Chapter 6 Ransome
RANSOME
“I found her.”
Maverick’s words come through the phone. I shove away from the breakfast table so I can take the conversation into my office.
Jenica doesn’t even look up from her phone or her fruit salad. It’s ridiculous. The woman we hired makes a full gourmet breakfast every goddamn morning, but Jenica doesn’t touch anything but a half a grapefruit sprinkled with fake sugar and exactly five cubes of assorted melon.
But that doesn’t matter right now. Nothing on the entire planet matters to me more than the conversation on the other end of the line.
I don’t speak until my door is closed.
“When? Where? Jesus Christ, Mav, it’s been almost a week. Was she not in the pinned location?” I demand. I’m pacing the floor hard enough to wear a trench in the wood paneling.
“Oh, no, she’s here. Her and her brother and sisters. Who knew Manhattan, Montana was a real place?”
“Tell me where she lives.”
Not that I care. It’s more than I know she’s been checking in on me and I need to make sure she’s not fucking with things that don’t concern her. There’s too much going on for her to get involved again.
“They have a little house on the outskirts of town. Kind of run down, but not like her last place. More like it was built a hundred years ago. Even has a tire swing out front.”
“I don’t give a fuck about tire swings. What was she doing when you found her?”
“Grocery shopping. Working the front desk at a dentist’s office. Going for long walks around the town park. Getting out of the tub…”
“You better be fucking kidding right now,” I growl.
“Hey, you told me to get eyes on the girl,” he says defensively. “It’s not my fault she doesn’t pull the curtains before walking around the house in a towel.”
I choose to ignore that, but only because climbing through the phone line isn’t an option. I also make a mental note to left hook him in his bad shoulder when he gets back.
“She’s working at a dentist’s office?”
My mind immediately goes to how bad the pay must be. It hurts. Not because I care—I don’t—but because her qualifications are wasted there. I’d give anything to find someone half as competent as her right now. But that’s beside the point.
“Do you have any more information on her?” I press. “Something that could actually be helpful?”
“I just flew across the motherfucking country, rented a car, drove all the way from Missoula to bum fucking Little Egypt and followed her around town for the better part of two weeks,” he rattles off.
“I know where she lives, where she works, where all her siblings are. I think I deserve a ‘good job, brother.’ Or at the least a half-hearted ‘thank you.’”
“I’ll thank you when I have information that explains to me why she hacked into our system six months after the fact,” I bark out. I’m making no point of lowering my voice, but considering I can hear Jenica watching the Kardashians on the big screen, I doubt she’s listening to anything I’m saying.
“Again, no credit where credit is due,” he sighs dramatically.
I mentally kick the shit out of myself for not sending Baron instead. I only sent Maverick because he’s been stir-crazy since he got out of the hospital. I figured going on a side quest might do him good. I should have realized no good deed goes unpunished.
“You haven’t shut up long enough for me to tell you what else I found,” he adds.
“Then talk.”
“I didn’t say anything at first because I wanted to be sure.”
“Sure about what?”
“I thought I noticed it when she walked into work the day I found her. Then I did a slow roll-by when she was leaving the grocery store, and she was wearing leggings that were pretty tight on her ass, so that kind of confirmed my suspicions on its own, not to mention the towel situation—”
“I swear to God, you better get to the point real fucking fast, Mav!” I bellow.
Outside the office door, I hear the TV turn up louder. Almost loud enough to drown out what Maverick says next.
“She’s pregnant, Ransome.”
I stop.
Stop talking, stop breathing, all of it.
“What the fuck did you say?”
“She’s pregnant,” he repeats.
Pregnant.
The word spins in my brain. For a second, I can’t connect it to my mouth long enough to form words.
“How pregnant?” I ask eventually.
“Pretty fucking pregnant. If I had to guess…”
Don’t say it. Don’t fucking say it.
“Six, seven months? Like she’s poppin’, brother.”
He fucking said it.
“You there?” Mav asks, but I am trying to process the wasp nest of thoughts swarming in my head.
