Chapter 10
RAISA
“Mama?” Lev tugged on my hand as I stared down the boss.
Luka Dubinin wasn’t my boss. He wasn’t my father, and when I lived under the rule of Konstantin Petrov, he never let an opportunity slide where he could remind me that he was the head of the house.
Luka Dubinin wasn’t my ruler. He wasn’t the man who could tell me what to do, who to see, and when I could speak. My father was never a parent but an overlord in that regard.
Yet, as I stood here with my son clutching my hand, my other one in a fist and propped against my hip, I stared down Ivan’s uncle with a fierce stubbornness that would not be fading any time soon.
He was the big, mighty boss of New York’s strongest crime family.
But as he glowered at me, I refused to show an inkling of fear or nervousness.
Deep down, I was cringing and whimpering with the need to get out of here and seriously rethink this last-resort plan of seeking help.
And still, I didn’t break eye contact. Not even when my son tried to prompt me to look at him with his timid whisper.
“Mama.”
“Yes, love?” I replied to him as I maintained a beady stare right back at Luka.
“I don’t like the way he’s looking at us,” Lev whispered.
“Me neither,” I said.
“And how am I looking at you?” Luka challenged. He folded his hands on his lap, not a single change in his demeanor.
“Like you don’t want us here,” Lev said before I could answer.
Part of me was shocked he had the gumption to reply and half of me was proud that he wasn’t afraid to address someone who practically oozed harsh masculine power like a demigod.
“Then you’re a very observant boy,” Luka drawled. “Because I’m not convinced I want Konstantin Petrov’s daughter in my house.”
Asshole. I was more than that. I wasn’t just my father’s daughter. I was a woman in my own right. I was a mother. And until this morning, I was determined to be an ordinary citizen, an average nobody—not a daughter of any Mafia family.
“Then tell those guards at the door they’re not doing their jobs,” Lev said plainly, gesturing in the direction of where the Dubinin men stood as the background sentinels they were. “They told us to come inside.”
Luka seemed to smirk. His stare was too cool to know whether he was amused or not. For all I knew, Luka could despise children and was counting down the seconds until he could order us out of here.
Ivan never talked about his uncle much. Of course, I’d heard of Luka Dubinin.
Most of what I’d heard was what my father told me, and those were all heated complaints.
I’d grown up with the knowledge that my father hated Luka and envied him for the excess power he possessed, more than what my father ever could’ve obtained.
When I knew that Ivan was a Dubinin, Luka and my father became equal halves of the elephant in the room. Ivan and I didn’t need details. Just knowing he was a Dubinin and I was a Petrov was plenty to set the scene, just like Romeo and Juliet. Rivals. Not friends.
“They let you inside because I told them to,” Luka explained.
“Why?” Lev pressed.
I almost winced, nervous that Lev’s natural inquisitiveness would derail the approach I wanted to use here.
We were here so I could demand protection for him.
We were here because I couldn’t keep him safe on my own anymore.
I didn’t have the money or strength to single-handedly keep Lev alive and well forever.
It was a fear I’d been avoiding facing for so long, but I wasn’t so proud that I couldn’t admit the need for help now.
With how chilly Luka’s welcome was so far, I had to tread carefully, yet firmly, in stating my request. Lev could be curious why Luka didn’t want us here.
For my son to understand why Luka wouldn’t want the daughter of a man he loathed here, a long, complicated, and twisted lecture would be necessary.
Just the same, though, Luka could demand that I tell him why I came here with this boy he’d never met or known about.
“Because—” Luka cut himself off, lifting his gaze slightly to indicate he was acknowledging someone else coming into the room.
I turned, spotting a woman. The slender brunette entered with a young boy, but they both stayed back near the guards near the door to this massive study, where I had been taken when I demanded to speak with Luka after we’d arrived.
“I told my men to let you in because I was curious,” Luka explained.
“Curious about what?” Lev asked.
This time, I tugged on his hand. I didn’t want to shush him, but I wished he’d slow down with these questions like this.
“About—” Luka stopped himself again, glancing up as the sound of hurried footsteps approached.
Once more, I risked giving the Dubinin boss my back.
As I turned, life blurred as if I were living in slow motion. One second, the air was normal, suspended with a usual weight of gravity rooting my feet on the floor. The next, I felt like I was simultaneously falling and soaring. My heart raced as the vision of Ivan Dubinin hit me.
He was there. He was here. In the same room as me, rushing in like he had to run to get here. We breathed the same air. Our gazes locked with no tangible hurdles to impede us.
And I had my answer.
He looked the same, yet not. Still tall, with that muscled physique, the tattoos revealed on his hands and still fit and sporting those immaculate dark suits, a gun in the holster at his hip.
But it was the sheer shock of staring back at his dark-brown eyes that mesmerized me before.
