Page 76 of Baby for My Ex’s Dad

“He didn’t trust me.” And there’s something raw under the dryness now, something that surprises me. He… his feelings are hurt. “He thought he had to hide it from me. From me, who trusts him with your life and mine.”

“You’re offended?”

His jaw works. “Some of the old men in my world would make his life hell for it. I’m not those men, but he believed I was. It’s an insult. I spent all these years thinking he knew me better than that, and tonight I learn he looked at me and saw one of them anyway.”

“Max—”

“That’s a crack in our relationship.” His thumbs gently wipe beneath my eyes. “When he’s able to sit up, I intend to sit beside him and inform him that he’s a fool, and that he’s always been safe with me, and continues to be so. That is the yelling I refer to. If you like, I’ll refrain from yelling, but he and I must have that talk.”

And there it is again—the thing that always catches me off guard about this notorious man. Beneath the empire and the body count, he’s different from the world that shaped him. He runs a criminal family, launders money for cartels, and plans to have a man killed today. Yet, he’s also the man who wants to sit by a hospital bed and gently tell a scared man that he was always safe in his care.

I’m still looking at him when the second set of doors opens.

Different doctor. Worse expression. His face is grim in a way Pasha’s surgeon’s never was.

32

MAXIM

The doctor takes his breath, while I hold mine.

“Mr. Vernigora, your son is in critical condition. The bullet penetrated the upper lobe of the lung, and prior to our intervention, he aspirated a substantial volume of blood. The lung’s actively resisting treatment.”

“What else?”

“He’s also lost more blood than desirable. We’ve conducted transfusions and are continuing to do so, but I must be frank with you. He is AB negative, a rare blood type. The supply at our facility is running low this evening. We have issued requests to nearby hospitals. However, the outlook appears uncertain.”

“I can donate. I’m AB negative.” I’m already shrugging out of my coat. “Take mine. Now. However much he needs, take it.”

The doctor’s professional calm flickers with something like relief. “We will crossmatch to be certain, but we can set that up immediately.” He’s already turning. “Follow me.”

Thea catches my arm before I go, her face wrecked. She takes my jaw, pulls me down, and kisses me hard and brief. “I’ve got everyone out here. Go.”

Donating blood is a strange process.

It’s a quiet kind of violence. I’m sitting in a vinyl chair with a needle in my arm, watching my own blood run down a line into a bag that will run into my son.

It feels wrong that the thing that could save him is slow. The thing that brought him this close to death happened in the blink of an eye. I should be able to fix him equally fast. It’s wrong.

This is taking too long.

The nurse tells me to pump my fist, and I do it, obedient as I haven’t been to anyone in thirty years. This is the one order I would crawl to obey.

I do not avert my gaze from the line. I’ve offered this young man so little throughout his life. Distance. Monetary support. Silence. I will give him this. All of it. I don’t care.

“How much can you take tonight?” I ask the nurse.

“One unit, sir.”

“Take two.”

“One,” she says, unimpressed with me in a way I find oddly comforting. “We preserve lives. We don’t take them.”

Part of me wishes to argue. Irina died here. But the nurse doesn’t know that. She’s young. She probably wasn’t even here when it happened.

When the bag is full and they have pressed the cotton into the crook of my arm, they let me see him. And the sight stops me in the doorway.

Niklaus is not a man in that bed; he’s a complex network of machinery. A tube is inserted in his throat, while a ventilator provides respiration with a slow, mechanical sigh. The false inhale and exhale. Lines are connected to both arms, and a monitor displays his heartbeats in green numbers.