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Rage crackles across Mikhail’s face again. Lurching forward, he tries to grab her arm and yank her hand out of mine. I’m just about to shove him away when Alina raises her other hand, stopping him.
“Yes, I am serious,” she says, locking hard eyes on the twins. Then she shifts her gaze to her brothers. “Kaden and I are dating.”
Disbelief and anger pulse across Mikhail’s face as he yanks up his arm and stabs a hand at me while staring at Alina. “He’s a Hunter!”
“I know.”
With that fury still flashing in his eyes, he switches to Russian and starts speaking quickly and angrily.
Alina draws her eyebrows down, her scowl deepening with each sentence.
“Is that really what you think of me?” she replies in English. “That I’m so fucking clueless and naïve that I would let someone play me that blatantly?”
“He’s using you!” Mikhail all but screams while stabbing his hand in my direction again. “Can’t you see that?”
Slipping my hand out of Alina’s, I take a step forward, putting myself between the two of them.
“Be very careful with the tone you use when you speak to her,” I warn, my voice dropping low and deadly. “If you don’t stop screaming in her face and insulting her intelligence, I’m going to grab that bottle and finish what I started.”
He jerks back a little, looking startled.
Then he clears his throat awkwardly and takes a step back, as if just now realizing that he was in fact screaming in his sister’s face.
After raking his fingers through his hair to push the blond strands out of his face, he turns towards me and pins me with a hostile stare. “I want you out of my fucking house. Right now. I won’t let you use her.”
“You think I’m using her?” I let out a humorless laugh. “How about this, then? A show of good faith.”
The twins scramble out of the way as I stride over to the edge of the kitchen island. Positioning themselves on Anton’s other side, they frown at me as I reach a hand underneath the edge. Mikhail moves around me so that he can see what I’m doing as well.
Shock pulses across all of their faces as I pull off the small black listening device that I stuck there the last time I was in this kitchen.
“Here,” I say, tossing it to Mikhail. “Show of good faith.”
“You bugged our house?” he growls, catching the device and glaring between it and me.
“That’s how you always knew when we were coming,” Anton blurts out.
“Yeah.” I shrug. “But now that’s gone.”
Mikhail narrows his eyes at me. “I still won’t let you touch her.”
“It’s not up to you,” Alina snaps.
We all turn back to face her.
She’s standing with her spine straight and her hands on her hips, staring us all down with hard eyes.
“It is not your call,” Alina says, enunciating every word. “It’s mine.”
“But you—” Anton tries to protest, his worried gray eyes flicking between her and me.
“My life. My decision,” she interrupts. Determination burns in her eyes as she sweeps that hard stare over all four of her family members. “You do not get to decide who I can and can’t date. I decide that. And I choose him.”
Emotions pulse through my chest at the possessiveness in her voice, and I suddenly feel like my heart is going to burst.
Anton’s gaze softens, but the twins glance towards Mikhail to check how they should react. The eldest Petrov holds Alina’s determined stare for another few seconds before blowing out a long breath and turning to me.
“Then what does this mean for us?” he asks.
