Chapter 16
I didn’t mean to push all your buttons. I was looking for mute.
— Keely’s secret thoughts
KEELY
“ Marrying a man that holds you accountable is amazing,” Nastya grumbled as she picked at her food.
I looked at Nastya’s food, which just so happened to be steak, broccoli and mashed potatoes.
“ What do you mean?” I asked.
“ Well , I told him after our child was born that I wanted to get back in shape, and I made him promise me to help me help myself. And now he won’t let me cheat on my diet,” she grumbled. “ Like my pregnancy wasn’t hard enough because I had to watch my blood sugars constantly, and then it doesn’t bounce back. I mean, I ate freakin’ good, for Christ’s sake! How is that fair that I still look like I’m four months pregnant?”
“ What kind of diet is it?” Brecken asked, looking at her plate. “ To be honest, that steak looks pretty amazing.”
Nastya leaned back and threw up her hands. “ It is amazing! He made it, so of course it’s going to be amazing! He even cut it up into pieces and grilled all the little tiny pieces in ghee and garlic for me because he knows I like all the bites to have a little bit of a crust to them. Even the broccoli tastes really, really good. I don’t even like broccoli, and he somehow made it taste really good.”
“ But …” I drawled.
“ But , he made steak! Dammit , I’m tired of steak,” she grumbled. “ We’re eating in a calorie deficit. I’m trying to eat under twenty-three hundred calories a day, so I chose to eat two thousand calories a day.”
“ Aren’t you still breastfeeding, though?” Brecken took a large bite of her steak, which she’d just massacred with her steak knife. “ That should give you a few extra calories to play with.”
“ Yeah ,” she grumbled. “ But I was pretty much done anyway. Making milk is hard,” she glared at Brecken . “ Not everyone is making as much as you are.”
Brecken raised her hands. “ I was just asking.”
I sensed that the milk production thing was a sore subject, so I gently steered it in a different direction.
“ Back to the diet,” I said. “ Aren’t you still training for a marathon?”
“ Yes ,” she sighed. “ Because Milena is making me. I hate running. But since I’m doing it, and I never do anything half-ass, I set a lofty goal. My ultimate goal is to make it to Boston . I have to shave forty minutes off my time to make that happen.”
“ She wants to go to Boston with me, so that means that I have to run faster, too.” Milena snickered. “ Glad she set a goal for both of us…”
“ Then you need fuel to feed that,” I pointed out. “ You can’t just be in a calorie deficit and expect to put up times that’ll get you qualified for Boston .”
“ I know,” she sighed. “ But I hate looking at myself in a mirror.”
That made my stomach clench.
That was part of why I’d hated nursing.
Sure , you got to help people, but you saw people at their lowest. And I didn’t like seeing people at their most vulnerable. It felt like an invasion of privacy.
“ You had a baby,” I pointed out. “ That’s the biggest accomplishment in life for most women. I mean, you grew an entire person inside of your body. One that was created with love. That’s worth every single wrinkle, stretch mark and fat roll.”
She sighed again. “ When you put it like that, it sounds stupid.”
“ I mean, getting healthy will help you with your goals of Boston ,” I pointed out. “ But doing it in a way that you are happy will be the best for you and your family.”
“ I have to stick to this for at least two more weeks because I bet Haze that I could make it a month,” she grumbled.
The table erupted in laughter.
“ What , exactly, were the terms?” I asked as my phone buzzed, feeling no guilt for pulling my phone out despite no one else having theirs out.
I glanced at the picture Dima had just sent me and giggled.
“ I have to be able to stay away from sugar for at least thirty days,” Nastya answered.
“ Like , sugar as in sugar that is white or brown? Or sugar that’s honey? Or sugar that’s in tortillas?” I asked curiously as I swiped to the next picture.
“ At the time, it was only sugar in its raw form, and sugar that’s in cookies, cakes, and pies,” she reported. “ But I can see you splitting hairs over there. But first, tell us what has that huge smile on your face.”
I showed them the photo of Dima , decked out in all black, with a fluffy white kitten on his back.
Nastya smiled. “ Tell him to bring the cat home.”
I did.
Me :
Nastya wants you to bring the cat home to her.
Dima :
She wants me to steal someone’s cat?
Me :
I guess.
Dima :
It has a collar.
Me :
Okay , well maybe leave it.
Dima :
No takebacks now.
I rolled my eyes and sent him another text, but he didn’t reply, so I went back to our previous conversation.
“ Back to what we were talking about,” I said. “ When you say in the form of cookies and candy and the like, that’s completely different from having, say, Taco Bell . Sure , there are sugars in the tortillas and things, but as long as you stay away from the churro bite things, you should be very fine.”
“ I like the way you think,” she said. “ Tell him to stop by and get Taco Bell on his way home.”
I laughed and reached for my phone again.
Me :
Is there any way that you could possibly stop by Taco Bell on the way home?
Dima :
Yes
I smiled.
No questions.
Just yes.
