Chapter Twenty
Alexei’s POV
The Italians hit another Lobanov warehouse at three in the afternoon—bold, brazen, and coordinated enough that I knew immediately this wasn’t just retaliation. This was war.
I got the call from Kirill while I was in a meeting with our arms suppliers. The words were clipped, efficient—exactly what I needed.
Warehouse twelve. Under attack. Multiple casualties.
Dimitri drove like the devil was chasing us, weaving through the traffic with the kind of reckless precision that came from fifteen years of running from or toward violence.
Sergei, another one of my men, called in reinforcements.
As I loaded my weapons, I felt something cold and familiar settle over me—the part of myself that existed only for moments like this.
The part Mila feared.
The warehouse was in chaos when we arrived. Smoke billowed from the main building, gunfire crackling like fireworks. Bodies littered the ground—some ours, more theirs. The Italians had come heavily, at least twenty men, but they hadn’t counted on our response time.
Their mistake.
“Flank left,” I ordered, my voice steady despite the rage burning white-hot in my veins. “Kirill, take the east entrance. Dimitri, with me.”
We moved like a machine, like we’d done this a thousand times before. Because we had. The Bratva didn’t survive by being soft or hesitant. We survived by being faster, meaner, and more willing to burn the world down to protect what was ours.
The firefight was brutal and efficient. I put three rounds in the chest of a man trying to flank Kirill. Dimitri took out their gunner with a headshot that painted the warehouse wall red. Sergei’s team cleared the east side with ruthless precision.
Within twenty minutes, it was over.
Fifteen Italian bodies. Four of ours were wounded, two dead. The warehouse was a loss, but the inventory had already been moved—we’d learned long ago not to keep anything valuable in obvious locations.
I was checking the perimeter, making sure no one had escaped, when I saw him.
A body slumped against the far wall, blood pooling beneath him. But something was off. His clothes were wrong—not the expensive suits the Italians preferred, but street clothes. Working class. And his features, even slack with death, were distinctly Slavic.
Russian.
“Boss,” Dimitri called. “You need to see this.”
I crossed to where he stood over the body, and my blood turned to ice.
The dead man was Russian. Mid-thirties, maybe, with the kind of hard features that spoke of a difficult life. And clutched in his hand, now stained with his own blood, was a piece of paper.
I pulled it free carefully. Cyrillic script. Neat handwriting I didn’t recognize.
The letter was addressed to Mila.
The world seemed to tilt sideways. Her father’s fingerprints were everywhere.
“Alexei?” Konstantin’s voice sounded distant.
I could barely breathe past the rage and betrayal flooding my system. She’d lied to me. Not just once, but repeatedly.
And now a man was dead. My warehouse was destroyed. My people were bleeding.
Because of her father. Because of her secrets.
“Get everyone back to the mansion,” I said quietly. Too quietly. Dimitri knew me well enough to recognize the danger in that tone. “Lock down security. No one in or out without my approval.”
“What about the body?”
“Burn it. Burn everything.” I folded the letter carefully, precisely, and tucked it into my jacket.
The drive back to the mansion took forever and no time at all. I sat in the back of the car, staring at the blood on my hands—some mine from a graze I hadn’t noticed, most from the men I’d killed—and tried to understand.
She’d been lying to me. My wife. The woman I’d claimed, protected, and obsessed over. The woman who’d somehow carved herself a space in my chest and made a home there.
She’d been lying.
**********
She was waiting in the foyer when I walked in.
I saw her before she saw me—standing near the stairs, worrying her bottom lip between her teeth, that nervous tell she had when she was afraid.
She wore one of my shirts again, too big, drowning her frame.
Her hair was pulled back messily, and even from across the room, I could see the shadows under her eyes.
She looked small. Fragile. Terrified.
Then she saw me, and her face transformed with relief so genuine it made something crack in my chest.
“Alexei!” She ran toward me, and instinct made me catch her even as rage screamed at me to push her away. “Oh God, I heard about the warehouse—are you hurt? Is everyone—”
I cupped her face with my blood-stained hands and kissed her, cutting off her words. For one heartbeat, I let myself forget everything. I let myself breathe her in and feel the warmth of her against me, alive and whole.
And mine.
Then I remembered the letter. The body. The Russian intermediary who’d died carrying a message to my wife from her supposedly dead father. The rage came roaring back.
I stepped back, and her eyes widened with confusion, then fear as she saw my expression.
“Alexei? What—”
“When were you going to tell me?” My voice came out low, deadly calm. The kind of calm that preceded violence.
She went pale. “Tell you what?”
“Don’t.” I pulled the letter from my jacket and held it up. Her face drained of all color. “Don’t lie to me again, Mila. Not now. Not about this.”
