Page 94 of The Marriage

What was Maxim doing now?

*

He found them in the kitchen, but Demyan sensed something was different the moment he’d stepped inside his house. The one thing he hadn’t concerned himself with were his men—they’d known what to do the moment Pavel made a single call.

Claire would be safe until he got home.

That was all he cared about.

He stopped in his tracks at the kitchen door when he saw Maxim Yazov sitting at his kitchen table. He had been almost completely certain Maxim was alive, so much so that he’d been willing to send a number of messengers about such a fact, but Demyan was still taken aback to see the man just ... there.

Claire was making coffee with her back turned to him, but she looked over at Demyan with a sweet smile.

Always perfect, she seemed entirely unconcerned by the scene, or the fact there were men posted just beyond her kitchen door. Of course, the bulls came and went often, but they weren’t so formal.

Not like they currently stood, eyes averted when their boss walked in.

Demyan noted the gun his wife had set on the edge of the island, except it wasn’t one he recognized. Maxim seemed to notice his stare.

“I offered her mine at the door,” his old friend filled in quietly.

Demyan nodded, but said nothing else.

The kitchen was mostly dark, other than a dim light at the counter that helped Claire do her work making coffee.

It took him a moment to speak again; to find the words ...

“You look well for a dead man,” Demyan said.

Maxim immediately broke into a smile.

Claire brought two cups of coffee over to the table and placed it there. The second cup wasn’t for herself, but for her husband. She glanced disapprovingly at Demyan, and he could read her mind with nothing more than a look into her eyes.

She was unhappy. Anger and frustration tugged her lips into a frown.

Her son and husband’s lives were in danger tonight—and the man who was at the core of that was now at her kitchen table. She would be hospitable and polite, but she wasn’t going to be friendly or warm.

Demyan didn’t expect more.

She also retrieved the gun from the island, and placed it right in the middle of the table.

“I’ll be in our room if you need me,” she said before taking her leave from the kitchen. Her job was done. Maxim was Demyan’s responsibility now, and he watched her go in silence.

He waited until Claire’s footsteps had faded, and his men slipped out of the room before he turned back to Maxim.

“Where is your son?”

“Likely still on the freeway—we are trying not to draw attention, hmm?”

Maxim’s brow raised high. “My apologies.”

Demyan didn’t really need the remorse—all the cameras were off, his house was swept daily for bugs at this point, and he had noticed the nondescript black car with tinted windows all the way around that Maxim had arrived in. Without a driver. The keys of that car sat on the table, closer to Demyan than the other man.

They had every reason to believe the agents tasked with watching their house couldn’t actually get close enough to see anything worthy.

As long as Maxim left as quietly as he came, Demyan doubted anyone but the people there at that very moment would even know he’d been there to begin with.

“And I wanted to apologize to her for all the trouble I’ve caused,” Maxim said. “If she’d let me, no?”