Chapter 11
Maeve
It had been just days since Artem and Ivan left, and I stood in the doorway of the Highland Bean with my son tucked against my chest, watching Lena work the espresso machine like she'd been doing it for years instead of the short time I'd trained her.
Mac was a warm, compact weight in the sling.
He had a frankly offensive amount of dark hair, a mouth built for fury, and the expression of a man who'd been handed substandard paperwork and was not about to let it slide.
When he slept, he curled one fist under his chin like he was already preparing closing arguments.
I loved him with an intensity that made my ribs feel two sizes too small.
The café looked the same. That was the part that got me. Mismatched chairs. The chalkboard sign that leaned left no matter how many times I shoved a folded napkin under the leg. The second-hand books that smelled of paper.
But the pastry case was full. The counter gleamed. The morning rush had fogged the windows. And taped to the till was a handwritten sign:
NEW MANAGEMENT. BE NICE OR GET DECAF.
I hadn't written it. I was stupidly proud anyway.
"You're doing the right thing," Lena said without turning round. The steam wand hissed. "You can't stay here. Not with the baby. Not with—" She stopped.
She didn't say the Russian mafia.
That was kind of her. Also pointless. Gregor was twelve feet away and could probably hear my capillaries bouncing against my skin. Just like they had when I told Lena we were flying out of the city today.
I looked toward the window. The black SUV sat at the curb like a bruise on an otherwise unremarkable Edinburgh street, wedged between a Fiat with one wing mirror and a Volvo plastered in parking tickets.
Gregor stood beside it, doing his granite impression.
His eyes tracked the pavement, the upper windows, the bus stop, the woman with the tartan shopping trolley, the student cyclist who veered into traffic with the survival instincts of a pudding.
Threats that didn't exist. Or threats that did, and I was too tired to clock them.
"I know," I said.
I'd agreed to move to Surrey because when I looked at Mac, the math was simple. I couldn't be the woman hiding above a coffee shop anymore. Safety looked like Russian alphas with unlimited bank accounts and very long memories, and apparently I was the sort of mother now who chose safety over pride.
Still. Leaving hurt.
I'd scrubbed these floors while pregnant and nauseous.
Argued with suppliers. Memorized the orders of pensioners who came in every Tuesday and complained about the same things in the same sequence.
I once cried into a sack of coffee beans because the boiler packed up and I had thirty-eight pounds in the business account and the repair quote was four hundred.
This place hadn't saved me. I saved myself here. There was a difference.
Mac made a snuffling sound against my chest.
"I know," I told him. "Very emotional. We'll make it quick."
Lena came round the counter and hugged me with the awkward, hovering reverence people reserve for newborns and unexploded bombs.
"You'll be brilliant," she said.
"I'm already brilliant. I'm just tired."
“Come on.” She laughed, but her eyes were wet. Mine were too, so I looked down and pretended to inspect Mac's hat. Mainly because it was, miraculously, still on.
We walked to the door of the cafe.
Fergus barked from somewhere outside. He was near Gregor's ankles, as usual he was impatient and full of self-importance in his travel harness. He'd appointed himself Gregor's partner sometime during the birth and hadn't resigned from the position.
"You'll look after her?" Lena called to Gregor.
Gregor's face didn't move. "With my life."
Lena blinked.
"He means yes," I said. "He's like that."
The jet was a flying living room with wings and a pilot who looked at Gregor as if he'd rather crash into the North Sea than disappoint him. Cream leather. Carpets thick enough to lose a shoe in. A bathroom bigger than my old flat's kitchen.
Gregor handled everything. He knew where the nappies were.
Which bag had the spare clothes. The cabin temperature, the flight time, whether the bassinet straps met infant safety standards.
He'd even produced tiny noise-cancelling headphones, which he fitted over Mac's ears before takeoff with the concentration of a bomb disposal expert.
Mac looked like a miniature astronaut. He didn't wake when the wheels left the ground.
The real surprise was Fergus.
My high-strung, deeply suspicious Yorkshire terrier had not left Gregor's side since the birth. At cruising altitude, I watched him trot over to the massive alpha, issue one demanding yip, and hop directly onto Gregor's lap.
Gregor didn't push him off. Didn't even look surprised. Just rested one scarred hand on Fergus's back and started scratching in slow, rhythmic passes. Fergus was snoring inside of thirty seconds.
"You're a dog person," I said.
Gregor gazed out the window. "He provides an adequate early-warning system."
