Page 74 of Baby for My Ex’s Dad

Her clothes are ruined. Saturated and stiffening from Pasha’s dried blood. Dark rust across her body. A horror she has forgotten she’s wearing. The sight of it frays something in me that not even the entire ambulance could.

“Pasha’s in surgery,” she says before I can ask. Her voice is hoarse and strained. “He coded again in the bay. They managed to revive him. It’s serious, Max. They may not be saying it, but I can read the room—it’s very bad.”

“I—”

“Klaus?”

“Surgery. EMT says he thought the bullet nicked a lung.”

Thea nods, and she doesn’t cry. There’s a kind of past-crying thing that rooms like this one exist for. I pull her in, blood and all. She presses her forehead to my sternum and takes a breath, and for a brief moment, we’re two individuals supporting each other upright, just like anyone else in this room.

I doubt most of the people here are preparing for a counterattack. Over her head, I take stock of my people. “Galina?”

“She’s got someone fixing her lip in the ER.”

I will construct a wing for any house she selects. If Thea agrees, I will name a child after her. I know I can never fully repay that woman, and she would be offended if I attempted to do so. I’m going to try anyway.

Lev’s eyes are lethal. They hold no trace of grief or fear, only a steely black certainty. This is the gaze of the man he was before becoming my sovetnik. The doctor who lost his license because he decided who lived and who died on his table. When he became an executioner instead of a doctor.

That’s the man looking at me and waiting, because he will not move on a thing this size without my go-ahead. The father in me wants revenge. Personally. The pakhan in me knows I must answer blood for blood.

I hold Thea against my chest with one arm as I glance at Lev across the bleak room and nod.

Lev inclines his head a half degree. He pushes off the window and walks out into the corridor. Sokolov does not know he lost this morning. He’s about to find out.

31

THEA

Klaus took a bullet. For me. Except not for me.

That’s the part my mind keeps obsessing over. I know Klaus well, and I’m certain that Klaus Vernigora never truly cared if I lived or died. I was merely an accessory to him, like a fashionable handbag that can plan parties. He wouldn’t have even crossed the street for me.

But he took a bullet for the lime.

It doesn’t match what I know about him from eight months up close. It sits in my chest, huge and wrong-shaped, and I can’t make it fit with who he is.

But Maxim’s mind is elsewhere. “I’m not going anywhere. Understand?”

“Yes.”

He studies me for a moment. “What’s on your mind?”

“He didn’t know.” Maxim and I sit in two worn chairs against the wall of the waiting room, with my hands in both of his. I’ve to say it aloud because it’s been gnawing at me since the study, “Klaus. What Kirill mentioned at the end. Klaus thought the plan was a ransom, believing they would take me alive and force you to pay Sokolov to retrieve me, expecting you to kneel to do so.”

“Niklaus sought to humiliate me.”

“That was all he signed up for—to hurt your pride and get paid. He wasn’t aware that the actual order was to kill me. Kirill told him that Sokolov never told him the truth. That’s when he moved in front of the gun.”

Maxim pauses beside me, holding his breath. “He thought he was bringing you to a temporary cage, not a coffin.”

“Yeah.”

He falls silent for a moment. Then, in a calm and steady voice, he murmurs, “Kirill is dead. I’m not sorry for that. The men Sokolov sent into my house are dead, all of them.”

“Good. They should be.”

His thumb moves over my knuckles, slow, steadying himself more than me. “Alexei believes he has won. He will pay for this. For all of this.”