18. Ben
18
BEN
S onya rested on and off for two days. She didn’t sleep the entire time, but she was sluggish and safe to stay in bed after all that running and hiding. I’d never had a woman in my life for more than one night or one experience, so she was already an outlier. I’d also never pampered a woman, and it was becoming addicting.
I couldn’t begin to imagine how difficult it had been for her to be on the run while pregnant. I didn’t want to stop and consider how horrible it was to worry about her family after all the trauma she’d faced, either.
Kidnapped. Almost raped. Forced to witness her mother’s death. Withheld from the rest of the world and driven anxious with not knowing what had happened to her sister. Attacked.
I ground my teeth and tamped down the residual anger at the flashbacks I still suffered of her trying to protect her baby from being harmed. Our baby. We had yet to speak about the fact that we were having a kid together, but we would. I wouldn’t rush it. It’d be better to let her have her head on straight again and not be completely stuck in survival mode to discuss our child.
Mafia families were a different breed. Members of these kinds of families were stronger and tougher, born to endure hardships like no other. For a short time, I had been involved in a different Mafia group in Russia. My mother was a US citizen who’d given birth to me in LA, but she’d been taken back to Russia, where my father was, as a Bratva wife. When he was killed, my mother and I were rejected and sent away. Still, that limited time in a Bratva had given me a crash course on how thick my skin would need to be, how dangerous my life would inherently always be just because I was “one of them”.
And Sonya was no weakling. She was the bravest woman I’d ever met to survive what she had. Yet, her body and soul needed to rest. She had to lower her guard a little more and see me as a figure of help she could rely on for more than the offer of a warm bed and protection.
Her sleeping in and being lazy here with me at my remote cabin was probably the first time in years that she’d been able to lower her guard at all. And when she woke up and had meals with me, I enjoyed the gift of providing for her. Feeding her, bathing her, helping her get comfortable, I took care of her, and it was the first time in my life that I felt certain I was being what I was meant to be.
A lover. A partner. A father-to-be. Seeing to her comfort satisfied me, and I knew I was a goner. Just like that, making Sonya happy was my vocation in life.
It helped that she gradually opened up to me too, providing more information, but she was still cautious. I saw it in her eyes. When she gazed at me with desire, it was too easy for me to cave and give in to take her, but I held myself back. We hadn’t fucked since that first time she woke up here. And I wouldn’t let sex be a distraction from our connecting like partners.
“They took me at the same time they took my mother and kept us together at first,” she said over a lunch of tomato soup and grilled cheese. I was glad I kept this cabin stocked with non-perishables. A short trip into town while she napped got the fresh essentials, too. This was the mother of my child. Of course, she needed good nourishment.
“Was it always the Ilyins?” I asked.
She nodded. “Yes. No middle men. They took us and kept us together. No one but the same few men handled our captivity. The crews changed over the years, obviously. Eleven years is a long shift for a soldier, but even still, they were consistent. Except for the few who got too greedy. Like I said, they killed my mother.”
“No one ever knew,” I replied.
She nodded sadly. “I bet not.”
That had to be the hardest part of it all, the lack of knowing what had happened. Eva seemed a little bitter, resentful with her assumption that her mother ran and took Sonya with her, abandoning Eva at home. And Oleg was vested in learning what happened. He never stopped or gave up on the case. It sounded like he’d recently had Vik go to Moscow to follow a lead about Sonya that turned out to be a dead end.
Sonya had to have suffered all that time, worried about her family.
So why hasn’t she just gone back already? I wanted to be careful about how I posed that question. For a short while, I’d been playing with the what-if that she could’ve run away and was acting like a spy against her family. Of course, it was nothing like that. I knew that now. But I couldn’t stop being curious about why she didn’t run right to her home.
Lev called me earlier, asking what was taking so long about the hit placed on O’Malley. It would’ve been better to come clean and just tell him that I’d found Sonya and was taking care of her, but that might not have ended well. He could’ve insisted I bring her to the house, and I didn’t want to until she and I talked about this baby, until I had all the information I felt I needed.
However, Lev had given the update no one wanted to hear. Oleg wasn’t doing so well. His vitals were mostly stable, but they were all getting more concerned about the length and depth of his coma after his heart attack.
