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“You will be,” I teased with a wide grin.

“What about you?” Lev asked.

I rocked on my heels. “I’m here to get a ring out of the vault, actually.”

Alexei rolled his eyes while the others congratulated me, but he came around to the idea of my settling with Louisa. “What about Brady?” he asked.

“I’ll adopt him. I’ll make it official. A wife and two kids. Who would have thought it?”

“Two?” Maksim asked, raising his brows.

“Louisa’s pregnant,” I announced proudly.

Alexei grumbled about this being a curse or something, but again, he congratulated me like the others.

“Then go down to the vault and find what you need to find,” Adrik said a few minutes later after I shared those announcements. The family heirlooms and rare pieces of jewelry the family owned made up a decent variety. I already knew what to look for.

The brightest blue gem possible. Something to match her gorgeous eyes that never failed to captivate me.

“And get upstairs,” Maksim said. “We’ve got a lot to cover.”

We did. That was why I didn’t linger in the vault. I chose a sapphire set among diamonds and knew that it was the one. That she was the one.

Done with this important step, I walked back up the stairs and felt the weight of the small box in my pocket. It was just a little cube, but with that ring, there was enormous expectation.

To protect her and pleasure her.

To learn how to be the best father to both Brady and my unborn child.

They were the reasons I needed to stay strong and active in the war we had been plunged into, but I didn’t fear having to step up. To rise to the challenge.

When I joined the others in what used to be my father’s office, I shelved all the emotional parts of what was clogging up my attention span. I could daydream about marrying Louisa after this meeting. I could mentally brainstorm and rehearse how I wanted to propose later. I could consider how to always check on Brady and make sure that he wasn’t feeling dismissed after this discussion.

But as I got into “work” mode, I realized that later would need to come tomorrow.

“With these new paths of activity, it seems like Gregori is focusing his time on the coast,” Maksim said, interpreting what Louisa had compiled from her investigation. She told me that she would send everything to Adrik and the others. I didn’t doubt that she would. Seeing the evidence of her searches made it all the more real, though. And I couldn’t stem the pride.

We were this much more advanced because of her.

We had these details to use for our strategy due to her input and advice.

For hours, we pored over all that she’d provided us. We went over maps and tried to decide whether we had the manpower to set up stakeouts and stalk where he could be going. We argued about how to approach his use of body doubles, if it would be helpful to kill them and leave him with no one to hide behind or use as decoys.

“The problem is that he’s had a lot of time to prepare for this,” Adrik said. He rolled a pen over his fingers. “When Elena first started tracking his financial trails, she found evidence dating back years.”

“We can assume that since he went into hiding after the bomb, he had these long-term plans in mind,” Maksim added. “Many years to structure this network.”

I shrugged. “That still doesn’t make him infallible.”

Even though we all debated how to delegate men into a more offensive plan, to go out and kill Gregori, we were all united in the fact that he needed to be dead. He was supposed to have been dead all this time that my father was ruling, but that wasn’t the case.

Alexei and I teamed up again by the end of the meeting. He and I would go after the latest leads we had on Vladimir Konstantin’s location—again, something we had to work with thanks to Louisa’s efforts—and that could give us more intel and direction. Whatever it took to find Gregori and be done with him.

We left together, planning to go to one of the clubs the Konstantins partly owned. The Konstantins were a smaller Bratva, but it made sense that they had a presence on the Strip. They didn’t call this Sin City for nothing.

“You’ve got to stop whining about being stranded,” I warned my cousin while he drove. “No one is going to force you to pull our weight.”

He shrugged, driving with one hand and rubbing the back of his neck with the other. “It’s just so different. In such a short time, all of you have these contingencies on the risks you’ll take.”