Page 67 of Baby for My Ex’s Dad

That’s strange, too. I’ve gone and worried myself sick. Can’t even remember the last time that happened. Childhood, perhaps.

The last miles are the estate road unlit. In the bare dawn light, it might as well be night with the trees closing overhead.

Our headlights find it first. My gate is wrong.

Twelve feet of iron that takes a motor to budge, hangs slack and canted on a ruined hinge. It stands crooked and half open, one leaf sagging into the gravel.

Whoever is here did not pick the lock. They did not try to be subtle or sneak in. A bold statement of no fear.

“Turn off the headlights, Yuri.”

He does, and the world goes black, but then our vision catches up. Beyond the gate sit two black SUVs, nose to tail. A single figure stands between them, a rifle held loose across his body.

He is Sokolov’s. He’s standing as if he never thought he’d be tapped in this fight, since my guards and I would be gone.

Yuri does not slow. The man raises his weapon a fraction too late, and the front of the car takes him at full speed. The thump of tires on a body roils my gut. And then Yuri backs over him for good measure.

We come to rest in the gravel a few feet from his struggling, wailing body, and I’m through the door before the car settles. I plug him once between what’s left of his eyes.

Lev is out with the twins behind him, weapons up, fanning to the angles without needing to be told. The house stands black against a dawn-gray sky. I walk toward my home with my men at my back, up the drive I’ve walked ten thousand times. Whatever questions I find on the other side of this door, there’s only one answer.

At the edge of the drive, I stop and turn to them. My voice comes out level and quiet. “You know what to do.”

27

THEA

“Kirill,” Pasha says loudly through the door, gun at the ready. “You need to leave now. Walk out the way you came in, and this won’t escalate. That’s your only offer, and I’m making it once. Take it.”

Silence from the hall.

Galina’s back is against the door beside the bolt, the butcher knife still in her fist, blood drying at her chin. My own hand is wrapped around the grip Pasha gave me, muzzle pointed at the floor. Sweat trickles down my spine.

A popping sound lashes out, and I feel it in my teeth and my sternum. There’s a black hole through the door in a puff of splinters, then Pasha folds.

He flops down hard against the desk like his strings got cut, both hands going to his stomach. When he lifts them away to look, they come back dark and wet and shining in the firelight. “Oh,” he says, almost polite, like he’s noticed a stain on a shirt. “That’s—okay.” Then he slumps, halfway on his back on the floor.

Galina’s already down beside him, on her knees, the knife forgotten, both her old hands pressing hard over his. I know enough now to catch the edges of her Russian orders to Pasha.

Stay. Stay, stay, you foolish boy, you stay.

For one absurd second, I’m aware of everything at once. The heat of the fire, Pasha’s breathing gone fast and shallow and wrong next to the desk, Galina’s hands dark to the wrist. The lime, under my ribs, that has no idea any of this is happening.

And then the door comes apart.

Kirill’s one massive kick beside the bolt turns the good old wood to kindling. Then he steps through the wreckage into the firelight. He’s exactly as bad as memory promised, and worse now, because I’ve seen what he does with a boot. Blood sheets down his arm where Galina must have stabbed him. He doesn’t appear to notice it.

The huge man fills the doorway. And behind him, hanging back where it’s safe, is Klaus.

My mind momentarily rejects it. Klaus is meant for dinner tables and expense reports, not here, not with these men.

Behind the two of them, a crowd of men with guns and flat, impatient faces. There are more than I can see, but I hear them.

I grab the fire iron off the hearth and raise it. A pistol with one magazine does not shoot its way through fifteen men, especially not one wielded by a person who is out of practice. But a woman with a length of iron and a small pistol can maybe make the next sixty seconds cost more than they want to pay.

“Okay,” I begin. “Okay, everybody just—Klaus. Klaus, look at me, not at him, at me.” My voice comes out shaking. He used to laugh at my jokes across a dinner table. He’s not laughing right now.

He’s smirking.