A Surprise Baby for the Russian (Nikolai Bratva Brides #12)

Chapter 1 - Yakov

He’s been outside my window for three days now.

It was the other one, the guy he rotates shifts with, that I clocked within five minutes of his arrival.

My father thinks moving my rooms down to the ground floor will make it easier for his goons that patrol the grounds to keep an eye on me, but this is the thing about my father that will eventually be his undoing: he has always underestimated me.

It’s the same mistake he’s been making my entire life, and you’d think, at some point, he’d learn.

I pour myself a tumbler of Beluga Gold and move closer to the window. These motherfuckers need to leave, so I make a point of standing there long enough, staring hard enough, that they notice and at least have the decency to look uncomfortable and fuck off.

Ever since I helped my sister Selene escape our father trying to kill her and unceremoniously put him on his ass, he has built this cage around me, brick by careful brick, goon by goon.

When her partner Simon Volkov and his brothers arrived to rescue her, Selene had asked me to leave with them.

While the offer was tempting, I needed to be in this house.

I made a point of raising the “family loyalty” card as a reason to stay; maybe it’d placate the old man.

Let him think, despite everything, that I was still too under his thumb to walk.

I had been waiting for a semblance of guilt to arrive.

The guilt of going against everything we are raised to be, the guilt of a son who chose his sister over the family.

It never came; it never will. What I feel instead is relief.

Relief that Raya Volkov and Simon and Selene’s twins are unharmed after the kidnapping stunt my father pulled.

My father hadn’t intended to take the Volkovs’ younger sister.

His intention was to take the twins, to use them as blackmail against a family growing too powerful now that they’d allied with the Nikolais.

It’s fortunate, in hindsight, that his men took their aunt, who was babysitting, along with them—so the children wouldn’t be quite so scared and alone.

I’m beyond fucking relieved that Selene escaped, and that for once in my life I did something that didn’t make me feel like I needed to stand under scalding water and scrub myself clean.

My father is a lot of things, but stupid is not one of them.

He knows that a son who helped his daughter escape is also a son who might follow her.

So he watches me. Has me watched. Keeps me close and tries to keep me blind, because in a family like ours, information is power.

Power is the only currency that has ever mattered.

Cut a man off from information, and you cut him off from everything. I let him think he has.

My brothers speak to me even less now than they did before, which is not the loss they think it is.

Dinner conversation is careful, words that communicate nothing because I may be listening.

Bogdan can barely look at me, which suits us both; at least with Bogdan I know where I stand.

Vasya, ever the pragmatist, has simply pretended I don’t exist, which is his solution to most things that make him uncomfortable.

And Yaroslav, well, Yaroslav acts as though nothing has happened and nothing has changed, which is somehow worse than all of it.

We’ve always been close, obviously, always had that twin telepathy which father despised; but now it is like he has deliberately shut down and become impenetrable.

Selene is never far from my thoughts. We were never allowed to be close.

In this family, closeness is weakness and weakness is an open door, so the distance between all of us was engineered long before we were old enough to understand what was being taken.

But now, with nothing but time and silence and my father’s men outside my window, I find myself replaying every conversation we ever had.

Every time she tried to show me something, I refused to look at it.

It’s not that she wasn’t right; for large parts of it I was too stubborn and too much my father’s son to listen.

As I got older, I consistently chose the comfort of my own path, believing that if she could hold out for a little longer, I would make it right.

By the time I finally opened my eyes to the reality of what she was suffering, it had nearly cost her everything.

Yaroslav and I went to the Bahamas to bring her back.

We moved without my father’s knowledge, using our contacts, our routes, leaving no trail that led back to the house.

At the time, I told myself we were doing it for her.

We weren’t. We were doing it because we couldn’t sit with what it meant that she’d gone.

The truth is, Selene was treated brutally within this house, and no way of dressing it up could ever make it acceptable.

My father was cold and violent toward her; he wielded his fists and fury and called it parenting.

The twins were treated like inconveniences, as leverage and nothing more; that is the only language my father has ever spoken.

I watched it all happen and thought, now is not the right time, a luxury I afforded myself at the expense of her obvious distress.

It’s a shameful thing to sit with; quite frankly, I don’t know what the fuck I was thinking.

The Bahamas trip taught me something, though, and I have thought about it often since.

The fact that I stepped around his surveillance, his entire infrastructure, without leaving a mark.

It wasn’t the first time, but it was the clearest proof.

Ten years of quietly building something that is mine—contacts and routes and resources that answer only to me—and when I needed them, they held.

My father has spent months congratulating himself on containing me.

He has no idea what he’s standing next to.

The night the shit hit the fan with the kidnapping, I had been watching the security feed.

I’d been watching it for hours, if I’m honest, the way I had watched it every night since they were taken, a pull I couldn’t explain and didn’t try to.

I watched the Volkov men launch their rescue mission.

Watched the children being carried out. Watched Raya move through it all, keeping herself between them and anything that might frighten them, keeping everything calm for two small people who needed it even though everything around her was chaos.

I sat in the dark with a drink I wasn’t tasting and felt something I had no word for.

Then I went looking for my father, and well, that was fucking insane.

I looked at him on the floor after I’d punched him, looked at Bogdan, and thought, what the fuck have I been doing, making excuses for these pathetic excuses of human beings?

Not thinking about Raya Volkov is a rule I have been failing to enforce since the first night of the kidnapping, when I pulled up the feed to check they were all safe and discovered that hours had passed, and I hadn’t moved.

I watched how she suppressed her own fear and confusion, making sure the twins were okay, happy even.

Watched the defiant tilt of her chin and how it elongated the elegant line of her neck whenever one of my father’s men came near.

I would sit guard over her all night, from the other side of the screen, and watch over the twins and her while she slept, watching the slow rise and fall of her chest, the way her arms were always around the children, and the way her lips would part slightly in her sleep.

I would touch them through the screen, imagining their warmth and plumpness underneath my finger, what it would feel like to press down slightly upon her lip, to lean forward, if it were possible, and take it in my own.

It was on those watches that I made a decision I never articulated to anyone, including myself: nothing would touch her.

Not my father’s men, not my brothers, nor anyone in reach of this house.

I kept that promise. She never knew it was me.

I made sure she was fed, that the warehouse was warm, that none of my father’s people went near her without being personally vetted by me first. I told myself my intervention was principal.

Basic human decency. The bare minimum that separated me from the animals.

I am a damn good liar.

The truth is that I watched Raya Volkov refuse to break, and something in me that had been wound tight my entire life clicked into place around her, and I have been ignoring that ever since, with the full understanding that ignoring it is not the same as it not being true.

When the Volkov men finally got her out, when I watched her climb into that car on the feed, and the screen went to an empty warehouse, what moved through me was loss.

I had protected her for days from behind a screen and never spoken a single word to her, and I missed her like I’d lost a limb.

But that was months ago, and no amount of going over it helps.

I’m on my third drink and considering the bed I won’t sleep in when the door to my suite bangs open and Bogdan falls through it.

Falls being the operative word. He catches himself on the doorframe, blinking at me with unfocused eyes.

He’s been drinking since at least noon, at a guess.

He grins the loose, sloppy grin that not so long ago I might have found funny.

“Brat,” he slurs. Brother. The cheeky bastard ignores me unless he’s in this condition.

“You’re drunk.”

“Very perceptive.” He waggles his finger at me and makes it to the chair across from me with all the grace of a felled tree. “Father’s entertaining. Did you know? Not that you’d be invited.”

“No.”

“Nyet.” He finds this funnier than it is. “No, I don’t suppose you would be.”