Chapter 58 Nikolai
The call came at half past noon.
I was in the office on the forty-sixth floor surrounded by the kind of paperwork that came with dismantling an empire piece by piece. Contracts to terminate. Assets to transfer. Shell companies to dissolve in the correct legal sequence so nothing collapsed into chaos and took legitimate businesses down with it. Marcus had been sending documents for three days straight and I had been signing them without reading most of them, because the details no longer mattered to me the way they once had.
I answered without checking the name on the screen. A mistake.
"Nikolai." Vivienne's voice was warm and honeyed and immediately wrong. She only used that particular tone when she wanted something she already knew she shouldn't have. "I've been trying to reach you."
"Vivienne." I set down my pen. "Whatever this is, make it quick."
"That's not a very warm greeting." A soft laugh, practiced and light. "Especially given my news."
I waited. I had learned a long time ago not to give Vivienne the satisfaction of asking.
"I'm pregnant," she said. "Twelve weeks. And before you say anything, yes. It's yours."
The anger came fast and total, rising from somewhere beneath my ribs like a storm front moving in without warning. Not the cold calculated anger I used as a tool, the kind I could aim and deploy with precision. This was something hotter and more primitive, the anger of a man being handed a lie so obvious it was almost insulting.
"I haven't touched you in two years," I said. My voice came out very quiet. That was always the sign, the quietness. Anyone who knew me well enough would have recognized it and stopped talking.
Vivienne did not stop talking.
"Memory is funny sometimes," she said pleasantly. "Especially for men who've been under a lot of stress. The Monaco trip, Nikolai. Think carefully."
"I wasn't with you in Monaco. I was there with my wife."
"Your soon-to-be ex-wife." Another smile in her voice, sharp at the edges. "Which brings me to the rest of it. I'll be speaking to a few journalists this week. Some people have been very curious about Volkov Industries and the woman you married so suddenly. I thought perhaps if we could come to an arrangement, I might find I had less to say."
There it was. The architecture of it, clean and simple. Come back or I burn what's left.
"Send whatever you want to whoever you want," I said. "We're done here."
"Nikolai—"
I hung up.
I sat very still for a moment with the phone face down on the desk. The anger was still there, hot and useless, with nowhere to go. I breathed through it slowly and picked the phone back up and dialed Dr. Petrov, the physician who had managed my private medical records for the past eight years. He answered immediately and I kept my voice professional and precise, asking him to pull every record, every appointment, every date of contact with Vivienne Kensington going back thirty months.
"Give me an hour," Petrov said, and I told him he had thirty minutes.
Then I sat back in my chair and looked at the ceiling and let myself think about Marlena.
I did that sometimes now, in the spaces between tasks, when there was nothing immediate demanding my attention and the silence of the penthouse pressed in too close. I would let myself think about her for exactly as long as I could stand it, and then I would put it away and go back to work. It was a punishment I administered to myself deliberately. A way of making sure I didn't forget what I had cost her.
She would hear about this. Vivienne would make certain of that. Whatever her plan was, whatever leverage she thought a fabricated pregnancy gave her, getting the information to Marlena was part of it. Women like Vivienne understood where wounds were and how to reopen them with maximum efficiency.
And Marlena had a wound that fit this shape exactly.
The baby we had lost. The child she had whispered about with her last conscious breath on that basement floor, her hand finding mine in the dark, her voice barely audible over the sound of my own terror. I had replayed that moment more times than I could count. The way she said was. Past tense, already understanding what I hadn't let myself accept yet.
If Vivienne reached her with this lie, it would land directly in that wound. It would confirm every worst thing Marlena already believed about me. That I was capable of anything. That nothing I had ever said or done was honest. That whatever had grown between us, quietly and despite everything, was just another layer of the manipulation.
I picked up the phone again and called Katya.
She answered on the first ring the way she always did, like she'd been expecting it. "I know," she said, before I could speak. "Vivienne called you."
"How did you—"
"Because she called three other people first. She's been laying groundwork for two days." Katya's voice was sharp and focused, already in motion. "I heard noise and started pulling threads this morning. Give me time to finish."
"How much time?"
"Less than you think. This one is sloppy, Nikolai. She's desperate and it shows." A pause, the sound of keystrokes in the background. "She made mistakes."
"Find them," I said. "All of them."
"I always do." She hung up.
I stayed at the desk but stopped pretending to work. The contracts sat unsigned in front of me and I looked past them at the window, at the grey Manhattan sky pressing flat against the glass. It had been raining for three days, the kind of slow relentless rain that felt personal. The city looked washed out and tired and I understood the feeling.
I was tired in a way that sleep couldn't touch. Tired of the games that kept finding me even after I had tried to walk away from them. Tired of the lies that multiplied no matter how many I burned. Tired of being the kind of man that women like Vivienne thought they could use and men like Marcus still called for direction and enemies long dead could reach from the past to keep destroying.
I wanted it to end. All of it. I wanted the paperwork finished and the businesses sold and the FBI investigation resolved and my name reduced to something small and quiet that nobody needed to track or fear or weaponize.
I wanted to be nobody. I had built an empire to survive and now survival looked like disappearing completely.
Katya called back in forty minutes.
"The clinic in London," she said without preamble. "The letterhead is real, the doctor is real, the pregnancy is real. The father is not you." Her voice was precise and businesslike. "His name is Julian Ashworth. Hedge fund. They've been seeing each other for fourteen months. I have photographs, financial records, hotel bookings. She's been with him consistently the entire time you were married to Marlena."
I closed my eyes. "You're certain."
"I'm always certain. I'll send everything to your secure server in the next ten minutes." A brief pause. "This is good news, Nikolai."
"I know," I said.
And I did know. Intellectually, cleanly, I understood that this was the correct outcome. Vivienne was lying and could be proven to be lying and the lie would collapse the moment anyone looked at it closely. It was good news. It was the only kind of resolution a situation like this deserved.
But I sat in my chair with the rain against the glass and felt something that was not quite relief settle over me like a weight.
Because Damien Cross would find this. His team would find it or Katya would make sure it reached the right people. The truth would surface the way truth eventually did when someone with resources decided to dig for it.
But Marlena had heard Vivienne's voice first. Had heard that warm, precise, perfectly aimed announcement. Had probably already seen whatever documentation Vivienne sent to make it feel real. And Marlena had spent months learning, with considerable justification, that everything connected to my name was built on layers she hadn't been shown.
She would hear the correction eventually. She would see the evidence that Vivienne had lied.
But she would never fully believe it. Not in the place where it mattered. Not in the wound where the lie had already landed, soft and devastating, right beside everything else she had already lost because of me.
Marlena would never believe him now.
Word count: 1,000