Page 27 of Baby for My Ex’s Dad

“Forty minutes of silence. He recited the service plaza menu in order, twice. Yuri says that it was the longest speech anyone had heard from him.” Lev exhaled, his frustration evident. “Get some rest, Maxim. He’s a message, not an attack. Alexei is telling us his reach has grown.”

Another message arrives at seven by courier in a gray envelope addressed to me in someone’s neutral hand. I open it myself. Two photographs, no note. A note would not be Alexei’s style.

The first is from the Meridian. Twelfth floor, my floor. It’s the corridor outside my suite, time-stamped in the corner, the morning on a date I do not need to check.

Thea is mid-step, shoes in one hand. Her hair is down, clothes askew, and she’s caught in the amber of the hallway sconces with her face in three-quarter profile. Unmistakable, lovely. Leaving.

Leaving me.

I brush aside the sting of that, but it lingers. The picture means Alexei already had a man there. Already knew where I was, and what I’d be doing.

Does that mean that Thea is his?

Doubtful, but not impossible. I’ve looked into her, and there’s nothing to imply she’s anything but what she says she is. Still, I have to keep my guard up with her. Just in case.

The love life of a pakhan is never simple.

Whatever the case, Kirill was in the corridor at four in the morning because Kirill had taken the neighboring suite. He was there before I ever brought her upstairs.

Which means she’s in Kirill’s crosshairs because of me.

The second photograph is daytime. In my garage, the executive sublevel, taken from an upper ramp with a long lens. She is crossing to her car with a coffee and a folder. Her sunglasses sit pushed up into her hair, and she’s talking to someone out of frame or to herself. Given how dedicated she is, I assume she’s speaking to herself. She’s never mentioned friends. The timestamp is from four days ago.

Four days. He has been following her in the daylight, on my property.

On the back of the first photograph in Russian are two words.

Pretty face.

I set the photographs on the desk, and I sit with my hands flat on the walnut until they are calm. They want to ball into fists I can shove down Alexei’s throat.

This is not a threat in a traditional way. And the last time he said a woman had a pretty face…

Alexei has seen her, and he’s telling me he has seen her. He will see her as one of two things. My woman or my informant.

As my woman, she’s a soft place to put pressure on a hard man. As an informant, she’s someone’s asset moving through my private floors and my archives at strange hours, a leak to be located and closed.

Or leveraged.

Either ends the same way once she stops being useful, and he’ll decide when that is, because that’s something I learned about Alexei Sokolov one funeral at a time.

He’s a man without a code.

The old rules, the ones I was raised under, leave wives and children untouched. They keep civilians left out of our world whenever possible.

But Alexei has killed accountants. He killed a man’s mother to make the man punctual. He’s tortured another man’s girlfriend because the man commented rudely about his suit.

Pretty face.

Two words to tell me he sees her, and that what happens to her next is a question he expects me to answer. My answer tells him what she’s worth to me, and what she’s worth to me tells him where to cut.

I won’t allow this to happen.

Lev arrives with coffee and takes in the photographs without touching them, and reads the back of the first one, and stands very still for a moment. “So… The woman.”

“The woman.”

He sets down the coffee. “One. Relocate her. New name, new city, money, a story for the family. Vanish her gently. It works if she cooperates and never calls her mother, which is to say, it works in textbooks.”