Time wasn’t on my side. If Sonya wanted to get back to her family, I had to facilitate that sooner rather than later. Which meant I needed answers now.
“How come you snuck out to lose your virginity?” I asked, hoping she wouldn’t get quiet and closed-lipped again.
She almost smiled, glancing at me as if she were proud I’d taken her virginity. Just as quickly, she scowled. “I heard them saying I would be taken to my fiancé soon. And I refused to let them take that one last thing from me. They’d taken my mother, they’d taken me , they’d taken my freedom, and I didn’t want them to have control over who took my virginity as well. It was the last thing I had, and I wanted to reclaim control, even just for a moment.”
“You wanted to stick it to them, huh?”
She nodded, lowering her hand to rest it on her belly. “And I don’t regret it.”
“You don’t regret that it was me? Or that you got knocked up?”
Now she really smiled. “Both. I’m glad it was you. And despite the hell that I am bringing this baby into, I can’t wait to be a mother. It’s a dream I never could’ve imagined being able to have. I feared being married off to someone I didn’t want, then bred and expected to let them take my children to raise as soldiers or future brides.”
I couldn’t help it. Leaning over, I claimed her lips in a kiss. I kept it soft and gentle, but once she sighed against me, I was relieved I hadn’t made a mistake. We hadn’t been intimate for the last couple of days—that was my doing. But with this little step of a kiss, I felt so much hope.
“And it’s why I escaped when I did. Once more, I overheard the guards talking about transporting me to my fiancé. I knew I was pregnant by then. I’d missed my period three times and I felt my body changing. So I worried not only to be forced into a marriage that I didn’t want but also that there would be no way to hide that I wasn’t a virgin anymore. I feared they’d take my child, and so I fought hard to run.”
I took her hand, glad when she didn’t flinch or retreat. Stroking my thumb over her knuckle, I waited for her to continue. “How did you get away?”
“I hid a butter knife under my pillow and waited for the guards to enter my room. I attacked them both, using the knife to kill one. Then, with…” She shook her head, like she couldn’t believe it herself. “Then with some kind of mother’s instinct to survive and see to my baby’s survival, I fought like hell and wounded the second guard so I could take his keys, climb out the window, and drive away. They chased me, but when I crashed, I got out and ran into the woods for hours to lose them. And I did.”
“Damn.” I picked up her hand to kiss the back of it. “I hate that you had to do that alone.”
“I wasn’t. I had him or her motivating me.” She smiled at her stomach. “And then I found a cabin with a small family in it. Jenny and Kyle Peterson.” When she described the young mother who was also a vet, I smiled along with her.
“As soon as I can, I’m paying them back.”
Me too. I wouldn’t hesitate to show gratitude for the people who’d selflessly saved my woman and child.
“If you took his truck, how come you didn’t drive straight to the Baranov home?” I asked.
“The truck died. So I hitchhiked.” She worried me with her telling of the woman who tried to rob her. “And I walked. And walked. I had no phone. Nothing. I couldn’t call for a ride. When I got into the city, the driver refused to take me there, too afraid because it was a Mafia residence. No driver wanted to drive there, and I suppose that makes sense. The Baranov name holds power still. It invokes fear.”
I nodded. “It does. Even with Oleg out at the moment, Lev and the others are making sure nothing happens.”
“I knew I needed more information before going home. I wanted to make sure I wasn’t entering a dangerous situation, thinking that without any leader, another family could be taking over. I just didn’t know. I didn’t know anything about what was happening, so I got a room to sleep in and catch my breath before trying to get home. That was how I ended up at Mancy’s. I recalled that it was Eva’s favorite restaurant, and I just so lucked out seeing her there.” She furrowed her brow. “But then when I saw that Petrov woman, I was confused and worried.”
“Irina Petrov,” I explained. “Soon to be Mrs. Vik Baranov.”
Her jaw dropped. “ What ?”
“Irina isn’t the enemy, even though her surname was—is—Petrov. She and Vik got together when he was undercover at the college, posing as a professor to investigate what the Petrovs and Ilyins were doing in regard to the drug trade there.”
“Vik is going to marry her?”
I nodded. “Yes, and it turns out that Irina has a younger brother who is your brother, too.”
Her jaw dropped. “What? What do you mean?” She furrowed her brow. “My mother ? No. That’s impossible.”
