Page 58 of Baby for My Ex's Brother

Hugo looks at it for a moment before he takes it. I give him credit for that. The hand that takes it is steady. He opens the envelope. He reads. His mouth does something while he reads that I wish I could see more clearly from this distance. “He drained them.”

“The funds are being… held. They’ll be returned under one of two conditions.” Igor nods at the paper in Hugo’s hand. “It’s outlined there, but I’ll walk you through it.”

“Please,” Hugo says. The word comes out thinner than he intended.

“Option A. One year. No contact, no comment, no interference in Mr. Fedorov’s personal life. At the end of twelve months, the funds are returned in full.”

“And if I take option A,” Hugo says. He pauses, and I can see him choosing his words, which is the first careful thing he has done since he opened the door. “And he decides I’ve breached terms?”

“He breaks your foot the next time he sees you,” Igor says.

Hugo absorbs this. He looks at the paper again. “And option B?”

“You come to Mr. Fedorov’s residence. In person. He breaks your foot himself. Funds returned the same day.”

Hugo folds the paper twice and puts it in his shirt pocket. He looks at Igor, then at Hank, and makes the correct decision not to say whatever he was going to say next. He’s a man who has spent his career operating on the margins of something much larger than himself, mistaking proximity for power, and today, the distance between them has been made clear to him on his own front step.

“I’ll be in touch,” he says.

“Mr. Fedorov will be waiting with bated breath,” Igor says sarcastically. They leave the way they came. Even pace, good coats, furniture again before they reach the corner.

Hugo stands on his front step and watches them go with the stillness of a man who’s saving his reaction for a room with no witnesses. He has enough sense not to call after them, not to make a gesture, and not to do anything that the street might see and remember.

This, at least, I give him. He knows how to lose in public.

I watch him through the binoculars until he goes back inside and the door closes, and the street resettles into its ordinary afternoon, indifferent to what just happened on Hugo Dumas’s front step.

I put the binoculars down.

“PR,” Armin says.

“Mm.”

“He’ll hate that more than the foot.”

“I know.” I hand Armin the binoculars. “That’s why I did it first.”

Armin considers this the way he considers things. He turns it over once, accepts it, and moves on. “He’ll take option A.”

“He’ll take option A and spend eleven months testing the edges of it.”

“And if he breaches.”

“I’ll break his foot the next time I see him.” I pick up my coffee. “As specified.”

“And if he doesn’t breach.”

“I break his foot anyway.” I finish the coffee. “For thinking he can do whatever he wants.”

Armin is quiet for a moment. “That wasn’t one of the listed options.”

“No,” I agree. “It wasn’t.”

Armin smirks, starts the car, and pulls out without hurrying. I want Hugo to know I was here, watching him sweat. Watching him suffer me.

Hugo will probably go inside now and pour himself something stiff and stand in whatever room he stands in when he needs to think. He’ll think about his precious accounts, and Igor and Hank on his front step, and he’ll arrive at the same conclusion a smarter man would have arrived at months ago.

That I’m not a thing you poke at. That the woman he left fourteen voicemails about is none of his business and never was.