“I gotta go,” I say.
“You gotta go? So what am I supposed to—”
“Get photos. Not of her in a towel. And get your ass back to Manhattan.”
“Technically, I am in—”
I hang up before Mav can say anything else.
Then, after a moment of my nerves sizzling under my skin, I text Baron.
RANSOME: Meet me at the warehouse. Now.
“Is he sure?” Baron asks as we watch production.
The warehouse is always a good place to meet for shit like this.
Anywhere else could have eyes and ears. Bars aren’t safe, even on Rozanov territory.
My house isn’t safe, because there’s no way of knowing if my formally Chadovich wife is actually paying attention to the dispute between Kourtney and Kim or if she’s listening in on my conversations.
I pull my phone out wordlessly and show him the photo Mav sent me. A photo I have looked at no less than twenty times since he sent it. It’s a side profile of her walking into a deli.
“Yep, that’s knocked up alright,” Baron says. Then he gives me an apologetic look. “Sorry.”
I shove my phone back in my pocket and go back to staring at the workers.
“A question comes to mind,” Baron says as we gaze forward. “Elephant-in-the-room kind of question, really. But I kind of don’t want to ask it.”
“And I don’t want to hear it.”
“Tough. You think it’s yours?” he asks anyway.
I grit my teeth. “We were together when it would have happened.”
“So that’s a yes,” he says.
“She could have cheated,” I point out.
Baron frowns. “You think she would?”
The thought makes my blood boil. Amara, having sex with someone else while she was with me. Maybe one of the pretty boys from the club.
Or maybe Tristan.
I crush that thought as hard as I can. “I think a lot of things have proven that I don’t know her as well as I thought I did.”
“So it’s not,” he half-shrugs. “Yours, I mean. That makes it easier on you, doesn’t it?”
“Easier in what way?” I snap. “It means I can’t trust her at all. Which means she could have been lying about anything. Fuck, for all I know, her and Gianni were working with Tristan.”
“I doubt that,” Baron cuts me off.
“Do you? Because doubt is the only certain thing I have right now. She could have applied for the personal assistant job just to get inside the business.”
“Don’t take this the wrong way, boss, but I feel like you’re being just a tiny bit paranoid.”
“Am I?” I snap. The more I think about it, the less absurd it seems. “As my assistant, she learned my routine. She had access to everything. Files, passwords, meeting locations, even my house. The woman did my fucking laundry, for Christ’s sake.”
“Well, sure, but that’s work. She didn’t hide out in your closet or anything.”
I go quiet.
Baron’s eyebrows scrape the ceiling. “Wait. Did she hide out in your closet?”
“Once,” I admit. “She used to stalk me.”
He blinks slowly. “I’m afraid you’re gonna have to be a hell of a lot more specific than that, cuz.”
“Let’s just say, I’m surprised the realtor didn’t find a shrine in the back of her closet when they sold the apartment.”
Baron chuckles a little, then stops when he sees my face. “Oh, shit, you’re serious.” He clears his throat. “Well, regardless, I don’t think she was being a creep because Tristan sicced her on you. I think maybe they just drew her that way.”
“Shut up.”
“And I also don’t think she would have cheated on you. Like you said, she was stalking you. The girl was literally obsessed. Hell, if she’s logging back into the system, she still might be.”
“Or she’s trying to fuck me over.”
But Baron shakes his head. “I still don’t think so. She’s not Bratva. She isn’t cut out for it. But here’s the thing: if the baby is yours, whether you care about Amara or not doesn’t matter. What matters is that her baby is a Bratva baby. A Rozanov. An heir.”
It’s not that I haven’t already thought about that. Obviously, I have. But it does pose a huge problem.
I want to write her off forever. Forget she ever crashed into my life and made a huge fucking mess of it. But if that baby’s mine, then I can’t.
Being the only living Rozanov son, if I have a son, he will be the next pakhan.
Which means I have to bring them home.
Both of them.