Page 28 of Baby for My Ex’s Dad

“Relocation rarely works.”

“I know. Two.” He pauses, and he looks at me, and he does not soften it. “Erase her. Not by our hand, by circumstance. By accident. It closes the question for good. It’s the only option where Sokolov gains nothing.”

“And the third option?”

“What makes you think there’s a third?”

I raise a brow. “You’re you. I assume you have a tenth plan up your sleeve. If you didn’t, you would not be my sovetnik.”

He nearly smirks. “Maxim. I’m obligated to finish the second. She runs your office, she reads everything, she’s in the archives excavating the exact records a prosecutor would subpoena, and you’ve known her for three weeks. She knows far too much to be left as a loose string.”

“You want her tied up all nice and neat?”

“What I want is immaterial. What you need is to tie her to a brick with that loose string and drop her in the river.”

There’s a tidy logic to his thoughts, but life is messy. Things with Thea are… messier. “Tell me what it is that you want, Lev.”

He sits back and sighs. “I want to know more about her before anything else happens. If she’s already someone’s, if Alexei reached her before you ever did, then relocation hands his asset a new identity at our expense, and it’s also pointless. Killing her could take away Alexei’s asset, but we also don’t get answers from her, ending our chance to make her into our asset. Bringing her closer hands her the keys.”

“But also possibly gives us Alexei’s asset.”

He nods once. “The cold answer is the second answer. The riskiest is the third option. Bringing her in makes you vulnerable.”

“It also has the highest cost-to-benefit ratio.”

Again, he nods. “I don’t like any of the options, to be honest.”

I see his points. All of them. But I will not entertain one of them. “She’s not a leak. She handed me her own bias unprompted in our first meeting. She’s a civilian, Lev. Probably the last civilian in that entire building, and I’m not my father, so if the second option is voiced in my presence again, I will treat the voicing as the act. Am I understood?”

“You are understood.” He sits with that for a moment before adding, “If you intend to bring her in, do it quickly. Quietly. Whatever you choose, she will not like it.”

“I’m well-aware.” The picture is clear in my mind. Thea, that defiant lip, the fire in her eyes. She won’t simply agree to what needs to be done. “She’ll fight it.”

“She threw wine on you in front of four hundred people. Of course she will fight it.”

“That was an accident.”

“We both know there are no accidents.” He collects the photographs, squares them, slides them into his coat. “But she will be alive to fight it, and that is the goal. Kirill is loose, and he has her schedule, and I would rather insult her freedom than attend her funeral. Perhaps approach her soon.”

He’s not wrong. If Kirill has a kill order on Thea, there is only one way to stop him.

Thea’s building in Queens is brick, prewar, three floors, a building out of history. I’m parked across the street with two cars I trust at either corner. Can’t have her running too far away.

I watch her kitchen light burn behind thin curtains. A fire escape on the alley side. It’s reachable from a dumpster someone can climb. The street door hangs a half-second before latching. Sixty seconds of looking and I know I have three ways into her building.

That means Kirill has three obvious ways into her building, and at least two obscure ones I spotted from the street. Probably another from underneath or on top of the building.

I climb her stairs and knock twice.

The locks turn, one, two, three of them because she’s always thorough. Thea opens the door the length of her security chain at first, which I approve of, and then all the way. She stands there in lounge pants and an enormous Penn State sweatshirt with a brown cat threading her ankles, and for one second her face does the thing I came all this way in the dark half hoping to see.

The softening.

Then it’s gone in a flash, and what replaces it is new and cold. She steps back to let me in, but she steps farther than the door requires. She holds her own elbows. Three nights ago, this woman pulled me to her by my lapels, and tonight she has put a kitchen chair’s worth of distance between us in her own home. Thea’s watching me the way a principal watches the school bully.

“Maxim.” Zero warmth or affection. Considering I know how to make her come screaming, this is a strange turn of her attitude. “If this is a, if you’re here to…” she gestures at the general concept, and does not finish it. She does not smile either, and the cat yells once into the silence, as if he knows why she has gone cold.

“I’m not here for that, Thea.”