Milana
I’m in his arms and pressed to his chest as he wraps me close, safe, no judgement, just understanding that this is exactly what I need. Somehow, our legs weave together, and we’re the perfect fit, my head on his shoulder, our chests flush, his strong arms protective.
I sob into his shirt, and it’s so many things. My heart is breaking in layers, knowing I’ll never see Papa again, that he’ll never smile at me, or hug me close, guide me with wise words again, randomly quote Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, or be a grandfather to my children as he’s been to Ivan’s girls.
I’ve been mourning him ever since his first stroke, but now there’s also the intense relief that his suffering is finally coming to an end.
It’s the fear for the loneliness I experienced when Mama died, Ivan and I separated for months.
But now…Luca is here.
He strokes my back, his lips pressed to my hair, and I feel his steady heartbeat under my palm. It’s calming, but it’s also the knowledge he isn’t leaving. I’m not alone.
I’ve cried a wet patch on his black T-shirt by the time I’m calmer, and I nuzzle closer, sobs now reduced to hiccups. I breathe in the intoxicating scent of his skin beyond the fabric, trace a line over his pec as I sink deeper into his embrace.
“Luca?” I murmur when I’ve caught my breath enough to talk, knowing this grief is going to hit me in waves as I wait for the final word from Ivan. I need to tell Luca before he gets a chance to speak to someone else.
“Yes, princess?”
The nickname annoyed me at the start, but it’s been growing on me, just like him. Even worse, I’m starting to love it, hearing him say it in that deep, musical voice of his.
“Nobody can know,” I whisper, still not sure who’s watching me, listening in on our conversations, hacking into my phone. “You can’t tell Benedict or Matteo. You can’t tell anybody.”
“Why? It’s your dad, Milana. Surely, you’ll have a funeral? I’ll take you, there’s no question.”
I shake my head. At least we’ve managed to keep the Pakhan’s strokes and imminent death under wraps long enough for Ivan to take control of the Petrov Bratva again.
If it comes out now, it’s better than fourteen months ago when rumors of a planned coup first started to trickle in.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the threat of a coup stressed Papa so much, it led to him having those strokes in the first place.
I lean back so I can look up at him. He slides his hand to my hip to keep me close while still giving me space. I struggle up onto my elbow to look at him properly—he needs to understand how important this is.
“There’ll be no funeral. Not yet. Ivan’s position as Pakhan is tenuous at best. He barely survived the coup in July and they could still come for him…for us. If they think the Pakhan is still alive, it could buy us time.”
Buy me time. I need it more desperately than Ivan.
“How? I don’t understand the rules of your Russian turf war. We’re not even in Russia.”
“Still, it’s important that this stays under wraps.”
“I won’t say anything, but you need to help me out here, princess. I want to protect you and we’ve married into your—” He breaks off, seeming to struggle to find the right word. “Situation.”
Mess. Shit fest. Glorious irreversible fuckup. I have so many more eloquent words for it.
“Yes, I get that you don’t get it,” I say, suppressing my frustration at always being only a powerless pawn.
Of not being in the know when it comes to how anything really works.
Luca spoke of human and drug trafficking, but he hasn’t made the connection yet.
I might not know much, but I know what we have that other Bratva would want.
“It’s all about control of the black-market trade routes in and out of Russia.
Our logistics business and routes have been in place for decades.
People are getting desperate what with the war dragging on, and the sanctions.
Like the Mafia, the Bratva rule certain areas, turfs, whatever.
The Bratva in Russia wants control of ours. ”
“For what? Drugs maybe, but you don’t ship humans around like that.”
I chew my tongue, because I would hate to reenter this cursed trade our Papa struggled for years to get out of. “Weapons.”
He frowns, the gears shifting. “No, from here to Russia?”
“Both ways.” I swallow, knowing I’ve opened a can of worms now. “You know you never sail a cargo ship empty if you could help it. I don’t know exactly what gets shipped, when and how, but it wouldn’t be hard to smuggle weapons. It’s as simple as that.”
“Nothing is ever as simple as that, Milana.”
He’s staring at me, his gaze begging me to open up more. To tell him things I honestly don’t know. He’s going to have to grapple with this information first, because this, from his expression, has definitely not been on their radar.
One thing I do understand though. “The reality is, with the Pakhan gone, it’s just Ivan and me as his heirs, and eliminating Ivan would just leave me, as the weak and compliant link.”
That was the plan, the one I knew nothing about. I learned the hard way how I would’ve played a key role in letting it all fall into place once Ivan was killed.
Luca goes up on his elbow as his brow knits together and his eyes darken with something that sends a chill down my spine. He squeezes my hip, then presses down, forcing me on my back.
“Has someone threatened to kill you?” he asks, leaning in, dominant now, his voice edgy. “To hurt you? Here, in America?”
“No. Not here. And it isn’t like that.”
“No? What is it, then? Tell me,” he says, urgent. “Because I’ll have to kill them and trust me, we don’t play nice. Whoever is behind the coup have no fucking clue who we are, what type of family you’ve married into, not if they’re in Russia.”
“They have no clue I’m married.” Unless they’ve intercepted Masha’s messages.
She won’t talk. They can’t make her. She’s become fearless.
They’ve done their worst already. Death doesn’t scare her anymore.
As for Varya—what if they push her too far?
I clutch at his shirt’s hem, needing to ground myself.
