Page 184 of Nine Months to Bear

“I know, dear. But the baby needs to eat.”

A pause. Then the lock clicks open.

I don’t stay to hear more.

The tech team has taken over my office like locusts. Three men hunched over laptops, cables snaking across my Persian rug, monitors stacked on every surface. They’re good—the best money can buy—but watching them work is fucking agonizing, because I can’t simply take over and do it all myself.

“How long?” I ask the lead tech.

“To lock her out completely? Another hour, maybe two. She had deep access, Mr. Safonov. Like,deepdeep. She could see everything. Financial records, security protocols, personnel files?—”

“I get it.” I cut him off. Mikayla had her fingers in every part of my operation. Eight years of trust, and she’d used every second to worm her way deeper into my infrastructure.

Taras lounges against my desk, picking at his teeth with a business card. “You know what the real problem is?”

I growl in irritation. “We have about fifty real problems right now.”

“No, just one.” He flicks the card into the trash and points at me. “You’re distracted. You’re thinking about Olivia instead of handling the threat.”

“I’m handling it just fucking fine, actually.”

“Are you? Because from where I’m standing, you’re letting emotions cloud your judgment. Again.”

I turn from the monitors. “Meaning?”

“Meaning Olivia knows too much now. She’s seen your journal, your plans. She’s carrying your kid, which gives her leverage. And she’s pissed at you.” He shrugs. “In my experience, pissed women with leverage don’t make great allies.”

“She’s not going to?—”

“What? Turn on you? Go to the feds? How do you know?”

“Because I know her.”

“You knew Mikayla, too.”

The comparison makes my jaw clench. “Olivia’s nothing like Mikayla.”

“No, she’s worse. Mikayla was a professional. This was business. Cold-blooded business, but business nonetheless. But Olivia?” He shakes his head. “She’s emotional. Hurt. Those are the dangerous ones, Stefan.”

“She won’t betray me.”

“Even after what she found?”

“She won’t,” I repeat, but the certainty feels thinner now.

“You sure about that? Because if I were her, feeling betrayed and trapped, carrying the baby of a man who lied to me…” He lets it hang. “I might think the FBI could offer me a better deal.”

“Drop it.”

“I’m just saying?—”

“I said to fucking drop it.”

The lead tech clears his throat. “Um, Mr. Safonov? We’ve isolated Mikayla’s remote access, but there’s something weird here.”

“Define ‘weird.’”

“These timestamps. It looks like she was accessing files as recently as… thirty minutes ago.”