Page 49 of Baby for My Ex's Brother

“Perhaps it is easy for you to see things in two categories. I do not. Never again. I don’t do business with my enemy. Do you want to be my enemy or my associate, Pyotr? The choice is yours.”

He looks at me for a long moment with something that is not warmth but is adjacent to it, one professional’s recognition of another. “You are not what Hugo described.”

“We are each other’s worst biographers.”

He almost smiles. It doesn’t quite arrive, but it comes close enough to mean something. “I think, given our history, I would rather be your associate than your enemy. Or your biographer.”

We shake hands on it, and I walk him out myself. Armin finds me at the window afterward, watching the city below. “Say it.”

“Hugo has now lost his most powerful external ally. A man who has been losing pieces for three months and then loses the kingmaker at once is a man who will make mistakes.”

“Yes. He will.”

He steeples his fingers. “In my experience, men in that position lash out.”

I give him half a look. “One might say that’s the point.”

“You want him to lash out?”

“When he overreacts, and he will because that’s what he does, it gives me all the reason I need to cut him off from the organization. Were I to do it now without obvious provocation, people would talk. Captains could become… shaken. Those under them could be, as well.” I lean in. “But if Hugo implodes, he forces my hand. He’s a spoiled brat, getting his toys taken away. Of course he will overreact.”

“I’m glad to know I’m not the only one who thinks of Hugo in those terms.” A pause, a delicate one, a man checking whether the sentiment is welcome. “For all his prettiness, the man’s a snake of the lowest order.”

“He is,” I agree. “And he’s still a Fedorov by marriage, which means he’s my snake to handle.” I turn from the window. “Handle the paperwork with Pyotr by end of week. The tech business item needs a separate memo, nothing that touches Greenstone’s line. And Armin?”

He waits.

“Keep the Jaba story alive. Not as threat. As education. For whoever comes after him, if anyone does. Let them learn what happened before they decide to spy for Witte, or anyone else.”

“And if no one comes after him?”

“There is always the next betrayer, Armin. Since when are you so optimistic?”

He shrugs. “Not optimistic. Hopeful, perhaps. I would like to think the men see what you have done for them and appreciate it.”

“I would like to believe that, too. But that does not appear to be how things work. Ever.”

He nods, gathers his folder, and pauses at the door. “The woman,” he says, as if he’s been holding it since the handshake. “The candle shop. I have yet to find an issue with her. So, either she’s exactly who she says she is, or she’s very, very good at what she does.”

“She is not a security matter, as we have established. Why do you press on this?”

“Because I have never seen you so smitten, Ivan. It’s concerning.”

I snort at that. “Can’t a man enjoy a woman’s company without it being a conspiracy?”

“A man? Yes. You?” He shakes his head.

“I’ll take it under advisement.”

Armin accepts this the way he accepts everything he disagrees with—quietly, completely, like a man who has learned that filing his objection doesn’t change the outcome. He goes to write the papers.

I go back to the window. I think about texting her. I don’t. She asked for time, and I have never kept a promise that cost me more.

The city sits below me in the Thursday light going about all its complicated business, and somewhere south of the river, in ashop that smells of bergamot, a woman is deciding something. I’m determined to be worth whatever she decides.

That’s the only campaign I’ve run all week that I care about, and unlike the others, I cannot strategize it. I can only wait, and work, and be who I am, and hope that it’s enough.

It is, by a long distance, the most frightening position I have ever held in my life.