"He doubles his weight when wet."
"He’s brave and persistent."
I smiled for the first time in days. "He thinks he's yours."
"He’s mistaken."
He didn't stop scratching.
"For someone who claims not to like the dog," I said, adjusting the blanket over Mac, "you've let him annex your lap, your coat, and possibly your moral compass."
Gregor looked down at Fergus. Fergus snored. "He’s small."
"That's not an answer."
"Small things require more love."
My throat tightened before I could make a joke. He was looking at Mac when he said it.
I turned toward the window. Scotland unspooled beneath us in gray-green patches, fields and roads blurred by cloud. Down there somewhere was my flat, my café, the bed I'd slept in with one hand on my stomach and the other near my phone.
Now I was flying south in a private jet with my newborn, my dog, and a Russian who spoke if needed and who’d also caught my son in his bare hands and considered a Yorkie part of his security perimeter.
Strange life.
Not bad. Just strange.
We landed two hours later. The door opened and heat hit me, along with a scent.
Champagne. Storm-clouds. Caramel.
I felt them before I saw them. When they were altogether the scent was like it was one perfect note. I smelled Gregor In Edinburgh and loved it, but nothing smelled like my three alphas did when they were together.
My alphas.
Artem and Ivan stood at the bottom of the stairs.
They looked wrecked. Their suits rumpled, eyes shadowed, the raw edge of alpha energy rolling off them in waves.
Ivan was never still unless violence was imminent.
Artem was still often, but this was different.
This was a restraint pulled so tight you could hear it.
Like an elastic band stretched to its limits.
They were looking at Mac like men who'd forgotten water existed and just spotted a lake.
The second my feet touched tarmac, they moved.
Artem reached me first. His hands shook. He pulled me against him and buried his face in my neck and inhaled like he was trying to memorize my lungs.
"Maeve."
His shoulders shuddered. Once. If I hadn't been pressed against him, I'd have missed it.
The future Pakhan of the Petrov Bratva, shaking on a private airstrip because I was alive. Inconvenient, that. Bad for my emotional defenses.
Ivan's hand touched Mac's head with the kind of reverence usually reserved for religious artefacts. He kissed my forehead and then his focus narrowed to the baby.
"Look at him," he breathed. "Look at our boy."
"Careful," I said as he reached.
Ivan froze. Both hands hovering. The man almost certainly had an Interpol notice and he looked genuinely terrified of holding a baby wrong.
"Support his head."
"I know that."
"Your hands are shaking."
"I’m experiencing a medical event."
"It's called feelings."
"Disgusting," Ivan whispered, but his smile cracked open when I placed Mac in his arms.
Mac scrunched his face, released one offended squeak, and settled.
Ivan stopped breathing.
For all his noise, all his jokes, there was now only silence. He looked down at the baby like someone had handed him a live coal and told him it was his now. His thumb hovered above Mac's cheek, not touching, just close enough to feel the warmth.
"He's so small."
"That's generally how they start." Because if I didn't make a joke, I'd cry, and I'd already cried enough in front of these men to qualify for a loyalty programme.
Ivan's mouth twitched. His eyes stayed bright. "I thought I understood. On the phone. A baby. Our baby. Fine." His throat worked. "But he has fingernails."
Artem made a rough sound beside me.
Ivan lifted one of Mac's hands with the care of a man handling a museum piece. "Look at them. They're ridiculous."
"Please don't insult our son's fingernails on the first meeting."
"I'm complimenting them. They're perfect and too small to be legal."
Mac yawned and it was wide, dramatic, and made his whole face collapse into it.
Ivan froze. "Was that normal?"
Gregor, behind me: "Yes."
"How do you know?"
"I read the book."
I turned. "You read a baby book?"
"Several."
Artem reached toward Mac. "May I?"
Ivan looked at him, then at the baby, then back at Artem with sudden, reluctant possessiveness. "In a minute."
The Pakhan blinked.
I laughed so hard my stomach ached.
"Ivan," Artem said.
"I said a minute. You get everything first."
Mac snuffled against Ivan's shirt. Ivan dropped his head at once. "Hello, little storm," he murmured. "I will be very funny and very annoying, and your mother will pretend she does not approve, but she will."
"She's standing right here."
"See?" Ivan told Mac. "Sharp. You'll inherit this and use it against us."
"One can only hope."
His smile wobbled. "What will he call me?"
The question landed softly. Not a joke. A careful little thing offered up with both hands.
