Chapter 19 Sienna #2
“Never said I wasn’t.” He remained seated and I was tempted to knee him in the balls.
“What happens after we separate? I’m not leaving my baby with you.”
Dimitri shrugged. “We’ll share custody. We can figure out the details later. I will, of course, cover expenses and ensure you have a monthly stipend after the separation.”
As if I needed his money. As if I needed him.
Strangled breaths rattled through my lungs, and I paced over to the window leading to the fire escape and pushed it open. I needed air…I needed a new life.
“What the fuck are you doing?” Dimitri asked as I swung my leg out of the window and onto the fire escape.
It was getting cold, but I barely felt it as I sat down on the metal landing and stared out at the city where I’d spent my entire life. For all my dreams of traveling the world, I’d never expected to live anywhere but New York City.
“Planning on jumping?” Dimitri asked dryly as he leaned against the window frame.
Hmm. I didn’t want to jump, but maybe if I convinced Dimitri to come out here…
Weather was so unpredictable. A gust of wind could come along and push him right off.
Oh, what a tragic accident that would be…
that conveniently solved all my problems. Matteo would tell the capos I was a grieving widow who had lost my husband in a devastating fire escape accident.
Such a shame the horrible things that could happen when people lose their balance…
“Why the fuck are you smiling?”
Dimitri’s raised voice pulled me out of my daydream.
“Hmm? I’m not smiling.”
I totally was, but it wasn’t my fault my brain was playing a vision of a squealing Dimitri hurtling to the sidewalk on repeat.
He muttered something low in Russian. I’d learned a few phrases because Sofiya tried to only speak Russian and Ukrainian to Clementine during the day, but I doubted Dimitri had said, “More food, please.”
“Sienna, focus.” He snapped his fingers close to my face, and I jolted back with a scowl.
“I liked you better with the Irish accent,” I said.
More muttering in Russian. “Get the fuck inside.”
I rolled my eyes and took my sweet, sweet time going back through the window.
“So, are we in agreement?” he asked. “We can get married here at City Hall and then you will move in. We will sleep in separate rooms. You can continue doing...whatever it is you do. Our lives won’t intersect.”
I wanted to tell him no. To scream and shout and shake my fist at the world for having such a cruel sense of humor. The only thing I’d ever wanted was someone to love me the way my papà loved Mamma, and this was what I got?
Growing up, Papà had been gone most nights when I went to bed.
On the rare occasions he was home, he would tuck me in and I would beg him to tell me my favorite story—how he and Mamma met.
A slow smile would spread across his face as he pretended to ponder my request. “Hmm...I don’t know.
Haven’t you heard the story enough, cuore? ”
“No, Papà. Tell me again, please.”
“Alright, alright. I’ll do it for my girl.”
He’d make sure I was cozy under the covers before stretching out beside me and telling me all about the stunning woman he saw across the dance floor at a wedding. A woman with beautiful dark brown hair and a laugh that filled the room.
“I knew she was mine right away, my soulmate. So I strutted over to her”—this would be accompanied by a dramatic reenactment of said walk—“and told her she was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen and I would die if she didn’t dance with me.”
“And what did she say?” I would ask as I bounced on the bed with excitement.
His eyes would twinkle as he crossed his arms, turned up his nose and said in a horrible impression of Mamma, “Well, you better start digging a hole.”
At this point, I would fall back to the mattress with laughter so loud Mamma would appear in the doorframe with a stern expression. “This doesn’t sound like bedtime to me.”
The two of us would convince her to join us on the bed, and my parents would take turns telling me the story while I was sandwiched between them. My heart ached at the thought that my baby would never have that.
“Sienna,” Dimitri barked.
I let out a slow breath. “And you won’t take the baby away from me?”
His expression softened marginally. “I have no interest in keeping you from the child.”
He had much more power over me as Pakhan, but I wasn’t helpless. I had money, skills, and powerful people in my corner. I would carve out a life for my baby and me, even if it wasn’t what I’d imagined.
“If I agree to your plan, what do we say to them?” I jerked my chin in the direction of the living room. “Do we tell them the marriage isn’t real?”
Dimitri was slow to answer. “The less people know, the better.”
I turned his answer over in my mind. I didn’t like hiding something like this from my family, but telling them everything would mean revealing the humiliating reality that not only had I gotten pregnant from an anonymous one-night stand, but that the father of my child hated me and saw me as nothing more than an incubator for his heir.
I met his hard gaze, trying to figure out what was going on inside his head.
Dimitri clearly loved his sisters and though he hated me now, there had been moments of incredible tenderness between us in Paris.
Maybe he would find it in his heart to care about our child, and maybe that would be worth the pain this arrangement would cause me.
“We’ll tell them we’re going to give marriage a try for the sake of the baby,” I said, speaking around the lump in my throat. “That way, we don’t have to pretend to be in love and it won’t be shocking when we separate.”
“Fine with me.” He pulled out his phone. “I’ll get us an appointment at City Hall. It will be safer for you to enter Chicago if we’re already married.”
“Fine.”
The closed door still separated us from this new reality. Fuck. How was I supposed to go out there and face everyone? What if I just climbed down the fire escape and sent them a postcard from Chicago with my life update?
Except…my stomach was about to eat itself with hunger and Sofiya had made tiramisu.
Facing everyone, it was.