31. Luca
LUCA
I get off the bed and strip, then reach for the remote to close the window blinds. I don’t put the bedside lamp on. Instead, I head for the ceiling lights.
“Cover your eyes,” I say and give her a second to do so, then switch them on. The room is flooded with light.
“Luca.” She sighs. “Really?”
“So I can see you better.” I smirk while dimming them a bit. I fist my cock and give it a few languid strokes while heading back to the bed.
“And hear me moan better and eat me out better?” she jokes, but there’s an edge to her voice.
“Totally.” We’re so on the same page here.
She’s pulled up her legs and now she’s peering through her fingers at me, eyes adjusting to the light. Jesus. She’s breathtaking. Thick dark hair spread over the pillow. She lifts her hands away from her face, and there’s the gorgeous glow I’m chasing.
She’s in pale blue lacy underwear with little white daisies embroidered all over it.
It’s playful but sexy, feminine and utterly alluring.
The need to thrust into her floods my whole body, and not just my cock.
I kneel on the bed with the intention of slowly stripping her of the whimsical fabric in a delicate operation that’s going to involve a lot of kissing, sucking, and licking.
My hand is on her thigh as I home in on her pussy, but my gaze snags on the lines—stretch marks, recent stretch marks—that cup her lower belly like a lotus flower. The faint dark line that runs like a seam over her abdomen.
A tremor runs through me.
She was pregnant. Once. Not long ago.
I sink onto the bed in shock, searching her body for other clues.
Surely, this is just a warped moment in the matrix, a mind fuck—just blink and it will pass.
My fingers quiver as I run them along her inner thigh and splay my hand on her stomach.
She is so quiet, but I can feel her suppressed breathing, the tension in her body as I touch her.
My mouth turns dry as all the implications of her situation tally in my mind.
She’s had a baby.
She’s here with no baby.
What happened to the baby?
This is why she’s so broken. And I feel my body break along the same lines on hers, curling into myself, unable to fathom the heartache.
“Milana—” I start, my voice filled with emotion too intense to stomach.
My wife is just lying there, limp, tears streaming from her eyes down her temples, hardly breathing, holding her agony in check. How long has she been carrying this—alone? Nobody mentioned anything about a baby.
“Oh, fuck, Mila,” I murmur as I close in on her and pull her into my arms. I cup her head to hold her close as sobs rake through her. “What happened? Was it stillborn?”
Like Gabi was supposed to be, tearing our mom from us? Just gone. We might have reunited with our sister, but her ‘stillbirth’ left a cut so deep it will never heal.
Milana just cries and I hold her, but then she cups my cheek and makes me look at her, into her tear-drenched eyes.
“I don’t talk about her. I don’t think about her. Only three people know she exists.” She stops. Swallows. “She wasn’t stillborn.”
What was cold before seems to freeze with dread. “Did they take her from you?”
“No, but I left her behind.” Her voice breaks. “In Russia.”
“What?” I lean back to stare at her in horror. “What the fuck? Why? What woman leaves her baby behind?”
As soon as the words are out, I regret them. She pushes out of my hold and sits up, hugging her knees, a wall between us.
I’ve fucked up. I clamber off the bed and reach for my jeans. I don’t bother with briefs. This night has taken a turn I didn’t expect. This is fucking crazy.
“What woman? A woman who doesn’t want anybody to know her baby exists,” she chokes out.
“But you’re right. Who has it in her to leave a baby behind—one she desperately wanted?
It broke me, but I did it and it worked.
Nobody would believe I had it in me to do this…
and me having had a baby? It can’t possibly be true. ”
For a long moment, she holds my gaze, challenging me, and I’m the first to look away. I know nothing of what led her to make this decision. I can’t even begin to understand.
I pull on my T-shirt, and when I look at her again, she’s rested her forehead on her arms, her body racked with sobs.
“I’m sorry, Milana.”
Fucking idiot. She starts to talk and I do this. I rub at my forehead as I find her cashmere sweater. She’s going to get cold what with the shock of this revelation between us. Only three people know?
“Here, princess,” I murmur, battling my own emotions as I softly coax her to unfurl so I can help dress her.
She doesn’t flinch or push me away. Thank God.
“It’s okay…it’s okay,” I try to soothe her as I pull the sweater over her head.
“But you’re going to tell me everything. No more secrets between us.”
She bites her lip and sobs as I guide her arms into the sleeves. “I can’t, Luca, please.”
“Why?” I ask as I gather her hair and pull it from the sweater’s neck.
It falls over her shoulders, and like this, with the tears in her eyes, she looks so freaking vulnerable.
The few women who know about me, about my fucked-up existence, flash through my mind’s eye.
Women who made impossible choices. Women who will make impossible decisions because of men.
Mom, for one, is still as vivid in my mind as she was over twenty years ago. She was probably as petrified as Milana is now—constantly.
Now there’s Tasha, initially so scared of Matteo she jumped off a cliff in Sicily.
Gigi, running for her life from what Franco Fiore planned for her.
Ariana suffering so badly from PTSD that she’d cry quietly, thinking nobody would notice, but Dominic noticed everything.
And then there’s Gabi, shot and in hospital, hunted by some Russian maniac.
Not this woman too. Not my wife. And not her baby, a pure innocent. “Tell me.”
“I don’t know who to trust.”