“Boris,” I explained. “Boris had an affair with Igor’s wife, and Igor pretended the boy, Maxim, was his. He planned to use Maxim as leverage with Oleg one day, having a Baranov offspring under his custody.” I held up my hand. “It sounds like a complicated story, and I know Irina, Vik, or even Oleg will be able to explain it to you better.”
She blinked. “Wow.”
“So Irina is not the enemy.”
“Okay, but I didn’t know that. I saw her and knew she was a Petrov, and I worried that Eva wasn’t safe, maybe not even safe to approach. When I saw them at Mancy’s, I was afraid I’d be captured, so I ran. I ran into you , precisely, at the strip club next door, and…” She shrugged. “We both know what happened there.”
“Yeah. You couldn’t resist me.”
She smirked. “Nor could you resist me.”
I smiled. “Guilty as charged. But why did you run again?”
“Because I didn’t know who you were or if you’d be able to help me. At that time, you were still Ben the one-night stand, Ben the stranger who was my baby’s daddy. After that, I tried to figure out how to get ahold of someone back at the house, but when I was going to the store to buy bread, I felt so weak and nauseated that I knocked into a shelf. The woman working at the store thought I was shoplifting, and she called the cops.”
I sighed. “Let me guess.”
She rolled her hand as though to say go ahead .
“The cops contacted the Ilyins and they captured you again.”
“Yes. And that was where you found me. How did you, though? I know you said Lev was considering hiring you to find me after you did this hit, but…?”
“I was trying to find a lead—for how I could get close to my hit and how to find you. O’Malley was injured at that shootout at the strip club, and I couldn’t get close to kill him. But I noticed some Ilyins were hanging around the hospital he was in, so I followed them and overheard them talk about going to help with a woman they’d recaptured. Which was you.”
“Clearly, the Ilyins are getting around. They have the cops working for them,” she replied.
“Not just the cops, but the next governor. O’Malley will be sworn in soon. I think the Ilyins are one step ahead of Igor Petrov in allying with power.”
She was quiet for a moment as she raised her brows. “Is that why Lev wants O’Malley taken out?”
“Yes. O’Malley seems to be favoring one family over the other, and the Ilyins seem to want to be his favorite. And that’s also how I first heard your name and wondered if my sexy virgin was someone of more importance. I spied on Igor Petrov and Geoff Ilyin after Boris died because I wanted to know if they’d killed him.”
“You really do like being in the know, huh?”
“I have to be. Geoff and Igor made it no secret that they want to end your family. Geoff told Igor that he had it covered. He’d had you taken. They took you to save as a forced bride for Eric Benson, who is a congressman waiting to be sworn in. The Benson family has always been involved with certain families, and it seemed that the Ilyins figured they would rule at the top by forcing a Baranov to be married to a Benson. So that once Eric was in office and you were his leverage as his wife…”
“Then he’d be able to attack my family through the connection to me.” She narrowed her eyes. “It won’t happen.” Again, she laid her hand over her stomach, protective without realizing it.
“No, it won’t,” I agreed. “Benson isn’t getting near you.”
“And they will not weaken the Baranov legacy. I won’t marry him. Eva won’t be forced to either.” She sat up straight. “I’m devoted to my family, and as soon as I can get back to them, I will ensure that Benson is killed.” With her free hand, she slashed through the air. “He won’t threaten me again. He won’t threaten this baby.”
Releasing her hand, I leaned in to frame her face and kiss her. “He’s dead,” I promised.
She let out a shaky breath at my words, probably seeing them as a vow. And they were. As I helped her onto my lap, she hugged me close. “He’s dead, Sonya. No one and nothing will endanger you or our child. I will see to it.”
Nodding slightly, she nestled against me. If this wasn’t the ultimate demonstration of her trust, her words were.
“Take me home, Ben. I’m ready to see my family and stand with them again.”
Consider it done. “All right. Tomorrow.”
“I’m ready to be reunited with my family,” she added. “Since my other family seems to be right here where I want it.” Taking my hand to hold it, she lowered it toward her baby bump.
I didn’t want to misinterpret her words, but I was elated at the idea that she could see me as someone in her family. That the three of us could be a family within the Baranov legacy.