“That I was working on it.”
“Are you?”
“I’m trying.” I set the cup down. “She won’t take my calls. She’s read the restructuring documents, I know she has, but she hasn’t said anything about them. She just arranges the visits and hands me the twins for an hour and stands there watching like I’m a variable she hasn’t finished calculating.”
“She’s angry.”
“She has every right to be angry. That’s not the problem.” I lean back in my chair. “The problem is that she’s at her parents’ house in an ordinary neighborhood with no securityinfrastructure, and she’s been asking questions she shouldn’t be asking.”
Maxim goes still. “What kind of questions?”
“The kind that lead back to the Malikov network.” I watch his face change. “Pavel has men on the house. They’ve been reporting her movements. She made a call to an old Kestrel Maritime contact named Gennady. Asked him about a company called Sorokin Freight.”
“She found that name on her own?”
“Her father’s old files. She’s been going through them.” I stand and move to the window. “Viktor also got a call from a former associate named Borin. Word is there’s been movement in the eastern networks. Surveillance on contacts tied to my operation.”
“And she heard this.”
“She was in the room.”
Maxim sets down his cup slowly. “Does she understand what Sorokin Freight actually is?”
“Gennady told her it’s a Malikov front. So yes. She understands enough to be dangerous.”
“You need to get her back here.”
“I can’t force her.”
“You’ve forced her into plenty of things before.”
I look at him over my shoulder. He doesn’t flinch from it.
“This is different,” I say.
“Why? Because you actually care about her?”
I don’t answer that. Turn back to the window.
“She knows about the security,” I say. “Pavel’s men. She noticed them on the second day. She called me about it, which is the only call she’s initiated since she left, and she told me she knew they were there and she wasn’t going to fight me on it because the twins were inside that house.” I pause. “She also said if I was using it as a way to surveil her rather than protect her, she’d move somewhere I couldn’t find.”
“But she didn’t move.”
“No. She didn’t.” Because she’s not stupid. She knows she can’t hide from me, and she knows the twins need whatever protection I can give them, even from a distance. “There’s no version of this where I can stop seeing the children. They’re mine. She knows that. So she tolerates the security because it protects them too.”
“But she still won’t come home.”
“No.”
Maxim is quiet. Then he says, “Let me talk to her.”
I turn around. “No.”
“Papa—”
“The last time you confronted her about something this important, you questioned the legitimacy of her children at a dinner table. She’s not going to want to hear from you right now.”
“That was weeks ago. Things are different now.”
