I said I watched what she did to you, and most of it looked like the opposite of whatever she was supposedly out there to accomplish.
" He shrugged, unbothered by the contradiction.
"People are allowed to be more than one thing at once, Maxim. Even the ones who lie to us."
We sat with that for a while, the vodka doing slow, quiet work on both of us, until a knock at the door pulled us out of it.
Sully stood in the hallway on a cane he still needed more than he wanted to admit, a container of something homemade balanced in his free hand, his weathered face breaking into a grin the second he saw me.
"Heard you were holed up in here feeling sorry for yourself. Figured I'd bring soup and unsolicited opinions, since that's apparently what I'm good for these days."
"Come in before Kirill drinks all my vodka."
"Already halfway there," Kirill said, not looking remotely apologetic about it.
Sully settled into the third chair with the careful deliberateness of a man whose leg still argued with him about most decisions, set the soup down, and studied me with the same gruff affection he'd been aiming at Sofia since her first month on the docks.
"You look like a man who needs something to think about besides himself.
" He said it without malice, just the blunt honesty of someone who'd worked long enough for my family to have earned it.
"Heard something strange from one of the boys doing intake at the terminal.
Some talk about an official raid coming through soon, task force stamped and everything. "
"There's always talk. Doyle's been trying to spook us with rumors for months."
"I know rumors. Spent forty years on that dock learning to tell them apart from the real thing.
" Sully leaned forward, wincing as his bad leg shifted underneath him, and something in his tone sharpened into the careful precision of a man who didn't waste words when he actually meant them.
"This one felt different. My nephew works dispatch, mentioned an authorization code that didn't match anything in the usual channel, like somebody built the paperwork after the fact instead of before.
" He settled back, rubbing absently at his knee.
"Probably nothing. Just struck me as the kind of detail worth mentioning to somebody smarter than me. "
Something in that detail snagged at the edge of my attention, small and persistent, the kind of thread that usually meant more than it looked like on the surface.
I filed it away without fully understanding why, some old instinct refusing to let it go even through three days of vodka and grief thick enough to drown in.
"I'll look into it."
"Figured you would." Sully nodded toward the empty bottles lining the counter. "In between all this, I mean."
Kirill laughed for the first time since he'd walked in, and something in the room loosened by a degree that felt almost survivable.
We talked longer than I expected to, about the docks, about Sully's leg, about anything that wasn't her, and for the first time in three days I felt something other than numbness sitting in my chest, thin and fragile but real.
Kirill topped off my glass one more time, then set the bottle down without pouring himself another, some quiet signal that he'd decided I'd had enough for one night.
Sully finished his soup story about a supplier who'd tried to shortchange him twice in one week, and for a few minutes the apartment felt almost ordinary, three men trading complaints about people who deserved worse than they were getting.
My phone buzzed against the counter, face still down, and I almost let it ring out the way I had every other call for three days straight.
Something made me turn it over this time.
SOFIA, the screen said, the name sitting there bright and impossible, the first time it had lit up since that night.
The room went quiet around me, Kirill and Sully both watching without saying anything, and I stared at her name through one ring, then a second, my thumb hovering over the screen like it belonged to someone else's hand entirely.
I answered on the third ring, my voice coming out flatter and harder than I meant it to.
"What."