Page 33 of Baby for My Ex’s Dad

“Potato goes where I go.”

The animal regards me across the table with its flat yellow stare, one ear folded, and I return the stare until it yawns at me, which no man has dared in thirty years. He wears nonplussed better than she does.

“This is a working estate, Thea. There are dogs at the perimeter. Men who move fast through hallways at strange hours. Galina’s kitchen won’t tolerate an animal on its counters.”

Her stubborn chin juts defiantly. “He stays with me.”

“Your room is large. He will endure.”

“What else?” She ably sweeps aside my objections.

I would be impressed if it were not so annoying. “You will clean up after yourself. Galina keeps this house, and she is not your staff. You will strip your own bed on Mondays, return your dishes to the kitchen, and give her no grief of any kind, because she has run this property since before you were born and she outranks everyone on it, including me.”

She doctors her coffee with three sugars and cream. “Keep going. This is the most information I’ve gotten since Queens.”

“You will not leave the walls without an escort. You will not post on social media, contact the office, or use any device but the phone I give you. It will reach me, Lev, Galina, and your sister through a relay that cannot be traced. Your employment continues here at full salary. The audit files are being driven up this afternoon.”

Her mint green eyes narrow. “You’re paying me to be kidnapped.”

“I’m paying you to work in a location that inconveniences my enemies and keeps you in one piece.” I fold the first newspaper. “That is all of it. The rules are few, and they are not up for debate.”

Perhaps four people live who argue with me. One shares my blood. Two are on my payroll and argue as part of their professional duty. The fourth is buttering toast at my table in a sweatshirt, the least formal wear this table has ever seen. I appreciate her spine, but now is not the hour for it, and so I stand and collect my jacket from the chair.

“Where are you going?”

“We may resume this conversation at dinner, but I have places to be. You may bring motions. The cat stays in the room.”

“The cat stays with me.”

My teeth gnash against each other as I exhale. “I look forward to the conversation.”

I meet the staff in the kitchen. Galina, arms folded. The groundsman and the house detail, six men on rotation, of whom the youngest, Pasha, stands straightest. I keep it brief.

“The woman staying in the east wing is under this family’s protection. Alexei Sokolov has his eye on her, and his dog Kirill is loose. Until that changes, she does not exist outside these walls. No name on phones, no name in town, no deliveries under her name.”

Galina sighs. “Allergies? Preferences?”

“Ask her yourself. She’s a guest, not a prisoner, and she is not to be troubled. Anyone who troubles her will discuss it with me.” I look at them each in turn. “She will cause no problems. Questions?”

Pasha wants to say something. I see it on his handsome face. Thirty-nine, broad, earnest, unusually kind for a man in his line of work. “Sir. The east wing rotation. I would like to take the nights.”

“The nights are the long shift.”

“Yes, sir. I don’t mind it. I’ve already read the Sokolov file, and I walked the sightlines to her windows this morning before breakfast.” He stands there, spine like a flagpole, ears red, and any fool could see what has happened here. A young man, a young woman, one morning of proximity.

He has developed a crush.

I remember all my crushes. They were ill-advised, much like this one. It does not matter. Crushes rarely ever do. It will fizzle out, and one day, when he is settled with a wife and babies, he will look back on this time fondly the way all men do.

It is a mild irritant. Not Pasha himself. He is loyal to the marrow and twice the shot his father was. The comparison is the irritant. He is unattached, unscarred, uncomplicated by empires or sons or far too many years. By any sane measure he is the suitable man for someone like Thea, and the suitable man just volunteered for night duty.

A wiser version of me would find this convenient. Do I? I give the boy’s broad back one long look as he goes, and then I put it aside. I did not bring her here for myself. I brought her here because of what waits outside. Not because of my prurient thoughts.

“Take the nights, Pasha. Thank you for volunteering.”

He grins, then goes at a pace just under a jog. Eager. Good.

Alexei hunts by appetite. He has no code to slow him, and no patience to steady him, and the one thing he cannot tolerate is time.