“Where did you—” Her voice broke. “How did you—”
“We pulled it off a body at the warehouse.” I watched her flinch, watched guilt and fear war across her features. “A Russian body. One of your father’s men, apparently. He died delivering this to you.”
“No.” The word came out as a whisper. “No, I didn’t—I never asked him to…””
“But you knew.” I stepped toward her, and she stepped back. Good. She should be afraid. “You knew he was alive. You knew he was contacting you. How many letters, Mila? How many times has he reached out?”
Her hands were shaking now, tears streaming down her face. “Twice. Just twice, I swear—”
“And you told me ‘nothing!’” The words came out as a roar.
The sound echoed through the foyer, and I saw guards scatter, giving us privacy.
“You looked me in the eyes and lied while I was trying to keep you safe, while people were dying, while your father was apparently coordinating with the fucking Italians—”
“He’s not!” She screamed back, her own voice breaking. “He’s trying to protect me from them, he said—”
“He said? You believe him?” I laughed, harsh and bitter. “He’s a dead man who faked his death and abandoned you. And now he’s crawled out of whatever hole he’s been hiding in, and you just—what? Trust him? Choose him over the family trying to keep you alive?”
“He’s my father!”
“He’s a liability!” I grabbed her shoulders, not hard enough to hurt but firm enough that she couldn’t escape. “Don’t you understand? Every connection to him makes you a target. Makes everyone in this house a target. And you hid it from me.”
“Because I knew you’d kill him!” She was sobbing now, her whole body shaking. “I knew you’d hunt him down and—”
“And I will,” I said flatly, with absolute certainty. “The moment I find him, I will put a bullet between his eyes. And you need to decide right now, Mila—are you going to stand in my way?”
She stared at me like I’d struck her. “Are you fucking insane? How can you ask me that?”
“How could you keep fucking lying to me?” I shot back.
“I’m pregnant with your child.” The words exploded out of her as she sobbed. “And I’m still terrified of you.”
Silence.
I stepped back like she’d just shot me. But even then, with my chest cracked open, my possessiveness didn’t falter.
“Then I’ll make you terrified of losing me instead,” I said quietly.
She looked up, confusion flickering through the tears.
“You’re afraid of what I’ll do,” I continued, stepping closer.
This time she didn’t back away. “Afraid of the monster I am, the violence I’m capable of.
Fine. Be afraid. But be equally afraid of a world where I’m not there to protect you.
Where our child grows up without me. Where you’re alone and vulnerable, and every enemy I’ve ever made comes for you. ”
I cupped her face gently, forcing her to meet my eyes.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered against my chest. “I’m so sorry, I didn’t know what to do—”
“I know.” I kissed the top of her head, breathing in the scent of her. “But the lying stops now. Right now. You tell me everything, Mila. Every letter, every contact, every detail. Or I swear to God, I will lock you in this house until the baby comes, and you’ll never see sunlight again.”
She shuddered but nodded. “Okay.”
“Okay.”
I pulled back enough to look at her—really look at her. My wife. The mother of my child. The woman who’d somehow become the center of my entire world despite every instinct screaming that attachment was weakness.
She looked exhausted. Terrified. And still so fucking beautiful it made my chest ache.
“Come on,” I said quietly, taking her hand. “Let’s go upstairs. You need to rest.”
**********
I sat beside her, pulling her into my lap. She went stiff for a moment, then slowly relaxed against me, her head on my shoulder.
“Tell me about the letters,” I said. “Everything.”
So she did.
She told me about the first letter, delivered by mail.
About the second, handed to her by a teenage boy who’d vanished afterward.
About her father’s warnings, his promises, his insistence that she wasn’t safe.
She told me about hiding them, about the guilt and fear that had eaten at her, about wanting to tell me but being too afraid of what I’d do.
I listened without interrupting, my hand resting on her stomach where our child grew. Processing. Planning. Calculating.
Her father was either incredibly stupid or incredibly desperate. Maybe both. Reaching out to her like this, using intermediaries, drawing attention—it was the behavior of a man with nothing left to lose.
Which made him even more dangerous.
**********
I didn’t sleep that night.
I couldn’t. Not with my mind racing through possibilities, contingencies, threats. Konstantin and Dimitri worked through the night, pulling surveillance and tracking communications.
Around 4 am, I went back upstairs. Mila was asleep, curled on her side with one hand on her stomach. Protecting those she loved even in sleep.
I stood in the doorway and watched her, this woman who’d become my obsession, my weakness, my reason for everything.
War had arrived—and she stood right at the center of it.
God help whoever dares to come close to her.