Page 35 of Babies for the Boss
“Sure.” He turns his water glass in a slow circle on the tablecloth, watching it rather than me, which is a studied casualness that takes a certain kind of stupidity to attempt across a table from someone like me. “A man in your position, with new attachments. New priorities.” He says the words with thedeliberate lightness of someone who has rehearsed the delivery. “It changes the calculation. For everyone involved.”
I keep my hands flat on the table and my face still and say nothing, because nothing is more useful here than anything I might say, and because the thing happening in my chest requires the full force of my discipline to keep below the surface.
“Fedor thinks there may be a more creative solution to the imbalance,” Snigir continues, with the careful cadence of a man navigating a script he was given and has memorized imperfectly. “One that doesn’t have to get messy. One that accounts for the value of—let’s say, the things a man wants to protect.” He looks up from the glass and meets my eyes, and the smile is still there, knowing and comfortable and deeply certain of itself. “Leverage, some people call it. Fedor prefers to think of it as a shared interest in keeping things civilized. In keeping the people around us… safe.”
He lets the word sit there between us like something placed on the table deliberately, like a cards turned face up to show his hand.
I look at Snigir’s face. The set of his jaw, the ease in his shoulders, the smile of a man who has delivered his line and is waiting to see what it costs the other person. Fedor sent him to say this specific thing, because saying it through Snigir costs Fedor nothing.
If I respond badly, it was only a captain, only a feeling-out, nothing official. If I respond well, Fedor has established his leverage cleanly and without exposure.
I recognize it as a competent move even as everything beneath the recognition goes somewhere else entirely. What happens next takes approximately four seconds.
I’m around the table before I have made a decision to move. The decision and the movement are the same thing, simultaneous, which has happened to me perhaps three times in my adult life, and each time it has meant that something has gotten past the part of my brain that manages outcomes and landed somewhere older and less reasonable. I have Snigir by the collar and his chair has gone backward and the water glass is on the floor, and the sound it makes when it shatters is the only sound in the restaurant because every other person in the room has gone entirely still.
I’m looking at his face from a very short distance. His face has done what faces do when the arrogance leaves them all at once, which is become considerably younger and considerably less sure of itself. The smile is gone. In its place is something that knows it made a miscalculation about the distance between provoking a man and surviving the provocation.
I don’t say anything. There is nothing to say that the grip on his collar isn’t already saying more precisely.
Igor’s hand lands on my forearm. Not grabbing, not pulling. Just present. “Pavel.” Quiet. Certain. The tone that meansI am with you, but this is not the move.
I hold for two seconds. Three. Then I release Snigir’s collar and step back and straighten my jacket with the deliberate calm of a man reassembling something that briefly came apart. Snigir rights his chair with hands that are not entirely steady. He has the sense not to speak, which is perhaps the first intelligent thinghe has done since he walked in twelve minutes late and reached for the bread.
Igor has already signaled for the check. We leave a pile of cash on the table before it arrives.
On the sidewalk outside, the air hits immediately and cold. I stand in it for a moment and let it work.
“He was sent to provoke,” Igor says, beside me.
“Yes.”
“Then it worked.” No judgment in it. Just the fact, laid flat. “If you’d finished it in there, we’d have a war by morning. That’s what Fedor wanted. An excuse that puts the first move on you, in a room full of witnesses.”
“I know.”
“A war right now, with the shipment unsettled and Kamila gone and three backup contacts who between them couldn’t navigate a route Kamila could run blindfolded?—”
“I know, Igor.”
He’s quiet for a moment. A cab moves past. Somewhere in the middle distance a horn sounds and dissolves into the general indifference of the city. “The girl,” he says, carefully.
I look at him.
“Snigir knowing about her,” Igor says. “That’s not a rumor anymore. That’s Fedor telling you directly that he knows, and that he intends to use it.” He meets my eyes with the level gaze that has never flinched from anything I needed him to see clearly. “He’ll use her, Pavel. The moment he decides a war isworth the cost, she’s the first move he makes. Not the last. The first.”
I know this. I have known it since the night I sat alone in my office in the dark and was honest with myself for the first time in a long time. I have known it through every protocol, every check-in from Vet, every camera and rotating street man I have positioned around the edges of her life. I have known it, and I have managed it, and I have told myself that managed is close enough to safe, which is a lie I’ve been sustaining through discipline alone because the alternative requires a decision I have not been willing to make.
Snigir’s face. The smile. The things a man wants to protect.
Fedor knows. Not suspects—knows. Which means someone in my organization gave him information, or someone watched long enough and carefully enough to see what I have been doing a poor job of hiding, or both. The perimeter I have built around Molly is a perimeter that a man who already knows she exists can simply walk around and wait outside of. It buys time. It doesn’t buy safety, and I have been using the word as though the two were interchangeable, which is a mistake I haven’t permitted myself since I was young enough not to know better.
“Double Vet’s check-ins. Around-the-clock eyes on Molly’s building, two men minimum, rotating, no pattern. And I want to know who talked. Someone gave Fedor something specific enough to brief Snigir on. I want a name before the end of the week.”
Igor keeps pace beside me, hands in his coat pockets, eyes forward. “And Snigir?”
“Snigir goes back to Fedor and reports that the provocation worked. That I reacted exactly the way they hoped.” I look straight ahead at the gray street. “Let Fedor think I’m compromised. A man who believes his enemy is acting on emotion makes lazy decisions and leaves gaps he doesn’t know are there. Fedor has always been lazy when he thinks he’s winning. Prison hasn’t changed that—it’s only made him more patient about it.”
Igor considers this with the quiet thoroughness that is his way. A half block passes before he speaks. “And are you? Compromised, I mean.”
