Page 65 of Baby for My Ex’s Dad

“I know.”

The phone’s still ringing in my other hand. Come on, Max, pick up, pick up, pick⁠—

The ringing finally stops. It’s not connecting anymore—it’s just stopped. The screen suddenly goes black in my hand, and almost immediately, the entire room goes dark, too.

All lights go out instantly, leaving only the fire, which casts an orange, flickering glow and shifts. The silence rings in my ears, as the house’s many tiny sounds suddenly die. Pasha curses, then grabs my arm to haul me toward the panic room.

That’s when the door bursts open a second time. It’s Galina.

In her quilted robe with blood on her that shines in the firelight. A butcher knife in her fist, and it’s wet to the handle. Her lip is split and bleeding down her chin. Her gray hair has come loose, and her eyes are wild. She’s breathing hard.

Galina rambles. “The kitchen hall. They came through the kitchen, three of them, maybe more—go, go⁠—”

In the swinging beam of a flashlight out in the corridor behind her, I see him.

The bald head. The scars hooking down through one eyebrow like a crack in a plate. The red smile.

He’s got a gash torn open high on his arm, dark and wet and running down to his fingers. Galina’s knife or a dead guard’s last act. He does not appear to have noticed it happened.

The face peeler isn’t hurrying.

That’s the thing that turns my spine to water. Everyone else in this house is moving fast, and he’s strolling like this is a day in the park.

Galina slams the door and throws the heavy bolt. Through the wood, muffled but clear and almost warm, like an old friend spotting me across a restaurant, comes his voice.

“Good to see you again, little witness.”

26

MAXIM

Lev and I are three hours from the pier and deep in the arrangement of it when my phone lights with Thea’s name. But we nearly have this done, and if I lose my train of thought now, it could be a matter of my life or my death.

“The river team sets before dawn,” I tell Lev, reaching for the phone. “Two boats, and I want the second one dark until⁠—”

The ringing stops before I accept the call. Missed. Her name sits on the screen above the words no voicemail.

Odd. She always leaves a voicemail.

A missed call from Thea with no message behind it has never once happened. I dial her. “Give me a moment, Lev.”

The silence has reasons, and I want them. It rings four times and goes to her voicemail. I end the call and dial again. Voicemail. Again. Voicemail.

“Maxim.” Lev cocks his head. “What’s wrong?”

I hold up one finger. I call Pasha, and it rings into nothing. Only his voicemail message of careful English asking me to please leave a message after the tone.

Galina does not carry a phone out of any love for the thing, but she carries the one I gave her because I asked her to. It rings. And rings. No voicemail this time. She wouldn’t know how to access it in the first place, so she never set it up.

Something is disturbing our lines. A cell tower? Weather? I try the house landline. Busy signal.

That’s not possible. No one uses it, and there are multiple lines that route to it. A cold has started low in me, in a place I had forgotten could feel cold.

“The satellite phone,” I say aloud, and I dial it.

Pasha carries it clipped inside his jacket at all hours, on my standing order. It works when nothing else works. It is the one phone in my world that cannot fail to connect.

It rings. And rings. And no one on the far end answers it.