I looked at this lethal, ridiculous man who'd been a two-day heat and a memory I'd tried to bury, now holding my son like the whole of him had been rewritten.
"Whatever you earn," I said.
Ivan swallowed. "Then I'll earn Papa Ivan."
I held my hand over my chest. "Ambitious."
"I'm known for exceeding expectations."
"Are you?"
"Please do not damage my credibility in front of my son."
Artem's face did something complicated. Ivan, with visible effort, transferred Mac into Artem's waiting arms.
"Breathe," Gregor said.
"I am breathing."
"Breathe better and deeper."
"Did you two rehearse that?"
"It was effective," Gregor said.
Fergus was at the bottom of the stairs, dancing around Ivan's boots. Ivan scooped him up, holding him at eye level. Fergus immediately licked his nose.
"Yeah, yeah, you too, little monster." Ivan tucked him under one arm. "Family. Don't think we forgot."
The drive to the Surrey estate happened in silence, heavy with things none of them were saying.
Artem's hand never left my thigh. Ivan sat twisted in the front seat so he could watch Mac. Wrought iron gates appeared after forty minutes, massive, flanked by stone pillars and armed guards who didn't pretend their weapons were decorative.
The driveway unspooled through ancient trees. Cameras tracked us from black domes. Men in dark coats stood at intervals, pretending to be grounds staff and failing because gardeners rarely wore shoulder holsters.
The house emerged slowly, the way you can’t take in a mountain all at once.
Honey-colored stone. Dozens of windows. Chimneys against a washed-out sky. Ivy climbing one side in a way that probably cost more to maintain than my café made in a year. The front steps were wide enough for a wedding or an execution, depending on family mood.
This was the Petrov compound. Generational wealth with a weapons budget. My new home.
It was beautiful. That was the worst part.
I wanted to hate it. I wanted the grand windows and armed men to feel like a cage. But the grounds were green and quiet. The air smelled of cut grass, old stone, and roses warming in the sun. Somewhere a fountain splashed. Birds called from the trees like nothing terrible had ever happened here.
It looked like the sort of place a woman could heal if she forgot to be afraid.
As the SUV stopped, Artem's phone buzzed. He glanced at the screen and something differed in his face. The father receded, the Pakhan surfaced.
He didn't get out. He stayed in the shadow of the backseat and hit a button.
"Killian." His voice dropped. "The flight just landed. We're at the Surrey estate."
Pause.
"Good. Bring the shipment tonight. No delays." Another pause, his jaw tight. "Killian… we need to talk."
He hung up and looked at me. Whatever was behind his eyes, it wasn't small.
Then he reached out and brushed a strand of hair from my forehead with a gentleness that didn't match the call.
"Welcome home," he said.
The front doors opened before anyone knocked. A woman in a dark dress stood flanked by two guards. Behind her, the foyer swept upward in pale stone and dark wood, a chandelier spilling light across a staircase built for dramatic entrances.
Fergus sneezed.
"Same," I whispered.
Ivan stepped out first with Mac against his chest. Gregor lifted Fergus in one hand and my bag in the other. Artem offered me his arm.
I looked at it. Then at the house. Then at the men that were now tethered to me by a scent and a baby.
"If this place has a dungeon," I said, "I'm leaving."
Artem's mouth twitched. "It has a wine cellar."
"That's not as reassuring as you think."
"No dungeon," Gregor said behind me.
I glanced back. "You hesitated."
"There is an old ice room."
"For God's sake."
The woman in the dark dress made a small noise that might have been a cough.
I turned to her. "Please tell me you're the housekeeper and not the person assigned to teach me which fork is for intimidating relatives."
Her mouth trembled. "Mrs. Dale. Housekeeper."
"Lovely. I'm Maeve. This is Mac. The dog is Fergus. If anyone calls me ma'am more than twice in a row, I'm taking to my bed and not coming out."
Mrs. Dale smiled properly. "Understood, Mrs. Petrov."
"Oh, we're not there yet."
Artem's hand settled at my lower back. "We will be."
"Confidence is attractive until it becomes paperwork."
Ivan laughed, low and warm. Even Mrs. Dale glanced down at her clipboard.
It helped. Not enough to make the house less enormous. Enough to make the first step inside mine.
The house swallowed us in polished wood and cut flowers and armed men and a future I was nowhere near ready for.
For now, I had Mac against my chest and Fergus trotting at my heels and three alphas who'd looked at our son like he was the first good thing they'd ever been allowed to keep.