Page 34 of Baby for My Ex’s Dad

The bus ticket says Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania will check out, and then it will not, and then his people will circle back through Queens. They will explore her building, her sister’s street, and find nothing. I will sponge away his time, minute by minute, day by day.

Every day she wakes behind these walls, drinking her three-sugar abomination, is a day Alexei Sokolov loses even more patience. It will infuriate him, and he will do something stupid.

Which is the point.

The question is, how long will he wait before doing the stupid thing? A month, I estimate. Perhaps six weeks, at most.

The day he fouls up is the day Alexei Sokolov learns who truly owns this city.

As I pull on my suit jacket, my phone rings. “Yes?”

“You need to come down.” Lev, and there is a note in his voice I’ve heard perhaps five times in my life. “Now. And Maxim, know that I’ve already taken Niklaus’s phone. I’m asking you, as the man who has kept you out of prison for thirty years, to keep an even head about this.”

The knot in my gut has its own knots. “What did he do?”

“Best discussed in person⁠—”

“He still breathes? No serious injuries?”

“None yet. But if he keeps struggling against security, I cannot promise that will stay true.”

The drive takes longer than it should, and not long enough. Without knowing what I’m walking into, I want more time to prepare. But one cannot prepare for something Lev holds back, so there’s no point in preparation. He rarely holds anything back from me, and when he does, it’s never a good thing.

Two of the house security stand inside my office door, and my son sits in the chair across from my desk with his collar wrenched sideways. A red mark rises on his cheekbone.

I pause at Konstantin, who guards the door with Oleg. “I’ll assume he earned that.”

Konstantin closes his eyes. Nods. “He swung at us. My apologies⁠—”

“None needed, but appreciated nonetheless.” I walk in, hearing the solid thunk of the door closing behind me. Lev stands by the window, a grim countenance on his face. I nod toward the banker’s box atop my walnut desk. Pale confetti droops over the edges. “What am I to make of that?”

Lev’s eyes stay on Niklaus, but his words are for me. “I suggest you read the tabs.”

My eyes fall to the small white label. Meridian Atlantic. Authorizations. Niklaus sought to shred the evidence against him.

The fury that arrives in me then is not hot. It’s cold and all-consuming. “Shredding documents. On a machine you had to badge into.”

“They’re my files.” His voice cracks in the middle, and he grimaces. “My projects, my—you took my company, you don’t get my⁠—“

“Your files carry the name of a subsidiary that launders Alexei Sokolov’s money through my freight lines. You’re not destroying documents, Niklaus. You’re destroying evidence, and the only question this office has ever needed you to answer is whether you knew what you were signing, and you have just answered it with a shredder. You knew exactly what you were doing and why.” The air flows out of my lungs as my disappointment increases. “I had held onto the pretense that you were just confused or, hell, too stupid to know better. But you fucking knew exactly what you were doing⁠—”

“I didn’t, I…” he starts, and stops, and his eyes go to the box, to Lev, to the door, everywhere but to me. The boy who cried at a boarding school gate looks out of the man’s face for one unguarded second, and my gut twists. Then the man sneers, cornered. “You’d never believe me anyway.”

“Give me a reason to believe you, Niklaus. Give me something I can point to as to why my son was signing off on my enemy’s movements.”

His jaw clenches as he shakes his head and glances away.

“I wanted to believe anything but what the evidence told me.” It comes out quieter than I intend, and truer. “You have no idea, in your pampered life, how much I wanted to think you were simply an idiot. And even that, you could not live up to.”

There’s a fire in his eyes that reminds me so much of his mother that it hurts. “I suppose I get to surprise you yet again. You know how much I live for it.”

“If you wanted to surprise me, you should’ve done something right.”

“Fuck you.”

“Niklaus Vernigora, your employment with this company’s terminated, effective immediately, for cause. Your badge, your accounts, your titles are revoked. Danilov will contact your attorney regarding the rest, and you will need one, I can promise you that. I suggest, for the first time in your life, that you listen to him.” I nod to the men at the door, and they come quickly to either side of him. “See him out.”

He comes up out of the chair, swinging off their hands, tears standing in his eyes and his voice tearing loose from whatever moored it. “You can’t do this to me!”