Page 62 of Babies for the Boss
“And then Fedor had his widow tortured for three days. Not for information. Not for leverage. Not for anything strategic or useful or even particularly logical. Just to prove that he could. Just to demonstrate to everyone watching that this is what the aftermath looks like when you move against him.”
I swallow. The rumors of what was done to her… I can’t help but think of Molly like that, and it only fuels my fire. “What the fuck is your point, Igor?”
He holds my gaze without flinching. “Molly is alive. The babies are alive. She’s in a hospital where Fedor cannot reach her tonight. If you go after him now, in the state you’re in, with the scale you’re contemplating—you will give him every justification he needs to do to her what he did to Kozlovsky’s widow. Andthis time, it won’t be three days. He will take weeks with Molly because of what you did to him.”
The silence in the room is complete.
I stand behind my desk and feel the image of what Igor has just described move through me. It’s worse than the thing I have been carrying since the phone call.
It’s worse because he’s right. That is precisely what he’d do.
“He knows I’m the reason he was in prison. He might do worse… If I’m dead, he might demand her in his bed. Use the kids as leverage…”
Igor nods once again. He sees it too. “You well know how fucked up his imagination is, Pavel.”
Too many thoughts crash in my brain, and all of them add up to one thing. “She deserves better than this. Better than me.”
“She does. She deserves a life that does not include hospital rooms and bodyguards. But she chose this life. She chooses to be by your side. You must respect her choice.”
“She’s carrying my children in a world that is trying to kill her because of me. Because of what I am. Because of decisions I made before she existed in my life, and that I would unmake if I could, and cannot.” I look at the window, at the dark grounds and the perimeter lights. “Sister Mary Patrick could take her. Take her and the children when they come and build something for them that I’m not in the middle of.”
Igor is quiet for a moment. “That is an option.”
“But.”
“But it’s not the best one.” He meets my eyes directly. “The best option is you. You, with your wits about you, which you are capable of, which I have watched you demonstrate in circumstances that would have broken most men. You, intact and intelligent and thinking rather than burning. That is what keeps her safe. Not your absence. Your presence.”
I look at him across the desk.
“She did not marry an absence,” Igor says. “She married you. Come back to us, Pavel. We need you here. With us.”
His words settle something inside of me, and things feel less pressurized. I’m still furious. The fury is not gone and will not be gone. But now, I might use it.
“She’s safe. Tonight. In the hospital.”
“Yes,” Igor confirms.
“That buys us time.”
“It does.”
I think about that, and Molly’s words ring in my ears. “She yelled at me. She never yells at me. ‘Get your shit together.’ Can you believe that?”
He allows for a smirk. A small one. “Was she wrong?”
“That’s the worst part of all of this. She’s never wrong. I should have married a moron. It would have been easier.”
He snorts. “You’ve never liked easy.”
I think about the fact that I left instead of getting my shit together, which is a failure of an unambiguous kind that I willhave to account for, and that I will, because she is owed that much.
“If anything else happens to her—if any harm comes to her or to the children that I could have prevented—I will burn every consideration to the ground and let the consequences sort themselves out in the aftermath.”
“And I will be by your side. Like you said, she deserves better.”
An ugly plan solidifies in my mind. “We do this right. We do it carefully and thoroughly, and we do it in a way that ends it, not a way that escalates it into something none of us survives.” I look at Igor’s reflection in the dark glass of the window. “But we do it.”
“Where do we start?”
