Page 86 of Baby for My Ex’s Dad

Anya glances back and sees it in my face. The girlish glee is gone, and the killer is all that’s left.

I lunge.

The gun goes off. Fire opens along my cheekbone, a hot, bright line. The round punches into the wall behind me.

“I didn’t miss, Maxim,” she hisses, smiling even now. “Don’t worry, my love. I’ll still want you when that scars over. It will suit you. All the best men are a little ruined⁠—“

“This is over Anya⁠—”

“The fuck it is! I have their pakhan. They’ll bow to me before they let me hurt you.”

“My men have strict orders to take down anyone who takes me. They will follow that order. You have no cards to play. Surrender yourself, and I will show mercy.”

She cackles. “You know better than to negotiate from a position of weakness, Maxim.”

“You’re going to lose.”

“You’re going to marry me. Those men are mine. They just don’t know it yet. And I’m going to kill that pregnant bitch⁠—”

The door bursts open.

And Anya wheels toward it and opens fire, the entire magazine without looking, emptying the gun into the shape filling the doorway on pure animal reflex.

The shape is Alexei.

He was pushed through the door, a human shield stumbling into the room. He drops where he stood.

For a half-second, Anya stares at what she has done. “Daddy?”

The men behind him fire past his crumpled body. Anya Sokolov is thrown back against the window, her head ricocheting off the cracked glass, before she falls, too.

It’s over so fast that my mind struggles to catch up.

The room fills. My men, clearing corners in the way I trained, before the others pour in. Yakuza beside them, quiet and precise. A stillness drops over everything as the last echo dies.

Then Chaucer. Then Sergei. And then comes Thea.

My mind just can’t quite make it all fit, can’t make sense of her being here, and it stops trying. She’s already pushing past the men to reach me. She rushes across the room, hitting my chest, and I catch her, my face in her hair. I hold her close, her hands gripping my coat tightly. In that moment, nothing else matters.

“You were supposed to stay,” I rasp. “I told you to stay.”

“Yeah, that was stupid,” she says against my chest. “I don’t work for you anymore. I’m family. We save each other.”

37

THEA

Maxim’s people roll over Sokolov’s place like the tide coming in. If tides hid evidence.

Different men handle the bodies, the basement, and the gruesome task of erasing a morning like this. Maxim issues three quiet commands, then, surprisingly, releases control, letting others handle it while he stays by my side. We leave in one of the gray SUVs, and I refuse to look back at the house where so much bullshit went down.

He has a butterfly bandage on his cheekbone, marking the line where Anya’s bullet struck. It makes him look precisely like what he is—a man who entered a grave and walked away.

“How are you here, Thea? What happened?”

I tell him everything. The waiting room, the hesitating twins, the party I planned in the back of a speeding car, the seating chart of killers. He listens without interrupting, and despite his exhaustion, his mouth almost forms a smile but stops short.

“There’s a part you’re not going to love.”