Page 64 of Baby for My Ex’s Dad

Both times, him waving me off. “That’s literally what I have you for, Thea.”

It’s his mistake. His repeated mistake, the one he never once learned to stop making because there was always someone standing behind him to catch it.

There’s no one standing behind him now.

So the mistake made it through because, in the rush to fire him, I wasn’t there to look over his shoulder. The error climbed into intel Lev trusted, and it sits on this desk with Klaus’s fingerprints all over it, in a language only I can read.

Klaus planted the intel about the ports.

It sounds insane, except for the fact that it doesn’t. It sounds like him.

Klaus fed Lev a tidy, backward-routed lie, and Lev believed it because it fit. Why wouldn’t he buy it? Then Maxim believed it because Lev believed it, and right now every gun the Vernigoras own is getting arranged in careful rings around a pier in Elizabeth where nothing is going to happen.

I sit back in Maxim’s chair. The ports are a decoy. You only create a decoy when you’re targeting something else.

Which means the real target is somewhere else. Somewhere Klaus knows Maxim can’t ignore. Somewhere that would gut him. Irina’s grave? There’s nothing to be gained by defacing her grave, not by Klaus or Alexei. Unless something else is buried there.

I remember seeing something about doing that kind of thing in documentaries about the Bratva. A fortune inside someone’s coffin, instead of a body. It took people years to figure it out, and by the time the law caught up to the situation, the people who robbed the grave were long gone.

Maybe that’s been Klaus’s plan all along. Take a chunk of the family fortune⁠—

Wait… Maxim would never have allowed Irina’s body to be moved for something as unimportant as money, and to be honest, as much as Klaus has gone off the deep end, I don’t think he would do that, either. So, her grave is her grave. That’s off the table… I run down the short list of what Maxim truly cares about, and it takes maybe four seconds.

All the air goes out of my lungs at once. It’s not the ports. Not the company. Not the money or the piers or his wife’s grave.

The heir. Me.

The estate is the target. Klaus aimed everything at the pier so that the mansion would be vulnerable. He knows the layout. Likely knows the gate rotations and the camera angles and where the panic room is and how to reach it. He knows everything he needs to take this place apart.

I call Maxim, and it rings. “Come on, come on, pick up!” I’m already on my feet, moving toward the door with some animal need to find Pasha. Max has to call off the pier. He has to send everyone here, right now, before⁠—

The study door bangs open right as I reach for the knob.

It’s Pasha. The soft boy who teaches me chess is gone. What’s standing in the doorway is a man with his weapon already out and his voice flat and fast. “The gate cameras just went dark. All of them, at once.”

“What does that mean?” But I know what it means. I’m just stalling.

He’s scanning the windows as he says it. “The internet’s down too. It’s been cut from outside.”

It’s happening. Right now. “Fuck.” The phone in my hand still rings. Why the hell hasn’t Max picked up?

Pasha checks the door he just came through, then me, then the door again. “My orders in an emergency are you. Only you. I do not leave your side, and you do not leave mine. Understood?”

“Pasha.” The phone is still ringing against my ear, unanswered, ring after ring. “Listen to me. It’s not the ports. The ports are a decoy. Klaus planted them. I can prove it. The real target is here, it’s⁠—”

He nods once, and it steadies me more than any reassurance could. “Panic room. Now. Follow me.” He’s already got a hand on my arm to take me there.

“Give me a gun.”

That stops him for half a second. “What?”

“A gun, Pasha. You have two on you, so please give me one. I don’t want to sit in a steel room as a package you’re guarding, waiting for Klaus to come and collect. If they manage to get through you, I want to be armed and ready.”

“You know how to use one?”

“I grew up in rural Pennsylvania, shooting tin cans and paint buckets before I could drive.”

He crouches, pulls the backup piece from his ankle rig, and puts it in my hand grip-first. It’s heavy, but my palm closes around it like some part of me kept the shape all these years. “Safety’s here,” he says, tapping it. “You point it at people you wish to kill, and that’s all.”