Page 38 of The Bratva’s Stalked Pregnant Bride

“It’s so nice to have a sister after growing up with three brothers.”

“Ha, try growing up with six,” Mila said.

“Or five uncles and a dad they’re all scared of. I couldn’t get away with anything,” Nat complained good-naturedly.

“So you’re Aleks’s daughter? Which makes you Mila’s aunt?” I asked, piecing together the family tree.

“Yes, but only a year apart, so we’re basically sisters,” Nat said. “Mila was a surprise.”

They made it impossible to feel nervous around them, and pretty soon we were all laughing like we’d known each other for years instead of only meeting once before. It hit me like a ton of bricks that they truly accepted me as family, trying to work me up against Mik for not giving me a real wedding.

“I don’t mind,” I said, swallowing hard before laying it on thick. “We just wanted to dive in and start our life together.”

“We mind,” Nat said. “There’s nothing like terrorizing a bunch of florists and bakers and designers. We can set you up in no time.”

“We don’t terrorize. We incentivize,” Mila corrected. “And we really just love big family weddings.”

“Maybe we could actually get Ilia and Oleg over here if Mik had a proper wedding,” Sofiya said, looking anxious for a moment.

The three of them filled me in on Mik’s wild twin brothers, and Mila and Nat tried to keep Sofiya from worrying about them, begging her not to run back to Italy to try to get them to settle down. “Look at your father,” Mila said. “He sure settled down.”

I was glad when the bill came, and the subject changed to shopping, not eager to talk about Mik’s father. Guilt had begun to gnaw at me, growing stronger as they insisted on picking out a new espresso machine for me, filling their own carts with kitchen gadgets and specialty appliances I never knew existed.

They accepted me so readily, along with Mik’s cover story, and the more I got to know them, the more I hated perpetuating the lie. It seemed so innocent and even good when I thought I was saving Mik from a life with someone he’d never love. Now his cousins and sister were all in on taking me under their wings, treating me like one of their own. And I’d been worried about my own broken heart if I let myself truly fall for Mik.

How was this going to end without causing any damage?

It had to eventually end, didn’t it?

Chapter 22 - Mikhail

For a few minutes, I cursed my sister and cousins, because a distinct twinkle had started to spark in Laurel’s eyes as she tried to get me to realize how much money I wasted by taking the damn rabbit dishes off the old menu.

Maybe she was right, maybe I didn’t care about the wine she was so passionate about not going to waste. Maybe I just wanted to feel her mouth on mine. It had been too damn long. One, she was definitely working hard to keep things at a distance between us, still believing this was an arrangement that was going to end one day.

Not if I could help it.

Two, we hadn’t had much time alone together in the past month. The restaurant was coming along nicely despite what everyone who ran around like chickens with their heads cut off thought about my changes. But things were getting worse with my family’s situation.

Ultimately, I was glad that Laurel was going out for a while, because now I could slip out to the meeting with my cousins without her knowing anything about it. Dodging her curiosity about why I was out so much at night was already rough. Now I didn’t have to deal with her wondering why I was leaving the restaurant for no good reason during the day.

No good reason that I could give her. Lying to her caused me physical pain, yet another phenomenon that had never happened to me before. It wasn’t like I thrived on being deceitful, but it was necessary in the Bratva, so it wasn’t as if I wasn’t good at it when I needed to be.

I didn’t want there to be any more untruths between us than there already were, so ignoring her curiosity altogether was the best I could come up with. It infuriated her, which infuriated me, because I hated seeing her upset. And because she was so damn sexy when she was mad, but she was holding me at arm’s length.

I headed out to the meeting place, a bar downtown that nobody would dare mess with. It was an open secret that it belonged to the Fokins, but it had been run by neighborhood locals for two generations, back when Aleks’s father first came to the US to start the legacy we were all fighting for today.

The people in the area were fiercely loyal, many of them working for my cousins, and glad that their neighborhood was under their protection. I parked behind the Irish pub, and my mouth was already watering for a good lager. Gavril pulled up at the same time I did, looking serious.

“Thanks for coming,” he said, clapping me on the back as we walked in. Not for the first time, I marveled that someone who would have happily killed any one of us at one time was now fighting on our side.

“Wouldn’t miss it,” I said.

We pushed our way through the heavy door and entered the dark back area of the bar, making our way down some stairs to a meeting room which could have doubled as a bomb shelter. It was so fortified against earthquakes as well as human-made disasters.

My brother sank into the chair beside me, trying to grin as he rested his elbows on the table in front of us. Luk had dark circles under his eyes and fresh scrapes on his knuckles. He was currently hanging out in LA to help out and hadn’t decided definitively if he was going to make this his new home. With no new projects to work on, he was still staying with our cousin and throwing his energy full-time into helping out.

“No sleep last night?” I asked, smiling as a server from upstairs brought in a tray laden down with mugs of beer.