Page 94 of The Pakhan's Secret Babies
“He has been photographed outside three of our properties,” Roman says. “In the last two weeks. We don’t know who he is yet or who sent him.”
I look at the photograph again. The posture of the man in it, the careful angle, staying just outside the camera’s range.
“Someone moved in,” I say. “After Grigori.”
Roman looks at me. “Yes.”
I look at the photograph for a long moment. Then I look back at the city, all that light going to the horizon, indifferent and enormous, and I press one hand against my bump, and I think about two heartbeats and a plain gold ring and a man who looked at me across a room tonight like I was the only thing worth looking at.
“Then we deal with it,” I say.
Roman looks at me.
“We,” he says.
“We,” I say.
He looks at the city. After a moment, he picks up the photograph and puts it back in his jacket and his hand returns to the small of my back.
42
ROMAN
The delivery menleave at noon, and I tell Kostya to hold my calls for two hours.
He looks at me. I look back at him. He holds my calls.
The nursery furniture came in pieces: the cribs flat-packed, the changing table wrapped in transit blankets, a rocking chair that Elena had pointed to on a website three weeks ago by turning her screen toward me without saying anything and waiting. I have come to understand that this is how she tells me something matters. Not asking. Just showing me, and waiting to see what I do with it.
I ordered the rocking chair that afternoon.
Now I’m in the room that used to hold filing boxes with an assembly manual open on the floor and the pieces of the first crib spread around me. I’m doing this myself because I have sent people to do every significant thing in my life for eleven years, and this is not something I’m sending anyone to do.
The manual is forty-two steps.
I start at step one.
By step twelve, I have established that the manual was written by someone who has never assembled furniture in their life, and by step nineteen, I have set it aside entirely and am working from the logic of the thing itself, the way the pieces fit together, the way the joints are designed to bear weight. I have built an organization from the ground up. I can build a crib.
By step thirty, the first crib is standing against the far wall.
I look at it for a moment. White wood, simple, the slats evenly spaced, the mattress platform at the correct height. I put both hands on the rail, and I press down, and it doesn’t move, and I feel something in my chest that I do not immediately have a word for.
I start on the second one.
Kostya arrives at three with his folder and finds me on the floor, the second crib half-assembled and a screwdriver in my hand. He stands in the doorway, and he looks at the finished crib against the wall. He looks at me on the floor. He opens his folder and closes it again.
“The Ferretti situation,” I say, without looking up. “What do we have?”
He steps into the room carefully, avoiding the pieces on the floor, and sits on the windowsill. “His organization has been watching four established networks in the northeast for the past eighteen months. Ours is one of them. They’re not moving yet. Based on our intelligence, they’re still mapping operations, identifying leadership structures, looking for points of entry.” He pauses. “They are patient.”
“So are we.” I tighten a bolt. “Pull everything on Ferretti. His background, his organization’s leadership, their existing operations in Europe, and their expansion pattern across the last decade. I want to understand how they think before they decide they understand how we think.”
“Already started,” he says. “I should have a preliminary profile by Friday.”
“Good.” I move to the next joint. “The council session next month. I want the Ferretti intelligence on the agenda. Not as a threat, as an item. I want the council to be aware that the vacuum left by Grigori has attracted attention and that we are already ahead of it.”
Kostya makes a note. He looks around the room. The fresh paint smell is still there, warm and faintly chemical, and there are fabric samples on the windowsill beside him, soft squares of cream and gray that he picks up and sets down without comment.
