Page 25 of Baby for My Ex’s Dad

He isn’t resisting anymore, which is worse than the fighting. He’s gone loose. Like it doesn’t matter what they do with him, because he’s already decided what happens next.

They get him up onto the bumper. At the top, framed in the van’s doorway under the dome light, he turns his head.

And looks at me.

Not around. Not past. At me, at the two inches of face I have over the Audi’s window line, from forty feet away in the dark between cars, like he’s known where I was this whole time. His eyes find mine and hold. Blood runs from the corner of his mouth over the scar seam. Then, slow, with a guard’s fist in his collar, he smiles at me.

The same smile from the corridor, only this time, red instead of white. And something else underneath it, worse. Not surprise.

Interest.

I do not want this man’s interest.

The guards shove him inside and the doors bang shut, and my lungs remember their job all at once, and I go down behind the Audi so fast I feel the box of files with my ribs. Each breath heaves harder than the one before. Am I hyperventilating?

Whatever I’m doing, I better do it quiet. There are more footsteps now.

Unhurried, hard soles on concrete, from the direction of the service elevator. A voice comes with the footsteps, low, formal, giving instructions in Russian.

Every hair I own stands up for the second time tonight, because I’d know that voice through a wall, underwater, in another language, which is the current arrangement.

Maxim.

I peek. I have to. I move to the Audi’s rear bumper and put one eye past it, and there he is, red in the wash of the van’s brake lights. He’s talking to the biggest of the security men with the calm of a man reviewing a delivery schedule.

Except his face. That’s not his calm face.

I’ve seen his boardroom face, his podium face, his midnight-in-the-archives face, and this is none of them. This one is older and colder, and it belongs to this concrete. The biggest of the security men says something and Maxim answers with two words, and the man steps back a full pace.

My Russian is eighteen months of apps and podcasts and subway drills, and they’re talking fast, so I get one word in five. Interrogate, or question him, close enough. Quietly, or a quiet place. And a word I know from nowhere academic, from the forums and the true-crime subtitles, the word with no clean English equivalent because it isn’t a business term. It’s a world.

Bratva.

And a phrase from Maxim himself, in that gravel voice, before he turns back toward the elevator. “Find out what the dog was sent to fetch.”

The van pulls out. Its taillights swing across the ceiling and are gone up the ramp. The remaining men disperse to the shadows they came from, and Maxim walks back into his building without one backward glance. The service elevator swallows him.

Sublevel three is a parking garage again, humming, empty, smelling of cold rubber. Nothing is happening now. Nothing ever happened.

Just like the nothing that happened in the archives. Maxim is very good at nothing, isn’t he?

I don’t remember getting to my car. I’m just in it, doors locked, box of files riding shotgun, hands shaking on the wheel. I drive out past the service bay without looking at it. The attendant booth is empty. The gate arm lifts for my badge like it’s any other night. The city does its blue-black thing all the way to Queens while my brain replays a two-note hum on a loop, and somewhere around the bridge I realize I’ve been holding my breath at every red light.

Potato meets me at the door yelling about the hour. I feed him without taking my coat off. Then I sit down at my kitchen table, laptop open, cat circling, radiator clanking. None of it registers in any real way. I don’t feel like I’m at home.

I feel like I’m still in the garage. Still captured by that red smile.

He knows I saw it. He knows, and he’ll tell those men. Those men will tell Maxim.

But then… What will Maxim do? Will it be nothing?

I’m not doing nothing. I type into a search engine, Vernigora bratva.

My finger hovers over enter for a second. Two weeks ago, I’d have been typing it out of curiosity. Tonight, I’m typing it because I heard the word in his mouth.

The internet doesn’t hold back.

The first result is a forum thread from six years ago titled “Vernigora Industries = front??” with two hundred replies.