“And even if they do, they have no idea where I am. Plus this is an impenetrable fort. I’ve never felt safer. ”
This is the truth. I might be broken, but I’m safe.
“My poor princess in her tower.” He seems to relax a bit, the frown gone as his gaze softens. He gathers my hair away from my temple and strokes my cheek. “Nobody will ever hurt you here, understand? Or anywhere. Over my dead body.”
This is true. Despite being in this house with him for so many days now, Luca hasn’t done anything but try and build trust, so gentle, yet shaking me in the foundations of my beliefs. He is so different from the men I knew before, and I’m going to crumble. This man is going to be my undoing.
I say nothing, a tear sliding down my temple.
“Fuck, princess, I’ll kill them for just looking at you with a sus eye,” he says as he catches the tear with his thumb and caresses it away.
I chuckle—of course he’s managed to conjure a smile out of me. “A sus eye? What is that even?’
“A suspicious eye. Obviously.”
I bite down on my lip to stop my smile and sniff. It hardly seems appropriate to smile with everything else going on. “And what does that look like?”
“It looks like an eye—” he says as his gaze follows his finger where it traces a line down my temple, to my jaw, to my chin “—that guides the hand that wants to touch what’s mine.”
What’s mine… What is his.
Me. I’m his.
He brushes a soft stroke with his thumb over my bottom lip, and I drag in a shallow, trembling breath as his leg slides over mine, trapping me.
When he meets my gaze again, I’ve melted into the bed with his words, his touch, his tenderness.
And I swear, he wants to kiss me.
I want him to kiss me.
The thought should trip me up, but it doesn’t. It lights up my stomach with butterflies. Since being in his apartment, since seeing him post-workout in the kitchen for days, I’ve been wondering what it would be like to kiss him. Really kiss him.
I inch my hand up his chest, and the air between us becomes heavy with this need that’s been quietly building.
His gaze drops to my lips as my fingers splay over his heart and I slide my hand higher, to his neck and the warmth of his bare skin, into his hair.
It’s so soft, in such contrast to every other part of him that’s firm and unforgivingly male.
He swallows as I pull him to me. He dips down, his lips closing over mine, softly, and I open up for him, taste him with a languid stroke of my tongue against his. He moans into my mouth, kissing me deeper, tasting me in turn as he presses his arousal into my leg, his thigh nestling between mine.
The pressure is just perfect, and I sink into this desire I’d written off as something I’ll never feel again. His hand is on my side, stroking up to my breast, and I roll into him in anticipation.
But he ends the kiss and drops his forehead to mine.
“This isn’t right, Milana,” he murmurs. “Now isn’t the moment.”
No, it isn’t, but I don’t let go, and he reaches for my hand to gently pull it from where I’ve burrowed my fingers into his hair.
“Your dad is dying. You’re not yourself. I can’t…we can’t…not when you’re this vulnerable.”
Does he have to remind me of everything I’m so desperate to forget? All I want is to be fucked so I can forget every misery in my life for a while.
“I’m always vulnerable around you,” I whisper. “You’re a man and I’m a woman. We’ll never be on an equal footing.”
He stills, his hand holding mine against the mattress. Like this, with his body braced over mine, his strength and weight advantage are so obvious, but the emotions playing in his gaze say it all: I’ve gone too far.
He blinks, and the room seems to turn cold. “And that’s how I’ve been treating you?”
“Luca—”
He lets go and gets off the bed only to stare down at me.
“I understand what happened to you made you bitter, but if the fucker did more than spreading those images of you on the internet, I need to know. I have a right to know who hurt you like this and how far he went. If he abused you, hit you—” He fists his hair and turns, dragging in a breath.
“FUCK!” he growls, but it isn’t in frustration, it’s in agony.
Something’s triggered him, and I sit up, stunned. “No, it wasn’t like that.”
“No?” He spins around, facing me again. “What, then? If we can cut to the chase, it would be great. I just need broad brushstrokes, Milana. I’m a man with extreme patience, but I can’t live like this.
I care…I care too much—” He swallows. “This,” he says, waving between us, “—hurts me…seeing you like this. I can’t do this. ”
My heart breaks for him, for his words and the meaning cocooned in them, because in this moment, he’s revealed so much to me. But he is still a man. In charge. Always the one with all the power.
He might have been just a tool in my machinations early on, but the tool is starting to wield the master, and I can’t let that happen. I have only one goal: Russia.
“Then let me go,” I whisper. “If you really care—for your brothers, for your lives, for your own safety—you have to let me go, Luca. Please. Let me leave. Trust me when I say you don’t want to get involved in this thing with Russia. It’s too ugly.”
He stills, and after a tense half-minute of just glaring at me, he drags his fingers through his hair with a pained sigh.
“If I really care, I should let you go? Allow you to go to Russia and get deeper involved in something you call too ugly? Where your life will be in danger? This, when all I want is to protect you?” He takes a turn around the room, frustration radiating off him.
“And then risk Gabriella’s life too, in the process?
Suffer your brother’s wrath when he realizes you’ve gone?
Start a war between Il Consiglio and the Petrov Bratva?
” He comes to stand at the bed, his hands dropping from his hair to his sides, fully in charge of himself, of every emotion.
“You’re not thinking straight, princess.
If this is what you want, you don’t know ugly. I can’t let you go. I won’t.”
With that, he stalks out of the room, and I turn my face into the pillow, muffling a scream. I’ve set the trap, only to be caught in it.