Page 47 of A Surprise Baby for the Russian

“Sofie,” I say, and my voice doesn’t sound like mine anymore. “Sofie. Listen to my voice. Where are you?”

“The clinic,” she sobs. “We never made it out of the parking lot.” Then, Sofie says the words that make the entire world stop rotating on its axis. “She’s pregnant, Yakov,” she wails, a broken, hysterical sob ripping through the line. “She found out this morning... that’s why we’re here at the clinic. She’s pregnant, and there’s blood all over the tarmac, and I don’t know whose it is... please... Yakov, please hurry...”

The line goes dead, but the sound in my brain is a hollow roar.

Pregnant. I fucking knew it. Well, hoped as much. A living piece of Raya and me, carried inside her while she is in the hands of fucking monsters. Every remaining molecule of humanity inside me is instantaneously obliterated, replaced by a cold, pressurized rage so absolute it petrifies my muscles.

The brothers are all staring at me, their postures freezing as they read the sudden transformation on my face. Matvei’s hand is already hovering over his holster.

I lower the phone. “Lev’s dead,” I tell them, the words dropping like blocks of ice. “They have Raya. Sofie is hurt.”

And then, I am moving. We throw ourselves through the heavy steel doors of the office in a synchronized blur of lethal intent. There is no hesitation, no debate. Matvei is already barking commands into his phone, his voice roaring as he assembles the cleanup crews to clear our path, and whatever mess we’re about to walk into. Weapons are drawn, checked, and chambered in a series of harsh, mechanical metallic clicks as we race down the concrete stairs.

Two armored SUVs screech out of the warehouse bay, tearing into the winter gray of the city streets. We hit the clinic parking lot in exactly eight minutes.

It is a total shit show. The silver Volkov SUV is idling, the glass on the driver’s side shattered into a spiderweb of frosted crystals. Behind the wheel, our driver is slumped lifelessly over the steering wheel, the horn blaring. Down by the entrance gates, the windshield of our chase vehicle is peppered with precision bullet holes. Two more of our men are dead inside, slumped over their consoles. Four elite Volkov guards. Wiped out in seconds.

Simon and Matvei curse, the weighty grief of losing their hand-picked soldiers turning their faces into masks of pure rage.

Sofie is kneeling on the cold sidewalk, her hands pressed tightly to her face, dark crimson leaking through the gaps of her fingers. She is shaking violently, huddled right beside Lev’s unmoving body. Lev, the veteran who had guarded these girls since they were teenagers, whose hand I had shaken only hours earlier, is lying flat on his back, his vacant eyes staring up at the winter sky, his throat painted in a thick, cooling collar of red. Dead, trying to protect my wife.

Blood is everywhere, a wide, smeared river of it. My eyes track the stains, calculating the volume, the trajectory, the spray patterns. The blood on the tarmac is not all hers. The volume belongs to Lev, to the driver, to the brutal punch that cracked Sofie’s face, and to the frantic, vicious struggle Raya undoubtedly put up before they overwhelmed her. Raya is not bleeding out. She is alive. I hold that fact very deliberately in the front of my mind, locking it down so the rage doesn’t blind me.

Matvei’s cleanup crews arrive in a screech of tires, three black vans cutting off the street visibility. A paid-off precinct captain has already rerouted the local police dispatch, buying us a fifteen-minute window before any authority dares to look at this block. Simon instantly crouches next to Sofie, his hands gentle as he wraps an arm around her shaking shoulders, lifting her to get her out of the blood before the street is scrubbed clean.

I stand and walk over to where Matvei and Simon are deep in conversation, pulling my secondary piece from my waistband, fingers steady as I screw the long, heavy cylinder of the silencer onto the threads of the barrel. It is a motion I have performed thousands of times in the dark, and I do it now with the absolute focus of a machine. I holster it inside my jacket. I check my primary Glock. I check the weight of the blade hidden against my forearm.

I pull out my phone and dial a number I haven’t used in three years. A shadow contact buried deep within my father’s old inner circle. The line connects. I don’t give him a chance to speak. “Where did he take her?” I ask.

The man on the other end hesitates for one second. He knows who I am, and what I’m capable of. He listens to the dead silence on my end of the line, and the sheer terror of what he knows I will do to his family if he lies to me breaks him instantly. He rattles off an address.

I know every single black-site property my father has ever purchased, leased, or stolen in this state. The address is exactly what I expected. A rotting, industrial sector in the worst part of the city—a grid of lawless, forgotten streets where gunshots don’t even bring people to their windows because survival means pretending you are blind. My father chose it because it is invisible to the world. It will suit me perfectly for the same reason.

I turn to the Volkov brothers. Matvei looks at me, and for the first time since I met him, the hardened Bratva boss looks genuinely unsettled by what he sees staring back at him from beneath my brow. I have gone dark. The skin-stitcher has taken the wheel.

“You sort this out,” I tell them, my voice barely louder than the winter breeze. “I am going to get my wife.”

I turn to leave, but Matvei’s heavy hand slams down flat against my chest, blocking my exit. His brow is furrowed, his jaw locked in a hard, dangerous line.

“The fuck you are,” Matvei barks. “You think you’re walking in there alone? We take both cars, we pull fifty soldiers from the south sector, and we turn whatever block they’re on into a graveyard. We’ve got backup, Mykros. Use it.”

I look down at his hand on my chest, then back up into his eyes. I’m not angry; it’s his sister’s life on the line, but what I’m about to do needs to be a definite and unmistakable message to my father.

“If we roll up with fifty men, guns blazing, they’ll panic and put a bullet in her head before we even cross the perimeter,” I tell him, my voice devoid of inflection. “This isn’t that type of operation, Matvei. This requires a scalpel, not a sledgehammer. They’re expecting a frantic, loud retaliation. They aren’t expecting me, alone.”

Matvei stares at me, searching my face for any sign of hesitation or reckless panic. He’ll find none. He slowly lowers his hand, a grim, reluctant understanding settling over his features.

“Twenty minutes,” Matvei states, his tone dropping into a dark promise. “If we don’t hear from you in twenty minutes, we level the entire zip code.”

“Keep your phone close,” I reply, pulling my hood up over my head. “I’ll drop you a pin when it’s finished.”

I grab the keys to one of the unbranded, blacked-out backup SUVs Matvei’s cleanup crew arrived in. I throw myself behind the wheel and tear out of the parking lot, weaving through the industrial side streets that are only a stone’s throw from the clinic.

Seven minutes later, I pull the vehicle into a shitty alleyway a full road away from the house where they’re holding Raya. I kill the ignition, letting the engine die so no one hears me coming. With a little over ten minutes left on Matvei’s clock, I step out from the shadows and begin walking down that forgotten industrial street. The air is freezing, carrying the scent of damp garbage and rust. I walk with my heavy hood pulled low over my eyes, my hands shoved casually into the pockets of my leather jacket, my boots clicking rhythmically against the broken sidewalk.

The street knows what’s coming; the block instinctively shifts, recognizing the scent of an apex predator walking. A mangy stray dog begins to bark frantically from behind a rusted chain-link fence, but the second my shadow passes the iron line, it lets out a pathetic whine and scurries backward into the dark. Up ahead, a couple of street-level lookouts standing on a stoop take one look at my gait, turn on their heels, and slip inside, slamming the heavy deadbolts behind them. Nobody wants to be a witness to the shit they can sense is about to go down.

I clock the house without breaking stride. Two goons are stationed outside the heavy wooden doors, and who should it be? None other than Tweedle-dum and his sidekick Tweedle-fucking-dumber. The two shitbags who used to rotate shifts outside my bedroom. These motherfuckers are getting it.