Page 57 of Arranged for the Russian Pakhan

Needless to say, when my uncle appears in my doorway later that week, I’m neither surprised nor in the fucking mood. I’d tell him as much if he bothered to knock. But he doesn’t do that.

That’s not how he operates.

I’ve known it all my life. I’ve appreciated it most of my life because a man whose strategies I understand is the man I’ve found it easy to rely on.

I look up from the correspondence I have been staring at for twenty minutes without reading a word of it.

I’m remotely intrigued by the fact that he looks tired. Still better than I look, but not by too vast a margin. His stick precedes his entry into the room. He takes the chair across from me without being invited to, which is also how he operates, and folds both hands over the carved handle of his stick and looks at me the way he’s been looking at me since I was a boy who’d done something he considered beneath me.

“You look like hell,” he says.

“Good morning, Uncle.”

He ignores the greeting. “You just let her go off? Knowing the things she surely knows about our business?”

“It was those dastardly wiles,” I say wryly.

“Mm.” He rolls the sound around in his mouth like he’s tasting it. He is not impressed. That’s fine; I’m not really laughing either. “Word is spreading, Anton,” he says.

“Word of what?”

“Word that says the new Zakharov bride has gone back to the Yuri estate, and nobody’s gone to collect her. That the alliance is over and done with.” He raises an eyebrow. “Is it? Will your men be left to wonder whether the alliance their Pakhan staked his reputation on isn’t as ironclad as advertised?”

I struggle to keep my voice even and my language anything but foul. “She’s visiting her family. That’s all anyone needs to know.”

“And yet.” Boris tilts his head. “There are men, Anton, men whose names you know, who have been watching this alliance with skepticism since the beginning. Men who would very much like to see it fracture. And a wife who has left after less than two months of marriage is a fracture they’ll press on.” He pauses. “There are also questions from Moscow.”

There it is. I’d been waiting for it.

“My father can show up and ask his questions. He can afford the plane fare, surely.”

“He is asking them through me,” Boris says, with the particular patience of a man who knows the weight of what he’s holding and is choosing his moment to set it down. “Sergei wants to know if the union is stable. He wants to know if the investment is sound. He has never been enthusiastic about this arrangement, as you know. He would like, as he’s put it, a reassessment.”

“A reassessment,” I repeat.

“Of the alliance. Of the terms. There may be a cleaner arrangement to be made with the Yuris, if—”

“Would he say the same if he knew there was to be an heir?” I cock a brow.

The words come out before I’ve decided to say them.

Boris says nothing for long enough that I feel every second of it. “That changes things,” he sighs. “But not the part where that woman needs to be back in her place. Which is here, beneath your watch.”

My watch. As if she’s a criminal, and I’m her warden. I feel sick. I feel sicker than I’ve felt in four days of sitting in this office, grappling with Darya’s absence and her words and my own unforgivable face staring back at me from every reflective surface.

I said ‘heir’, because that is the language my uncle will understand. But it’s a baby. And it’s a baby, whether I deserve it or not, am guaranteed it or not, is one I want more than I’ve wanted anything. And I want it with her.

The truth pummels me with the force of something I’ve been refusing to look at directly, like staring directly into the sun. I want our baby. The wanting is so immediate, so unqualified, so entirely separate from every fear that’s been colonizing my chest since she said the words—it nearly knocks me sideways.

I want this baby, and I want it with her, and those two facts sitting together in my chest are the most terrifying thing I’ve experienced since the last time someone told me Anfisa—the child Irina and I would’ve had, the daughter who came too soon, who Irina died for—hadn’t survived the night without her mother.

“No,” I say. My voice doesn’t waver.

Uncle’s eyes burrow into me. His voice carries a warning. “Anton.”

“No,” I say again, and the repetition is less for him than for me. To hear it. To know it’s the word I’m choosing, clearly and without caveat.

My uncle leans forward, the stick shifting in his grip. “I want you to hear me. I say this not as a man with an agenda. I say this as a man who has watched you hold this organization together through circumstances that would have broken a lesser leader. The mole is still unidentified. The alliance is visibly strained. Sergei is asking questions, and your father’s questions don’t stay questions for long, as we both know. This is the moment, if there is one, to step back from the ledge.”