Page 51 of Arranged for the Russian Pakhan

“You’re a goddamn coward.”

“Darya.”

“You are. You are a coward. You’re not worthy of leading anyone or anything. You have no heart and no spine. You can’t fuck me without being goaded into it, so of course it shocks you that you managed to knock me up. You’re—”

“Stop it.”

I won’t. I’ve never wanted to hurt someone more.

“You’ve asked me before why I think Viktor did what he did. I think this is why. Because you aren’t worthy of respect. You are not worth following. You’re a failure as a Pakhan. Even worse, you’re a failure as a man.” The stones I cast, pelting him, one after another, bring vindication. It’s close enough to relief to see him flinch. He should. “Don’t bother worrying about what I want to do about it. I’m ashamed enough to have let you breed me with your spawn to get rid of—”

“Get out.”

There is no anger in the words. He sounds as calm as I had, breaking the news to him. The door behind his eyes is closed. There’s nothing there. I can see it. I look into his eyes, and all that awaits me is an abyss.

“You don’t want to watch me abort your baby and free you?” I snarl.

He looks at me. No. He looks through me. “If you can’t calm down and behave like a person, I would like you to please go. Calm down. We will discuss this later.”

It. This.

It’s too soon to tell, but I think it’s a boy.

I don’t say the words to him. There’s no point. He’s already turned away, unwilling as ever to reach back out. To clasp my hand. To do something—say something. Give me something solid to hold between my hands. He doesn’t. He won’t. Maybe he can’t.

What else is there to do?

I do leave.

I walk out, knowing he won’t turn around to watch me leave, and carry the shards of my heart down the hall. I don’t bother going to the bedroom first. My phone is in my pocket. The keys are with the guards in the garage.

For as much as it feels like an eternity, I doubt it takes me longer than five minutes before I’m in my car. But I have to sit there and wait. I have to wait behind the wheel for my vision to clear, for the tears streaming down my needling cheeks to relent so that I can drive.

Time doesn’t matter. I know where I’m going: the place I can always, always go home to. Home. The Yuri estate, where home and family mean love and warmth—not the cold, dark cockles of a cruel man’s heart; a heart that I’d begun to mistake for a safe place to land.

A mistake I’ll never let this baby make.

Chapter 18 - Anton

It never fails to confound me how the world can keep spinning madly on after it’s already ended for me. I haven’t died—but parts of me have. They’ve been killed, buried, and even mourned in some cases. It’s almost funny, the way I’m always left sitting here, in this fucking chair, staring at the clock tick-tick-ticking the seconds, minutes, hours passing me by. That’s the thing about the sands of time: they are too fine not to slip through your fingers once you’ve smashed the hourglass.

Shattered glass glitters all over the rug.

I’ve thought about calling on someone to clean it up. I’ve considered cleaning it up myself. It’s a hazard out in the open. It’s evidence of bedlam, of pain turned outward. Darya’s pain. In my mind, I kneel on the ground and drag my palms across the debris, letting it pierce my flesh and punish me in a thousand cuts. An act of penance, since I can’t offer her anything better.

Because I can’t do this again, I can’t. I fucking can’t.

It doesn’t fucking matter how much I’ve researched—just like it didn’t that night twelve years ago—there are no guarantees. To create a life is no easy task. It costs a person, sometimes their life. Who knows that better than I do? She’s been pregnant for almost two months now. She was pregnant when I poured her the drink on the plane back to Boston. Hell, she’d been drunk off her ass when I’d fucked her in New York.

The numbers on the clock blur.

Somewhere, buried beneath this avalanche, is the awareness that we’re in the middle of a fucking crisis. There’s a mole coming after us all. An ‘us’ that now includes a fucking baby. In the wake of this news, it isn’t as if the suspicious gap in shipment records this morning ceases to exist. Whoever is selling our information is still out there, patient and evasive, watching this alliance buckle beneath its own weight. Watching me buckle.

How long before they know about the baby, too?

Till this baby is something else to target.

My gaze drops down to the desk, to hands that shake in useless fists in front of me. Hands that can kill but have never been able to save. I want to wrap them around my own throat and wring the life out of myself. Even for this, I can’t seem to move. It’s a cruel fucking paradox—a body that won’t move, and a mind that won’t still.