Page 55 of Babies for the Boss
“No, I don’t believe he did.”
Which means we still have a spy.
20
PAVEL
Fedor did this on purpose.
That is my first thought, standing in the courtyard with the security lights burning white against the stone and my men waiting to be told what to do next. Not the hanging itself—the location. He selected my rock garden, with these sight lines, and the precise center of the most visible space on the property. He knew the layout of my home in detail, which means Vladimir—or the spy—told him.
Fedor now knows the mansion the way he knows the rest of my operation—from the inside, with the granular accuracy of a man who has been thorough.
Nowhere is safe. That’s the message. Not the city, not the distance, not the stone walls or the perimeter or the men I have positioned around my estate. Fedor can reach whatever he decides to reach, and he wants me to know it, and the knowing of it is the point.
I stand in the courtyard light and look at what has been done. It is not anger that digs into me and settles in. Anger is heat, ismotion, is the thing that moved me across a restaurant toward Yuri Snigir without a decision being made.
This is different. This is the cold settling of a man who will communicate, with perfect clarity, that declarations of this kind do not go unanswered.
Vladimir was not a man I liked. I will not pretend otherwise, even standing in front of his body in my own courtyard—he was a complainer and a grievance-collector and a man whose loyalty had the specific texture of something held in place by adequate compensation rather than genuine commitment, which in the end proved to be exactly what it looked like. Perhaps he fed information to Fedor. He let himself be turned, for whatever combination of money and resentment drove the decision, and he paid for it. Or, he was an innocent, albeit annoying, man who Fedor learned I doubted.
Killing him makes fact-finding more difficult.
Regardless of Fedor’s reasons, Vladimir was still mine. He was in my organization, under my protection, and Fedor reached into my home and took him, used him to send a message.
I will send a message in kind.
Igor is beside me, close enough for a quiet conversation. I look at the body for one more moment before the plan is solid in my mind.
“You will take Fedor’s dog.”
The sound Molly makes beside me is immediate and sharp. “You can’t hurt a dog!” She steps forward, her focused energy that of a woman who has just seen her first hanging body and isnonetheless prepared to go to the mat over animal welfare. “I don’t care how important Vladimir was. You cannot?—”
“I didn’t say hurt the dog.” I turn to look at her, briefly, so she can see that I mean it. “I said to take the dog.”
She blinks. “Oh.”
I turn back to Igor. “Take the dog. Find it a good home, or a nunnery—” I think briefly of Sister Mary Patrick, who would accept a dog with the same practical grace with which she accepts everything. “Care of Pavel’s Animal Rescue. Leave a business card with that and my personal number.”
Igor nods, and I catch the fractional quality of his amusement.
Fair enough. Fedor hung a man in my courtyard, and I am stealing his dog, and the disproportion of the response is deliberate. Let him receive it and understand what it means, which is that I am not rattled, that I am not moved to the kind of heat that produces errors, that I will escalate this on my own timeline, and my full answer will cost him considerably more than a dog.
His dog is just the beginning.
Igor leaves. My men work quietly and without unnecessary motion to process the body. Molly is beside me, and she is very still in the way she’s still when she’s managing something difficult.
I watched her look at the body with the full, honest attention of a woman who had decided to see it clearly rather than look away, and I understood in that moment, with a completeness that I had been building toward for some time, that she is not the woman I need to protect from my world.
She is the woman who looked at my world, in its ugliest available manifestation, and stayed beside me anyway. That is not nothing.
It is everything.
“I’m sorry,” she says quietly. “About the dog thing. I should have—this is the first time I’ve seen—” She stops, then starts again. “I lacked faith in you.”
“You have just seen a hanged man,” I say. “Your reaction to the dog is reasonable, Molly.”
“Still.” She looks up at me with those brown eyes, and there’s something in them that is not quite steady and is trying very hard to be. “I know who you are. I should have known you wouldn’t hurt a dog.”
