Page 68 of Brutal Vows

“Yes. I get it now.” But it will be over my dead body. “What’s her name?”

“Ana. Just Ana. Short for Anastasia, my mom’s name. We call her Annushka.”

I nod. “It’s a beautiful name. Can’t Masha bring her here? They’ll be safe here.”

That’s what I’d like to think, but today proved us all wrong. Still, I’ll protect her with my life.

“Masha doesn’t travel. She doesn’t even have a valid passport anymore. Luca. There’s more, you don’t understand.”

“You’re damn right I don’t understand.” It feels as if I’ve stepped into a maze of catacombs, skeletons everywhere, and I can’t get out.

“They’re on to us. And they’ve taken Varya.”

“Varya?”

“She’s a friend, and the midwife who was at the birth.”

“What do you mean, they’ve taken Varya?”

“The Bratva. They took her, to interrogate her, and she isn’t back yet. I don’t know if she’s going to be back.”

Her voice cracks, and I fist my hands, but my body is already so tense, it hardly shows.

“I’m sitting on a time bomb,” she continues. “I don’t know how long she can hold out and not tell them the truth. That the baby is mine, not Masha’s.”

“Which fucking Bratva?” I bite out, wishing it wasn’t going to be true.

She cups her hands to her mouth and shakes her head. “Chertnikov.”

32

MILANA

“His name keeps on coming up, doesn’t it?” Luca says with a weary sigh. “This Chertnikov.”

I nod. “He is black mold.”

I’ve told him the worst from my perspective. But I haven’t told him the worst from Annushka’s. I’ll have to, because otherwise, there’s no point. He won’t get the urgency or the reason why I’m so desperate. The danger she’s in, and that only at a few months old.

“Is this all of it, princess? Or only the tip of the iceberg?”

“The tip.” The rest is worse. So much worse. “I don’t know where to start.”

“Okay.” He raises his brow slowly, bracing himself. “How about starting with telling me how the photos I scrubbed off the internet for Ivan fit into the picture? Blackmail?”

God, those photos. The biggest red flag on the planet, but I was unaware Dimitri took them. Imagine where we would be today if I’d caught on and seen him for who he was before everything turned into a dumpster fire.

“Yes. Dimitri took them. At the time, I didn’t know about any of his plans, that he was Chertnikov’s puppet. But Ivan and my dad got wind of a coup planned against the Petrov Bratva.” I swallow my pride for falling into Dimitri’s trap, having vowed a million times I will never be so blind and gullible again. “We didn’t know Chertnikov was behind it because he wasn’t on anybody’s radar, not in that way. We knew about him, as you do in Bratva circles, but not like this.” My mind flashes back to those crazy weeks when Ivan insisted I leave. He was grappling with so much, uncertain about everything, and made hasty decisions. “Ivan smuggled me out of his compound and back to Russia because he thought I’d be safer there than here, hiding out with Masha who is the one person who has managed to evade the Bratva for years. He didn’t want me caught in the crossfire here, or worse, be the last Petrov standing.”

“And were you? Safe? You were pregnant. Alone.”

“I wasn’t alone. I had Masha.” She’ll be steadfast, my rock and anchor, until the last breath in her body. “At the time, I wasn’t sure about the baby. I only suspected I could be pregnant after Ivan forced me to leave. Papa had suffered his strokes, and the Petrov Bratva’s position was suddenly very dire. It was a crazy time. Ivan left me no choice, and I had to wait it out in Russia. I never bothered to take a pregnancy test. I never told anybody. And Dimitri…”

I’d realized something was off, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. If only I could tell Ivan, but Dimitri and I were a secret, so I stayed quiet. Ivan would probably have killed him for messing around with me in the first place, being so much older than me.

“You never told him about the baby, did you?”

“Dimitri? No.” I shake my head. Thank God my sixth sense kicked in. “He didn’t even know about Ivan’s plans to get me to Russia. Thank God. I left, and it was a clean break; I never spoke to him again. He didn’t know where I went. It was only once I realized Dimitri messed with my contraception, swapping my pills for fake ones, that his betrayal started to sink in.” I shudder even now as I recall how that reality hit me, but it was only the start. I never thought his greatest betrayal would be as the undercover coup leader. “I felt so stupid to have trusted him, but contraception was his idea in the first place. In fact, he insisted on it. Now I know why.”