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"On it," Freddie replied, knowing better than to ask me what was actually going on right now. He’d seen me through enough heavy shit to think it was a smart idea to get to the bottom of it, without ruining his own night in the process.
And if he’d known the truth – that I had just discovered I was almost certainly a father, and by one of the women who worked at the Flood – I knew it was going to turn into the gossip of the whole town. And I had to work out what I was going to do about it before I let anyone else in on the secret.
Chapter Four – Jo
Fuck! Fuck, fuck, fuck...
It was the only thing I could think as I rushed away from the bar. The moment my shift had finished, I had made a break for it, not wanting to stick around and potentially run into that Avda guy again.
No, not that Avda guy. The man who was the father of my child. The man who had gotten me pregnant, on that fateful night, the night of my twenty-first birthday. I still couldn’t quite wrap my head around it...
I had accepted, a long time ago, that I was never going to see him again. Accepted that I was doing this on my own. Hell, I had been okay with that! I really had! I had been fine with the thought of doing this on my own, it was not something I wanted to change...
And yet, there he was in front of me, flirting with me, coming on to me like nothing as serious as that had happened between us. And why would he think, even for a second, that it had? As far as he knew, we’d just had sex all those years ago, and then, we’d both gotten on with our lives. He didn’t have a clue that the encounter we’d shared had ended with a child, a baby that had changed my life. I didn’t know what to do. What to say.
I should have just lied to him, told him I had no idea who he was, and pretended like the two of us had never met. That would have been the smart way to go about it, right? Not instantly blurting out all the pieces for him to put together like that. I had seen the way his face had dropped, the shock of it written all over his face.
I still couldn’t believe I had come out and said it. Told him about how old she was, my precious little Kyra – it felt so weird, knowing that he knew about her, even vaguely, even distantly. He must have been in full-blown panic mode by now, and no doubt he would want answers when he finally got to see me again.
But what answers did I have to give him? What did I have to say to him, really, after all of that? That yes, I was going to turn around and let him be part of my girl’s life? When she’d grown up without a father figure, and she had been totally fine with it? I mean, maybe not totally fine – she'd dealt with some questions from the other kids at school, but for the most part, nobody bothered her about what was going on there.
And now, I knew what kind of guy he was. What he was involved with. I knew all the men who worked for the Antonovs, save from maybe Freddie, who was just a bartender, were Bratva. The kind of Bratva who dealt with their shit on the streets, the kind of men who did everything they could to control this city and keep it in the iron grasp of the men who paid my bills. Of everything I had idly imagined about him over the years, that had to be at the very bottom of the list...I couldn’t wrap my head around it, every part of me too shocked to make sense of it.
I arrived back at the apartment building and unlocked the door quietly, sneaking up the stairs and then letting myself in to the apartment – Nala was asleep on the couch, and I tiptoed past her to Kyra’s room.
Leaning in the doorway, I stared down at my daughter for a long moment. Here she was, the reason I was doing all of this. I came back to her room after every shift, and just looked at her – stared down at her, and reminded myself what this was all for. Why it was all worth it. Why I did it all...
And, now I looked at her, I could see some flashes of Adva in her. Those pale blue eyes of his – she'd had them when she was born, and everyone had told me that she would grow out of them and they would dim over the following years, but they never had. No, she’d always had the most striking eyes, and, of course, I had played dumb when people had asked me if they’d come from her father. Now, of course, I could see that they had, but knowing that she carried a part of him so close to her, a part of him right there in her eyes...God, it was a headfuck.
I slid down in bed next to her, though it was far too small to fit both of us and wrapped my arms around her. She nestled back against me, just like she used to do when she was tiny. She still seemed so small to me, so vulnerable; something like this, like the man I had just encountered tonight, could turn her whole little world upside down.
Did she wonder about her father? If she did, she never said anything about it to me, and I was grateful for that. But felt a little guilty about it too. Did she deserve to know him, no matter how I felt about him?
If he even wanted anything to do with her, that was. And, judging by the way he’d been flirting with me tonight, I got the feeling that he was very much into his life as a bachelor. No way would someone like him want a family, not in any meaningful way...
Or maybe that’s just what I had to tell myself about him because I needed an excuse not to let him into our lives. It was easier for me to just pretend that I was doing him a favor, not including him in any of this, even though I knew damn well I didn’t have any business making that call for him. He might have been the sweetest family man in the world...
Or I might have been downright delusional for even thinking that. Yes, the Bratva were into their family, but not when it came to the kind of family that I was talking about. They didn’t play at the sweet, loving parents - they groomed their younger generations into being ready to take over the family business, someone who was going to step up and pick up where they had left off when all was said and done.
God, my head was a mess right now. I closed my eyes and squeezed Kyra a little closer to me, silently letting her know that I would do everything I could to make the right call for her.
On top of it all, too, I had to admit that I was still attracted to him. Of course I was. He was...he was handsome, he was charming, he still had that magnetic energy that had drawn me into him that first night.
And, if I was being honest, I hadn’t been with anyone since him. Not in the entire six years and change since I had hooked up with him in that club bathroom. Granted, my social life had pretty much gone to shit since, given that all of my friends had drifted away from me when I got pregnant. I’d resented them for a long time, but these days, I got it – I was living a life so different to them, and they didn’t know how to handle this new life I was going through. They were still out partying with their friends, and I was figuring out how to build a crib without sticking a nail through my thumb.
But, yeah, my dating life had pretty much vanished when I had gotten pregnant. Between trying to make enough money to support my daughter and dealing with being cut off from my own parents, I just didn’t have time to think about getting myself out there.
Which meant the last sexual encounter I’d had, had been with Avda. It was strange, knowing his name now – I had wondered what he was called a million times over the last few years, and now I knew, I couldn’t stop rolling it around my head, testing how it sounded. Avda. Avda. Avda.
It seemed to suit him. Strong. Masculine. I could still remember how his hands had felt against my body, how much I had wanted him, how badly I had felt like I needed him...
Crap. I rolled out of bed, leaving Kyra to sleep, and headed through to the bathroom to take a shower. I needed to wash this day off of me. Not just the shift, though that was a part of it – no, I needed to leave all of this behind me, the memory of meeting him.
What was I going to do when I saw him again? Was he going to want to speak to me, or was he going to avoid me at all costs? I was ready for both possibilities. Well, at least, I thought so...
I turned on the water in the shower, undressed, and stepped in. I just needed to get some rest. When I had gotten some sleep, I would feel better about all of this – I would feel calmer once I had a good night’s rest behind me.
I needed to get my shit together, that was for sure. I mean, I worked in the same place he did now, and I couldn’t let myself get distracted from work. This was about the best-paid job I was going to find anything soon, and I refused, stone-cold, to mess it up because of a guy.
