Chapter Sixteen
Alexei’s POV
Usually, this room was my sanctuary—the place where logic reigned, where the chaos of the world was reduced to pins on a map and percentages of probability. However, tonight, it felt like a cage.
I sat at the head of the heavy oak table, the wood scarred by decades of Lobanov history.
Across from me, the map was spread out like a flayed skin.
Red pins marked the Italian routes—the veins through which their poison tried to flow into our city.
Blue pins marked my safehouses—the fortresses that kept my wing of the empire breathing.
And then there was the black pin. It sat dead center at an old, decaying dockyard, a place the Italians hadn’t touched in three years.
It was a ghost of a location, a relic of a previous war.
But the tech team had traced the intercepted message back to a relay station less than a mile from those rotting piers.
The bastards knew her father was alive.
“The chatter is spiking,” Roman said, leaning over the table. “They aren’t just feeling around anymore, Alexei. They’re mobilizing. They think they’ve found the one thing you can’t afford to lose.”
I didn’t answer. I couldn’t. Every time I opened my mouth, I felt the words like a knife balanced on the edge of my tongue. I wasn’t thinking about the dockyard. I wasn’t thinking about the shipments of Ricci’s heroin that we’d need to intercept to cripple their funding.
I was thinking about Mila. I was thinking about the way she had looked at me this morning—that flicker of defiance masked by a layer of bone-deep terror.
She had lied. The realization was a low-grade fever in my blood, a constant, throbbing heat.
I had given her everything. I had brought her into the heart of the Lobanov machine, protected her from the monsters at the gate, and given her my name.
And she’s carrying my child.
My hand instinctively tightened into a fist on the table.
A part of me was growing inside a woman who didn’t trust me enough to tell me her father was still breathing.
“We have to move,” Dimitri said, his voice the steady pulse of a soldier. “If they get to him before we do, they’ll use him to force a parley. Or worse, they’ll execute him and pin it on us to turn the remaining neutral families against the Bratva.”
“He’s leverage,” Roman added, his eyes meeting mine. “We find the father, we bring him in and use him. We dangle him in front of the Italians, draw them out into the open, and finish this.”
“No one touches him,” I practically growled. Then I lowered my tone in silent apology to my older cousin as I added, “I’ll deal with him.”
Roman raised an eyebrow, but then he nodded.
It wasn’t about the old man. I didn’t give a damn if Mila’s father lived or died.
But I knew Mila. I knew the fragile architecture of her heart.
If one of my men killed him, if he died in a crossfire of my making, the bridge between us wouldn’t just be cracked—it would be gone.
She would never forgive me. And the thought of her looking at me with nothing but hatred for the rest of our lives was a vacuum in my chest.
I wanted to be the one to decide his fate because I was the only one who understood what he meant to her.
“Fine,” Dimitri said, sensing the shift in the room’s temperature.
He cleared his throat and pointed to a blue pin on the outskirts of the city.
“Then we need to talk about Mila. The estate is secure, but the Italians are bold. We should move her to the safehouse. It’s isolated, easy to defend, and away from the line of fire. ”
“No,” I said instantly.
“Alexei,” Konstantin spoke up for the first time.
While Roman worked with me more often, Konstantin and I were closer—it probably had something to do with the fact that he was my youngest cousin and we were in the same age bracket.
He had a way of looking at me that stripped away the cloak of my title or office.
He knew me. “Dimitri is right. She is your greatest vulnerability right now. Moving her is the logical play.”
But that didn’t mean his opinions were unshakable to me.
“She doesn’t leave my sight,” I said, my voice like iron hitting stone.
“You can’t run a war and watch her at the same time,” Konstantin countered calmly. “You’re walking a fine line, Alexei. Protection is one thing. Obsession is another. One keeps you alive; the other gets you killed.”
I looked at him, my jaw tightening until it ached. I knew he was right. I knew that keeping her here, in the center of the storm, was a tactical nightmare. But the idea of her being miles away, behind walls I didn’t personally stand guard over, made my skin crawl.
I didn’t trust my men to protect her. I didn’t trust the safehouse to hold. I didn’t even trust Mila herself not to run, not to try and find her father on her own.