The thrill of watching his lips curve in a frown, as if I’d stumped him in a fun argument.
The shift of that longish brown hair that he kept slightly unruly, as if needing any help to look like that much more of a rugged bad boy.
He was here.
At first sight, I couldn’t tell if I wanted to cry out of joy to see him after missing him or if I wanted to scream and scowl with all the rage I’d kept pent-up inside me for too long.
The anger won out. It overwhelmed me. Watching him rush into the room and locking his stunned gaze on me, I couldn’t contain all the fury I bottled in.
I was angry at him. I was angrier at myself for this stupid, underlying attraction that sparked at the sight of him after all these years, that I could react to him at all.
One step forward distanced me from Lev.
And one more step closer enabled me to have the right angle to bring my hand up and land it on him. I slapped him, surprising myself with how instantly the need to return some pain to him filled me.
“You heartless coward!”
I let that accusation ring out clearly. It could echo forever in this big room for all I cared.
He lifted his hand to press it against his cheek, but that didn’t hide the utter shock of his expression as he stared at me. Gawking openly, he didn’t seem able to snap out of the surprise that I was here.
It’d been years. And he was still the same.
Older, and bigger with more muscles, but he was still the same man I’d fallen so deeply in love with during our whirlwind affair. I’d been so convinced that we could fight the odds together and stay strong as a couple, but that hadn’t been a mutual concept for him.
“Heartless?” he said, narrowing his eyes as the greeting I’d given him finally seemed to hit.
Perhaps I’d hit him too hard and his ears were ringing.
It felt like forever to look my fill of him.
Time moved oddly. Space felt different. Like it was just me and him again, drawn to each other but with a wicked dose of fury lacing my temper.
The rest of the room fell to the background, but I noticed the guards flinching and standing slightly more alert at someone hitting him.
He had to be a high-ranking member of the family. And here I was, the daughter of an enemy, striking him so openly.
I knew he wouldn’t punish me personally. Ivan had never lifted a hand to me in anger, and something dormant in the back of my mind clued me in to the fact that he never would. It was just who he was. Who we were, or who we used to be. His style of hurting me was in breaking my heart.
“Yes. Heartless,” I repeated, not backing down a bit. “You’re nothing but a cruel asshole to have walked away and let me learn about your new lover. After all we’d shared. After all we’d—”
“Hold on. Wait.” He reached out to take my hand, but I reared back and stayed out of his reach. It was hard enough to be near him and see him up close. I wasn’t strong enough to feel his touch. I wasn’t sure if I would ever be.
“No. I will not wait. I’ve spent almost eight years waiting to erase you from my life. I will not wait for anything you want or demand.”
“I’m not…” He gritted his teeth and shook his head. “Raisa, you show up out of nowhere—now—and think you have any right to call me heartless?”
“My timing doesn’t matter.”
“The hell it doesn’t,” he shouted back, still just as good at digging in for a good argument like I was.
It was the weird part of how we worked and meshed, so stubborn and strong-minded that we’d bicker.
Then make up. No making up would be happening here or now.
Never again, actually. I’d burned those bridges that led to loving him.
“You couldn’t have shown up once? In all these years?
You couldn’t have contacted me at any time since your father died?
” He paced away one step but got right back in my face.
Even as we argued, he seemed shocked. Shocked and stuck in between marvel that I was here and annoyance that I wasn’t so sweet with this reunion.
I was coming in here strong, telling them I was no pushover. But this was Ivan. I had to be this fierce and combative because if I surrendered at all, I’d cave and bawl at the glory of being near him again. That was how hard I’d fallen for him.
“What does it matter?” I asked. “If he’s dead or not, it wouldn’t make me change my mind about getting as far away from you after you cheated and left me without any explanation!”
“That’s not—” He reached for me again, and I dodged his hand again.
This time, I dodged his step so far to the left that I revealed Lev.
He’d retreated behind me, inching near the other boy who stood near the woman at the wall.
Again in slow motion, as if the events of this night were too enormous and monumental for anything to be normal again, a cosmic shift happened in what I finally showed him.
Lev.
I’d been so swept away in seeing Ivan again that I hadn’t realized Lev took his hand out of mine. That he’d stood behind me as if to hide.
Now, he was in full view.
I saw the moment Ivan noticed him. If he was shocked to see me before, he was about to burst from surprise at seeing our son. He narrowed his eyes again as if puzzling out this newcomer.
“Hey.” Lev tilted his head to the side, peering right back at Ivan. Ivan blinked, realizing that he was tilting his head to the side as well, like he always did when he was perplexed.
“Why do you look so much like me?” Lev asked in that direct, curious tone I prayed he’d never lose.
Because he is your father.
I gulped, too stuck and frozen in this critical moment to have the courage to open my mouth and say the truth I’d hidden from the world for his whole life.