Page 28 of Baby for My Ex's Brother

“The vocabulary in circulation is old-world. Inflexible.” A pause, surgical. “Relic.”

There it is again. The word arrives wearing Hugo’s voice from the rehearsal-dinner corridor, champagne breath, and borrowed courage. The accusation has stopped stinging and started clarifying.

A man tells you his entire campaign strategy in the insult he chooses. Hugo is not building an argument that I’m weak, because no one would believe that. The city has too much evidence on file. He’s building an argument that I’m over, which is cheaper, and requires only repetition and an audience. Repetition is the one craft my stepbrother has mastered.

And he is renting the audience through his father-in-law, paying in dinners and deference, the only two currencies he has ever minted himself.

“Assessment.”

Armin blows out a long breath. “Witte is shopping, not buying.Yet. But Hugo married his only daughter, which gives him a permanent seat at Pyotr’s table, and dinner is where empires actually move.”

I sit with that. He’s not wrong—Pyotr knows how to make things happen in other people’s empires. That’s what’s made him such a profitable man. But there are ways to maneuver around his strengths. “What options do you see, Armin?”

“A counter-campaign. We cultivate Pyotr directly and cut out the middleman. It wouldn’t hurt us to have Witte Corp in our pocket if Greenstone goes sideways. Two weapons manufacturers on friendly terms with us, instead of one. Redundancy is a virtue.”

A grim proposition. On paper, it is a clean idea, and I let him have the silence while I take it apart, because the flaw is not on paper. The flaw is personal, and it’s the reason I know this map better than my counselor does, because I inherited it annotated.

My father did business with both houses decades ago, before their feud went to court and then went somewhere worse than court. He kept a file on it that read less as intelligence and more as scripture. Certain enmities, he told me once, are load bearing. Remove them, and the men collapse, because the hatred’s the last original thing either of them owns.

“It won’t work,” I say. “Greenstone is Boris Malsagov. Boris and Pyotr have had a blood feud over a contract since before you had gray hair, and neither man will share a room, a market, or an ally with the other. There is no both. There has never been a both.”

Armin waits, because he can hear the rest coming.

“Any alliance is one or the other, and Hugo made the selection for the entire organization the day he proposed to Olga Witte. Without asking, without noticing, possibly without knowing the history, because the history is older than his attention span.”

Armin absorbs this. “And we’re already in business with Boris.”

“Eighteen months of careful work with Boris, lunches and lamb, and his granddaughter’s recital schedule.” All that fucking work for nothing. My fist balls without a thought. “Everything which Hugo’s wedding placed a question mark over in Boris’s mind,where question marks become grudges and grudges become policy or worse.”

“Hugo has always been impertinent, but marrying into Pyotr’s family was a direct hit to your reputation. His dinners do you no favors.”

My stepbrother reorganized our entire strategic map to upgrade his dinner invitations, and he wouldn’t understand the sentence if I said it to his face. Or, he simply wouldn’t care. Regardless, I must handle the fallout. “That is the actual damage. Not the whispering. The math.”

“Then what we do is, by necessity, uglier,” Armin says, unbothered, because ugly is where he does his best work. “Keep them both warm. Golf with Boris, drinks with Pyotr, separate rooms, separate flattery, no photographs.”

“Court them both.” It’s less a question than it is an unpalatable proposition.

He spreads his hands, presenting it. “Let each of them believe you are taking him to the prom, so to speak, and delay choosing a corsage until we see which way Hugo’s little campaign breaks.”

“That’s a recipe for disaster.”

“It’s a recipe for time,” he says. “Disaster is optional and comes later, if you cook badly. You’ll not cook badly. You never have.”

“There’s a first time for every menu.”

“Yes,” Armin agrees pleasantly. “And it’s still the safest move.”

I run the projections while he waits. Playing both sides of a blood feud is a maneuver that ends careers and occasionally pulses, and ten years ago, I would have refused it on that fact alone.

But the board is what the board is. I cannot drop Boris without burning eighteen months and confirming every word Hugo is whispering about decline, and I cannot ignore Pyotr while he is being courted nightly by a man with my surname in his marriage license. There are no good options, only expensive ones.

Court them both and risk my neck, or pick one and guarantee I lose my head.

“Very well. I take Boris personally, lunches, no golf, he despises golf. You handle the Pyotr channel socially for now until I decide the moment is right for a direct meeting.”

“And the men answering Pyotr’s questions?”

“Their names on my desk by Friday. Not for consequences. For inventory.”