“She stays,” I said, turning to Dimitri. “Double the perimeter guards. I want a drone in the air twenty-four-seven. If a stray cat crosses the property line, I want to know about it.”
I stood up, the chair scraping harshly against the floor.
**********
The house was quiet as I climbed the stairs, but it wasn’t a peaceful quiet. It was the silence of a held breath. When I entered our bedroom, the only light came from the moon reflecting off the fresh snow outside.
She was awake. She was sitting at the foot of the bed, her back straight, her hands folded in her lap. She looked like a penitent awaiting a sentence, her hair falling over her shoulders in dark waves. She didn’t move as I approached, but I saw her eyes widen, catching the moonlight.
I stopped a few feet away, the space between us charged with everything we hadn’t said.
“Are you going to lock me away?” she whispered. Her voice was small, but it didn’t shake.
My jaw tightened. The question stung because part of me wanted to. I wanted to put her in a room of glass and steel where nothing could touch her, where she couldn’t lie to me, where she was safe from the world and from herself.
“No,” I said.
She let out a breath she seemed to have been holding for hours. “Your men might prefer me gone. With the car coming closer and all.”
“My men want a lot of things,” I said, stepping closer. “What they don’t do is decide what happens to you. I do.”
“And what do you decide, Alexei?” she asked, finally looking up at me. “Am I a prisoner here? Or am I still your wife?”
“You’re safer next to me,” I said.
But what I didn’t say—what I couldn’t say—was that I didn’t trust anyone else. I didn’t trust the world to be kind to her. I didn’t trust her father not to use her as a shield. And I didn’t trust her not to hide from me again.
I moved to the edge of the bed and sat down, not touching her, but close enough to feel the heat radiating from her body. The silence stretched out, no longer sharp, but heavy.
Tentatively, she reached out. Her fingers brushed against my wrist, just below the cuff of my shirt.
Her touch was light, almost a question, but it hit me like a physical blow.
In the war room, I was a god of lightning and stone.
I was the man who ordered deaths with a nod.
But here, in the dark, with her fingers on my skin, I was just a man who was terrifyingly, hopelessly compromised.
She was the only thing in this world that could make me hesitate. She was the flaw in my armor.
“Alexei,” she murmured, her voice soft. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t,” I snapped, the word harsher than I intended. “Don’t apologize for something you’d do again.”
“I did it for him,” she said, her grip on my wrist tightening. “Not against you.”
“There is no difference in my world, Mila. If you aren’t with me, you’re against me. There is no middle ground. There is no ‘for him.’”
I turned my hand over, lacing my fingers through hers, pulling her hand up to my mouth. I kissed her knuckles, my eyes never leaving hers. I wanted to swallow her whole. I wanted to reach inside her and pull the truth out of her lungs.
I leaned in, my mouth finding hers. It wasn’t a soft kiss. It was hungry and demanding, a desperate attempt to reclaim the territory I felt I’d lost. I felt her melt against me, her body betraying her anger and fear.
When we broke the kiss for air, she opened her eyes slowly, her gaze on mine.
We fell back onto the pillows, a tangle of limbs and suppressed fury.
The space between us was still threaded with danger, with the knowledge that the morning would bring more blood and more difficult choices.
But for now, there was only the friction of our bodies and the frantic beat of two hearts that didn’t know how to beat in sync anymore.
A while later, Mila was asleep, her breathing deep and even. She had shifted in her sleep, her head resting on my chest, her hand curled against my shoulder.
I lay awake, staring at the ceiling. I reached down, my hand sliding under the pillow to feel the cold, familiar weight of my gun. Then, I moved my other hand. I rested it gently over her belly, over the place where my child was growing.
The duality of it—the gun and the life—was the sum of my existence.
As I felt the slight, rhythmic rise and fall of Mila’s stomach beneath my palm, the coldness in my soul solidified into something much more dangerous than anger. It became a vow. I would not lose her. And I would not lose this child.
Whoever came for her, whoever threatened what was mine, would find a monster who had finally found something worth the darkness. They would die—no two ways about it.