Page 47 of The Pakhan’s Hidden Heir

She sits patiently, but I feel the shift. She pats my knee as her eyes shift to the door where Bastian stands, glowering. He fills the entire doorframe with his foreboding posture and angry eyes. I swallow a lump forming in my throat at the sight of him, knowing Ingrid probably told him what I’ve been doing.

So my plan has worked and he’s here, but now I’m starting to regret that. He’s angry, but I deserve answers, don’t I?

Crossing to the nightstand, he looks down at the untouched tray, and his face settles into a cold scowl before he turns it on me. “Ingrid tells me you’re starving yourself,” he says, folding his arms over his chest. “Why haven’t you eaten?” The tone of voice he uses is not kind or warm. It’s cold and accusing and I’ve had enough.

For the entire past week he’s been coming to bed well after I’ve gone to sleep, ignoring my requests during the day to speak to him about what happened, and if I catch him in the morning before he leaves for work, he gives me the silent treatment.

If I had to stop eating a few days just to talk to him, I’m not sure my heart can even hold out hope anymore that I will ever get him to connect emotionally with me.

Pushing myself up against the headboard, I clutch the blanket to my chest. “I’m not hungry.” I’ve said it to Ingrid a dozen times over the past few days and it’s been a lie every time. I am starving, ravenous actually, but I need him to pay attention to me and tell me what the hell is going on.

“You’re carrying my child, so you don’t get to be hungry or not as it suits you.” Bastian is being so harsh; I hardly recognize him. It’s like that bomb went off and made him a different person. “You eat what I put in front of you, and you eat it on schedule, the way we agreed. That was the arrangement.”

Heat climbs up my chest, shoving past the fear that’s kept me pinned to this mattress all week.

But when my voice comes out, it’s fractured and weak when I need it to be powerful. “The arrangement? Is that the only thing you know how to say? Somebody blew up your car with the two of us standing ten feet from it, Bastian. I was right beside you, or did you forget? I’ve been lying here for days trying to make sense of how any of this is real. You won’t even talk to me.”

He doesn’t so much as shift his weight.

His face is devoid of emotion, his shoulders squared as he stares down his nose blankly. “I dealt with the threat and protected you. You’re safe inside this house now and that’s where you’ll stay until my child is born.”

A brittle laugh scrapes out of my throat as I shove the covers off my legs and swing them over the side of the mattress, needing to be on my feet rather than cowering under him where he stands.

“You think I feel safe? You lock me in a room, take my phone…” I’m spitting mad. “What the hell is going on! Tell me why that person did that.” Gripping the bedpost to steady the sway that’s threatening to take me, I force myself upright and make myself look at him. I am so weak right now; Ingrid is right. I need to eat. “This is no way to raise a child. There’s no life here for a baby. You can’t build a nursery inside a war and call the thing a home.”

Bastian’s eyes darken, but he clenches his jaw and fails to respond again. Poor Ingrid stands in the corner now, cowering.

I wonder if she’s ever seen him like this or if this is normal for her too.

He’s treating me like a puppy he has to care for, not the woman who is carrying his child. I deserve better than this.

“You want to know what this is?” His nostrils flare and if possible his chest puffs out farther.

I don’t like the defiance in his eyes, the way he leans over me like I’m supposed to kowtow like his little maid over there. But when he speaks again, I listen. “I’m bratva, Raina. Do you understand what that word means?”

I feel the blood drain out of my face as I sink back onto the edge of the mattress.

My knees feel weak, but it’s my head reeling with that new information that makes me buckle. Ingrid’s eyes shift, then her head hangs in shame as I look to her for answers.

I sputter out, “No. You told me you were a businessman. You said⁠—”

“I told you what you needed to hear.” He watches me take it in without a flicker of apology, standing there staring at me as my mind knits together every warning Lada gave me.

“I run this city, or most of it, and the men who came for us the other day have spent the better part of a year trying to take what’s mine. Now that they know an heir is coming, they’ll come harder. That’s the world you’re living in, and it’s the world our child grows up in, whether or not you find it acceptable.”

My ears start to ring loudly as my eyes pass from Ingrid to Bastian and back. I can’t make sense of this.

He’s a criminal?

He probably knew that man who was shot personally, maybe even worked with him. And Lada sat right here in this house and told me what a fool I am and I ignored her.

The man I fell for, the one who laughed with me over dinner and let me hold his hand while our baby’s heartbeat flickered across that screen, is standing here telling me he’s the exact monster Lada swore he was. It guts me. There are no words for what I’m thinking or feeling.

I want him out of my presence. I want my life back. I want to undo the past six months of mistakes I’ve made and at the very same time I want him to wrap his arms around me and hold me and tell me this is all just a joke.

But the part of me wanting him gone wins right now. “Get out,” I hear myself say in an empty tone. “Get out of this room.”

Bastian’s brow lowers. “Raina⁠—”