Her words are a gut punch, but I get it. With this level of secrecy, there’s something seriously messed-up going on. I’m a fucking living secret. Gabi was one too. Now here is Milana, with a secret baby.
“Try and trust me?” I say softly, not knowing if I’ve earned it, especially with my earlier comment, but her secret is out now. With us living like this, it was just a matter of time.
She nods and wipes at her cheeks.
I reach for the tissues on the nightstand and hand one to her, my mind flooding with questions but not wanting to jump to conclusions because I already know I’m not going to like this. I don’t need to embellish it with my own assumptions or fuck it up by saying the wrong thing again.
It’s quiet for a long time as she seems to arrange her thoughts, and when she eventually looks up, there’s a different light in her eyes.
She’s weighed her options. Strategized. Adjusted to my earlier reaction, maybe anticipating my next move.
Some men would resort to violence in moments like these, but I’ve been around enough shit like this in my life to have control over my reactions.
“Just start somewhere,” I urge her on as I put a hand on her arm.
She leans away from my touch, opening a gap between us. “I’ll tell you everything, as long as you promise you’ll let me go. I need to fetch her and…” She buries her face in her hand, fingers trembling.
“Disappear? That’s been the plan?”
She nods.
“You know I can’t let you go, Milana. I don’t want to. I want—” I stall, staring at the momentous truth I didn’t see coming. “I want to protect you. Be with you. And there’s Gabi.”
“Ivan will never hurt Gabi, especially not after what happened today.”
“That’s not the point. There might not be much trust between Il Consiglio and the Petrov Bratva, but it doesn’t need to be like that between us.”
“I vowed to never trust a man again.”
And I don’t blame her, but I’m getting to the bottom of this. “Who’s the father?”
She shakes her head, on the verge of tears again.
“It’s the man who took those photos of you, isn’t it? The one you told me is dead?” An urge surges in me, red hot like anger, to protect her. “Is he really dead, or is he coming for you?”
“I was such a fool,” she chokes out. “Such a stupid, naive, gullible idiot.”
“You were in love,” I say softly. And here I am, jealous about a look she gave him, forever captured on camera.
She shakes her head. “Yes, but I was targeted. He didn’t care about me. Only seduced me with one sole intention. And for a good four months, I thought it was real. Our secret. He took my— He took everything. My virginity, my dignity, made me lie and betray my brother.”
Fucker. I reach for her hand, encouraging her with a soft squeeze to carry on.
“He used me to cement his hold in our family. It’s so fucked up. He was older than me, Ivan’s age. They were friends in Russia. Best friends.”
“A name, princess. Just say it once and I won’t ask for it again.”
She drags in a haggard breath. “Dimitri. Dimitri Mikhailov. Along with Ivan, he was my Papa’s right-hand man.
The asshole planned a coup for six long years and then seduced me.
Fucked with my contraception to get me pregnant so I’d be chained to him forever.
So he could use me as a bargaining chip.
A tool in his arsenal. My baby his to do with as he pleased, knowing once a child came into the equation, I’d do anything he asked me to do just to make sure she stayed safe. I was such an idiot.”
You were in love. Blinded by the intensity of it. No wonder she’s so bitter, so broken. I say nothing, letting her carry on.
“He infiltrated our lives, our house, our sanctuary. And then he led a coup against the Petrovs.”
She stills.
I wait.
When she stays silent, I ask, “How did he die?”
“Ivan. Nobody knows exactly what happened, but Ivan killed him during the coup on the Fourth of July. Sliced his throat. He bled out on my Steinway at our family house. I haven’t seen his body, but his blood…
it’s everywhere. Between the keys. On the felt.
The leather.” She convulses. “Ivan tried to clean it away, but…”
No wonder she can’t touch the Steinway I bought her. No wonder she doesn’t want to play the keys, every single one of them a reminder of death.
“How old is she? Your baby?”
“Four months.”
“What? Only four months?” Holy fucking hell. “Where is she?”
But the answer is already sinking in.
“She’s with Masha. Hence the money.” She shakes her head. “I’m sorry, Luca. Do you understand why I’m so desperate to leave? To go back to Russia?”
“Yes. I get it now.” But it will be over my dead body. “What’s her name?”
“Ana. Just Ana. Short for Anastasia, my mom’s name. We call her Annushka.”
I nod. “It’s a beautiful name. Can’t Masha bring her here? They’ll be safe here.”
That’s what I’d like to think, but today proved us all wrong. Still, I’ll protect her with my life.
“Masha doesn’t travel. She doesn’t even have a valid passport anymore. Luca. There’s more, you don’t understand.”
“You’re damn right I don’t understand.” It feels as if I’ve stepped into a maze of catacombs, skeletons everywhere, and I can’t get out.
“They’re on to us. And they’ve taken Varya.”
“Varya?”
“She’s a friend, and the midwife who was at the birth.”
“What do you mean, they’ve taken Varya?”
“The Bratva. They took her, to interrogate her, and she isn’t back yet. I don’t know if she’s going to be back.”
Her voice cracks, and I fist my hands, but my body is already so tense, it hardly shows.
“I’m sitting on a time bomb,” she continues. “I don’t know how long she can hold out and not tell them the truth. That the baby is mine, not Masha’s.”
“Which fucking Bratva?” I bite out, wishing it wasn’t going to be true.
She cups her hands to her mouth and shakes her head. “Chertnikov.”