I set the phone on the desk and stand there for a moment in the quiet while I run the situation again in my head from the top.
And that's when it surfaces.
Not for the first time tonight. I've been keeping it at the periphery since this whole thing started, the same way you keep a bright light at the edge of your vision. Present, insistent, but not looked at directly. My uncle's voice, with the particular cadence he uses when he's saying things he intends to say once and not repeat.
One year. Twelve months from tonight, each of you will have produced an heir.
There were five of us at that table. My cousins and my brothers. And one by one, over the past months, they've complied. That's not the word they'd use. Vitali would say found her, Leon would say handled the situation, Avros would simply look smug and change the subject, but from the outside, watching it happen across the table at family dinners and in terse briefings at the estate, it looks exactly like falling.
All of them. Except me.
The deadline is not a distant thing anymore. I have been very good at keeping it abstract. Treating it like a logistical problem to be solved in due course, or a variable to be managed like any other. But my uncle doesn’t make idle threats, and the time I've spent deciding how I feel about being compelled into fatherhood by family mandate is time I haven't spent actually complying with the mandate.
I’m the last one.
I'm aware that I’ve allowed this to slip. That I've been running the club and running my operations and attending the dinners, and nodding at the appropriate moments, but quietly doing nothing.
And now there is a woman in my bathroom.
I shut that thought down immediately with force.
She is a civilian. She is in shock. She killed a man tonight who had his hands on her. Then she walked through the city in the cold, and she ended up in my club by the simple and terrible coincidence of being Sasha Vinzlee's closest friend. Whatever my uncle wants from me, it has nothing to do with the woman currently running water over her hands in my bathroom.
That is not a door I'm opening tonight.
I put the phone in my pocket. I need to focus on the problem. The actual problem. Which is getting Mia out of this building and out of this part of the city before Vinzlee's people start making enquiries. Before someone who was outside that club tonight remembers a woman with blood in her hair.
She comes back out after eight minutes.
She's scrubbed her hands and her face and pulled her hair back into a knot on the back of her head. She's wearing my shirt, the hem of it hitting just above her knee, the sleeves rolled to her elbows. She looks younger than she did twenty minutes ago. She also looks steadier, like she has used the few minutes alone to rebuild some interior scaffolding.
She looks down at herself briefly and then back up at me with an expression that has something dry in it, a hairline fracture of self-awareness that is endearing.
"It's a look," she says with a shrug.
"It is," I agree, ignoring how much I enjoy the look of her in my shirt. "Are you ready to go?"
The dryness fades. She looks at me. "Go where?"
"Out of the city." I shrug out of my jacket and hold it out to her. "I have a house on the family estate just off the north road. You'll be there tonight."
Her chin comes up a fraction. "Your house."
"Yes."
"With you?"
"Yes."
She's quiet for a moment, and I can see her working through it. The calculations running behind those sky-blue eyes, the alternatives, what this means and what it doesn't mean and whether she has the resources to argue with me about it right now.
I wait for her to come to the only conclusion.
She looks at me for a long moment with an expression I'm finding increasingly difficult to read.
"Okay," she says finally. Just like she did downstairs before I brought her up to my office.
"Good." I move toward the door.