Me :
I’ll place the order at the closest Taco Bell to your place. What time are you thinking?
Dima :
Probably another couple of hours. I’ll text you when I’m about done.
We went back to wine night.
It’d been Milena’s suggestion because she wanted to know everything there was to know about Dima and me.
It’d all started out this morning when I’d been in the backyard checking out a swarm of bees on the fence.
Apparently , one of the sisters had bees, and Dima had been explaining to me about them when Milena had popped her head over the fence and seen us.
“ It’s true!” she’d exclaimed, and from that point she’d demanded that we have dinner tonight.
When Dima had explained that he had something to do, Milena had turned it into girls’ night.
No bad food or snacks, just healthy food and wine.
Which I’d been totally okay with, even though Brecken hadn’t been able to drink because she was pregnant, right along with Milena .
The two of them were two months apart and would have kids very close in age.
Which reminded me of my own vow of never having children.
“ How do you make sure that they stay safe?” I asked.
It was Nastya who answered. “ You’ve met their fathers, right?”
When she put it like that…
“ Cutter would literally kill anyone and everyone if it kept our child safe,” Milena said softly, her eyes meeting mine.
Something passed between us, a knowledge that we’d both suffered the unthinkable.
Honestly , we were both doing very well considering, but she seemed to be handling the kid part better than me.
And nothing against my brother, but Dima was the way scarier of the two.
I knew that Cutter wouldn’t hesitate to harm or even kill someone if he had to, but Dima just had this, I guess you could say, air about him. Like he could and would kill you even if you breathed wrong. And god help them if they breathed wrong around me.
If we had a child…whew.
“ Okay ,” I said. “ He’d said as much…and I’d been thinking as much…but when you put it like that, I guess it makes me realize that it’s not just Dima and me that would be watching out for a child if it came down to it.”
“ Are you already at that point in your relationship that you are thinking about children?” Milena asked, her eyes sparkling.
“ I can’t say that what we’re doing is making any sort of sense, but I do know that he means the world to me, and I don’t see this going anywhere but in the right direction,” I admitted.
I wasn’t sure how I knew that.
I just did, down deep in my heart.
I knew that this was it for me. That he was it for me.
That …
My phone chimed, indicating an incoming message.
Dima :
Spoke too soon. This is gonna take longer than three hours. Place the order, baby girl. Shasha’s going to pick it up. He’s close.
I placed the order.
And when Shasha arrived with it, I was only slightly disappointed.
Brecken moved to take the bags from him and give him a solid kiss on the cheek.
“ Can’t stay long because the babysitter we hired for the night says that one of our kids is puking.” Shasha sighed.
“ Hope it’s not mine.” Maven groaned, but made no move to get up, fully trusting her brother to handle it.
Maven was the quietest of the bunch, but that didn’t mean that she wasn’t participating like her sisters.
I adored them all, and I was glad that they were all so nice and welcoming.
“ Oh ,” I said. “ I have some Zofran that you can give them.”
I hopped up from my chair and went into the bathroom where I kept my meds bag.
Even though I hated being a nurse, I did always come prepared.
I had Zofran always on hand, just in case.
There was no worse feeling than being sick and not being able to control it.
I pulled the meds out of my bag and said, “ This dissolves under the tongue.”
“ It’s safe for kids?” he asked.
“ More than,” I said. “ My good stuff that you would rub on the belly is at home. I’d suggest that over this, but it’ll still work in a pinch as long as you can get them to hold their liquid down long enough.”
He took the tablet from me and fisted it into his hand.
When I expected him to say thank you, he surprised me by going off on a tangent.
“ I know that you’re a good person,” Shasha said quietly. “ But Dima is broken, Keely . Don’t hurt him.”
I blinked, surprised by the words. “ Like you just said, I’m a good person.”
“ Good people can still do bad things to people that aren’t expecting it,” Shasha pointed out. He looked beyond me to the women in the kitchen laughing at something. “ I had to pull all kinds of strings to get him out of the military and back here in one piece.”
My brows rose.
“ He was one job away from losing himself,” he said honestly. “ I’d like to say that he was going to be able to pull himself free, but I don’t think that’s the case. I think that he would’ve given and given until he had nothing left, then gone and died quietly by himself with none of us the wiser.”
My heart seized inside of my chest.
“ I won’t hurt him, Shasha ,” I promised him. “ I won’t.”
Shasha turned back to me and said, “ You better hope not.”
As Shasha walked away, I knew that I’d met the pakhan of the Russian Bratva right then, and not Dima’s brother.
Shasha would keep his promises, even if that meant heartache for his brother later on down the road.
But I promised myself right then that no matter what, I would not be the one to hurt Dima .
I didn’t care what I had to do to make that a reality, but I’d do it if it meant that Dima would never have to feel a void ever again.
I’d also point out Shasha’s hypocrisy next time I saw him.
If he wanted Dima to be able to live with himself, maybe he should stop sending him out on jobs he could be doing himself…