Page 52 of Vasily the Hammer

Not when I bark out, “She is my wife!” right back at him.

He doesn’t say anything. He just stares at me silently, calmly, showing no irritation with me despite the fact that I keep yelling and throwing shit at him.

I’m not freaking out. I don’t freak out. I fuck up, sure. My brain has definitely done some absolutely ludicrous shit— like turned my Flagstaff curse into the words of my long-dead mother, who wouldn’t have even known what Flagstaff was if the city had been mentioned to her and spoke such poor English that when my current shrink pointed out the oddity that the words spoken by my mother were in English, I knew he was a keeper— but I’ve always just dealt with it one way or another.

The destruction of my office as well as the destruction of her bedroom and bathroom and the transfer of all the clothing I bought her to my now overloaded closet felt like dealing with it. The unending phone calls and messages stretching all the way to Mother Russia felt like dealing with it. Hiring Sasha to figure out if Dima’s the reason Ana got picked up by a sex trafficking ring— because that shit was not a coincidence, nothing about this is a coincidence— felt like dealing with it.

Yeah, externally, tossing all these rooms looks like a temper tantrum, but they’re not. There are twenty-four hours in a day, and I’ve only been able to fill about six of it with figuring the Ana situation out. I gotta do something else with the rest of the time to keepmyself from flying to Phoenix, murdering her brother, and kidnapping her and our kid—my kid— and starting a war and making her hate me for probably forever in the process.

I feel like I am dealing with it.

But Kostya is quietly staring at me.

I close my eyes and breathe, hunting for an equilibrium within myself, where there is none.

Because the moment I let my brain travel anywhere close to Ana, actual Ana, I’m struck again by the fact that I missed the birth of our first child. I missed the pregnancy. I missed all that shit that Kseniya has shared with me the last year and a half. I missed the positive pregnancy test, the gender reveal, the ultrasounds. I missed the morning sickness and the aching feet and the swollen hands and the fatigue.

I missed the glow.

I missed so many of my kid’s milestones, too, and I know there are so many more to come that Iwillbe there for, but I can’t fix what I’ve already missed.

If Ana is pregnant now, every single day is going to be something else missed. Every single day is a day I should be there for her like I should have been there before. Each day will give her another chance to double any resentment she must have held the first time she was pregnant, since she never tried to tell me she was pregnant then either.

Kostya just stares at me.

I slump in my chair.

“I’m so fucking tired of this,” I whisper, the words leaking out as though they lived on my breath, but I am just that tired. Fucking exhausted to the bone. To the marrow. “I just need her back. I need Ana back here, right now, and I need Dima to bleed and every othertraitor to have their spines ripped out their assholes and draped across the halls so everyone else knows exactly what will happen if they try to double-cross me. And I have a son I don’t know, Kostya! Do you understand that? Do you get what this feeling is? He is mine, and I’ve spent twelve impossibly shitty seconds of my life with him, and he has no fucking clue who I am because I just fucking stood there and let Tony take them because I don’t know how to unfuck this whole situation without permanently fucking everything up, and that is my goddamn family, and they need to be here with me.With me!”

I tip the desk.

Kostya moves in time to keep the weightier end from falling into his lap. The glass top hits the carpet, but there’s already so much shit there that it shatters, spewing glass in all directions as it bounces off the carpet and onto the hardwood. Most of the drawers remain closed, but two guns and a set of brass knuckles fly out along with more expectant office supplies.

I don’t really hear it, my pulse pounding in my ear. I guess it was loud, though, because Ivan Petrovich in the office on the opposite side of my elevator shaft peeks in. I’m already settled back in my chair at that point and Kostya’s standing next to me as though we’re about to have a portrait done together even though I think he was about to see if he could right the frame of the desk. The desk will have to be replaced, but there’s the built-in cooler that has two months’ worth of medication in it. It’s not a major rush getting it into my fridge upstairs if the compressor’s blown, but I’ll forget to do it until I get an actual migraine, and by then, the entire supply will be ruined.

I pay insurance a shit ton of money for that stuff. The fact that I’ve got tens of millions of dollars is irrelevant; insurance is bullshitand I’m not paying a single extra penny out of pocket if I don’t have to. So Kostya’s doing the right thing.

Ivan whistles as he scans the room. He’s not anyone I’m close with, just another guy who would plant his flag in this office the second I croak, having made his way up from the Tijuana scene. He’s also twenty years my senior and resents that I’m the one running the show even though it’s my baby, the ghost guns, that’s making us the most money right now.

“Just redecorating, Petrovich. Nothing you need to supervise here.”

He grumbles under his breath in Russian, but he’s been in the States a decade longer than I have. It takes me a second to realize he’s called me a little shit because his pronunciation is so bad. I’d kick his ass for the comment if our best document forger wasn’t in a brigade under his lineage. And if it wasn’t going to be such an unfair fight. The guy gets winded walking back from the shitter.

“Your bitch is here,” he says as he turns away, leaving the door open.

“Hey!” Benedetti snaps at him.

Hmm.Kostya told her she wasn’t to show her face here until I gave the green light. She stayed away except to arrange that meeting between her cousin and me, a cousin that ended with Ana getting stolen from me, and now she’s showing up?

I don’t like it.

“Fucking ray of sunshine, he—” she grumbles as her heels goclick-clackin the foyer, only to screech to a halt as she crosses the threshold. “Well, you certainly chose the most aggressive way to redecorate,” she adds glibly once she catches herself and moves on from the shock. “You need to tell me something?”

I raise an eyebrow. “I think you’re the one who needs to talk.”

She scowls, but I can’t tell if it’s in irritation or confusion. She shakes that off too, though. “I just came here to apologize. I got word from Angelo that Gino ended up sending your boy back to Tony and Tony didn’t release him. Angelo made it sound like neither he nor Gino meant to fuck things up like that, but who knows with those idiots? Not Gino, Gino’s great, but—”

“Shut up!” I snap at her, slamming my hand down on my armrest because I’ve already destroyed everything else I could have slammed my hand down on.

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