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Nothing. Fucking nothing.
“I didn’t send my sister and the mother of my children away because there isn’t a threat.”
“I didn’t mean there isn’t a threat. There is. But?—”
“Then find it!” I roar. “I can’t bring my family home until I know they are safe, and I can’t know they are safe until you do your fucking jobs! Do you have a single useful thing to tell me?”
Kuzma’s mouth twists nervously before he adds, “I have been looking into Budimir. A property he owns sold last week, but I didn’t lay eyes on him. I don’t know if he’s?—”
“You don’t know if he’s in the city. You don’t know if he’s even alive! For fuck’s sake.” I swipe the Budimir file off my desk and let the papers scatter across the floor. “Have you added the security cameras we discussed?”
“Yes!” Savva says, eager to tell me he’s done at least one thing right. “Yes. I finished the install this afternoon. It took longer than expected because…”
I frown. “Because?”
He sighs. “Your mother didn’t like the look of the cameras around the fenceline. She thought it was… cluttered. She asked the groundskeepers to take them down after we finished, so they had to be reinstalled.”
I stand up and storm to the door before he can even finish. “This meeting is over. Go do your fucking jobs and come back with better news to tell me tomorrow.”
I don’t see them leave my office because I’m already throwing open the patio doors and stepping outside.
My mother is at the table, a cup of tea and an open magazine in front of her.
“You can’t command my staff around, Mother.”
“You’re telling me!” She snorts. “Things are way too lax around here, Yakov. It’s impossible to get anyone to do any work. I make the most basic requests and they can’t manage to follow through.”
“I haven’t had any complaints until you arrived.”
She turns to me, eyebrow arched. “That’s because you don’t have an eye for this kind of thing. Your father didn’t, either. It’s why I managed the household when he was alive.”
“My eye is fine,” I say. “The problem is that my men had to waste time installing cameras twice after you had them taken down.”
“Oh.” She winces. “He really was telling the truth.”
“Who?”
“The groundskeeper. He told me that he took down the cameras like I asked, but I could look outside and see that they were still up. I thought he was making excuses just like Hope and your chef, so I fired him.”
I pinch the bridge of my nose. “You’ve been here for less than twenty-four hours. Why in the fuck do you think you have the authority to fire anyone?”
“Because when I see a job being performed poorly, I know that reflects on you and the family as a whole. I was protecting us all.”
“Protecting us from better security?” I blow out a breath, trying to rein in the frustration expanding in my chest. “I asked for those cameras to be installed to maintain security. I’m protecting us all. I need you to step aside and let me do that.”
She crosses one leg over the other and flips through her magazine. “I thought I was being helpful. You’re so busy with everything else that I thought I’d take some of the strain off of you. I guess I’m too old and out of touch to be useful anymore.”
My mother has always been like this. She complains whenever she doesn’t get her way and will go to great lengths to get her way no matter what anyone else says. But she cares about us. More than almost anyone.
Whenever my mother would go off on some tirade and make demands, my father wouldn’t shut her down like he would have anyone else. He’d compromise. Sometimes, he’d give her exactly what she demanded.
When I asked why, he said, “When you find yourself a good woman who will stand by you through anything, you give her what she wants. Your mother is a good woman.”
I hear his voice in my head as I try to temper my response. “You don’t like the food here, you hate the guest bedroom, and you don’t like my staff.”
“Only because the food is tasteless, the bed is lumpy, and your staff have no discretion. They walk around like they live here. You never should have taken out the servant hallways.”
When the house transferred to my ownership, I had the windowless hallways meant for servants removed. If someone is walking into a room I’m in, I want to see them coming. My ego can handle being in the presence of the people I hire to keep my house running.
