Page 80 of Baby for My Ex’s Dad

I’m not religious. I haven’t prayed since childhood, sitting in stiff pews, mouthing words I didn’t feel and directing my prayers to a ceiling I didn’t believe in. It all felt pointless.

But I get down on my knees on the cold hospital tile beside this woman who just called me family. I fold my hands, and I don’t have words of my own, so I think about what I hope for. That’s all it really is—prayers are hopes given form.

I pray for Klaus Vernigora. Because I will grieve him despite his mistakes. The entire contradictory mess of him. The grief is as complicated as he was.

I pray for Pasha Kagan. The man who was willing to give everything. Not for just a paycheck. For a family he wasn’t born into but is a member of all the same.

And I pray for Max. That he will slaughter Alexei in the worst ways imaginable. That it hurts until Sokolov breathes his last breath, and then it hurts worse when he hits the fires of Hell.

When we get up, my knees ache, and my face is wet again. We sit in the worn hospital waiting room seats and do what the room says. We wait.

“Where would he go, Galina? Tonight, with Klaus gone. Where does a man like Max even go with something like this?”

She considers it, wiping her eyes with the back of one hand. “A drive. Or perhaps to Irina. To her grave, to tell her about their son. Perhaps to stand over what is left of Sokolov. With Maxim, at a time like this, it could be anything.”

That would make sense, all of it. Except that Maxim’s twins, who have drifted closer to us since he left, are wearing a look that does not make sense. I can’t read it. Not grief. Horror. One of them keeps glancing at his phone, then at me, then away.

“What is that face? Both of you. What’s happened?”

Neither answers right away, and the not-answering is its own answer, and my heart starts up again in the bad way.

My voice crackles. “Who?”

They share a look, the tense silent agreement of men coordinating how to give a woman something dreadful. Then one moves closer, extending his phone to me with the screen visible, an apology already in his eyes.

“It went to everyone, miss. From Lev’s own number.”

The screen shows Lev. He’s half slumped in a chair, his intestines spilling out. Mouth sewn shut. Arranged. Displayed. Purposeful. A message.

Lev, who slowed his careful Russian so I could understand. Patient like a teacher. Maxim trusted him enough to send him alone to handle Sokolov tonight, because Lev was worth ten others. The man who was always by Maxim’s side.

Galina leans in to look at what I see and makes a sound next to me that I’ve never heard from a human. Low and torn. Her hand quickly covers her own stitched mouth.

My mind goes white. Thoughts eddy out, leaving only pictures behind. Maxim’s face. His running. His goodbye.

Not because of Klaus. It was Lev.

Out of the blankness, an old woman’s certain voice. “That’s what family does. We save each other.”

We couldn’t save Lev. But I can save Maxim.

34

MAXIM

I drive to Sokolov’s estate knowing it’s a trap.

Lev was bait. I knew it in the corridor with the photograph still lit on my screen. Alexei did not kill my sovetnik in the field by accident. He did not display his mangled corpse for shits and giggles.

He sewed his lips shut while he was alive to make it harder to scream when he was ripped open. He tortured Lev to torture me, and he did that so that I would come.

A visceral invitation he knew I would not turn down.

Alexei knows me. The years taught him the one lever that moves me without fail. He saw what happened when I lost Irina. He knows how I am when I lose the people I love.

He’s pulled that lever tonight. Many times.

Whether Lev betrayed me, I will likely never know now. That’s the cruelty inside the cruelty. Alexei has always been fond of his games. That’s where his daughter gets it from. The hankering to toy with people like a cat with a mouse. The Sokolovs’ most shared trait is not their hair color or skin tone or taste in wines. It’s ruthlessness.