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“You missed dinner.”

“I ate.”

“Coffee isn’t food.”

“It is when it has milk.” I don't know who’s more difficult—him or Misha. I can see where Misha gets it. Like father, like son.

I sit on the bench and remove my shoes. “Misha thinks you burned the bear’s soup.”

Alexei watches me roll up my trousers. “What are you doing?”

“Coming in to remove an uncooperative patient.”

Alexei pulls himself out of the pool, and every sensible thought leaves my head.

He’s completely naked.

Water slips down the hard lines of his stomach, and the black ink across his chest shifts as he moves. Fading marks from his wounds make him look dangerous and very much alive beneath the soft golden lights.

Wet hair falls across his forehead, and his chest rises with each rough breath. I can’t look away as water trails over his hips, runs down his thighs, and gathers around his feet.

The medication sits forgotten beside me, along with any reason why I removed my shoes.

He notices where I’m looking. “I stirred it.”

“You forgot the jam.” My eyes remain on his half-hard cock.

“There was no soup.” He picks up a towel and dries himself.

“To him there was.”

“Leonid traced the lease on your father’s warehouse outside Yaroslavl.” Alexei wraps the towel around his hips and sits beside me. “The company renting it handles waste for several hospitals.”

I look at his bare chest, then at the towel. The night feels wrong for this conversation.

“And Misha wanted jam.”

“Yes.” The word comes out hard.

I wait.

Alexei looks across the pool. “I knew it mattered to him. I still thought it was a waste of time.”

“That doesn’t make you cruel.”

“His face changed.”

“He’ll recover.”

He says nothing. Light from the pool moves across our legs.

“I spend twenty minutes reading the same story, and part of me counts everything I could have finished instead,” he says. “He asks questions while the radio is speaking. He wants me to sit with him when captains are moving money, and my men miss Belov placing a camera under my roof.”

“That’s what children do. They don’t care what the adults are busy with.”

“I can’t play when my mind is somewhere else. It doesn’t come naturally to me.”

“Most parenting doesn’t.”