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Turning away from the window, I stared at the crib, the only furniture in the nursery. The day I had started to assemble it, I had thought about a future with her. I had thought about our child and how maybe I could let down my walls one at a time to slowly accept the fact that Naomi had gotten just as close, if not closer than Katya had ever done.
She was carrying my child.
A child was still hanging in the balance between us.
A child was still part of my life, part of my future.
Now I wasn’t so sure I even had a fucking future ahead of me, not with this war looming.
I slumped against the wall, staring at the crib and feeling my heart being ripped out of my chest. Whatever light Naomi had shined on it felt like it was slowly dying away, and I was going to be left with another gaping hole because I hadn’t learned my lesson the first time.
I had wanted to believe that Naomi was different. I had wanted to hope that I could be happy for once.
I had been wrong.
It wasn’t all her fault, I supposed. I had ripped her from everything she knew and loved and tried to force her into my world, to make her love a fucking monster. I had put my child in her belly, but the feelings, the needs I had tried to figure out with her hadn’t meant anything.
That was where I had failed.
I hated myself for it all: for the stupid plan that I should have stopped when I realized I didn’t have Sveta.
For allowing Naomi to stay and letting her give me hope for a future when there was not one for me.
For getting her pregnant and now being forced to make decisions that turned my stomach.
For thinking that the Krasnaya brigadiers would ever come over to the Belaya side and accept me as their Pakhan.
Most of all, for thinking that I could have something of my own, someone of my own that could actually give a fuck about me.
I had nothing. No one.
The tightness in my chest grew until I felt like I couldn’t breathe and I kicked at the crib hard, the collision of my boot on the fragile wood forcing the thing to slide sideways. Was it really just the other week that Anatoly was teasing me that the crib wasn’t safe for a child because I had put it together?
I hated the fucking thing now. It was a constant reminder that my world had fallen apart around me, and I was to blame for it.
Another vicious kick had the thing falling to the ground, but that wasn’t enough for me. I smashed the wood under my boot, feeling it crack and bend until there were nothing but splinters littering the hardwood floor.
Breathing heavily, I smoothed my hair back with a shaking hand, the anger still welling up inside me. The crib was only going to be the beginning unfortunately. I had a fucking war to plan, a Bratva to protect, and a wife that I knew nothing about.
A wife that I couldn’t trust.
Shaking my head, I turned back to the window. It was hard for me to think of Naomi as anything else but my wife. I had claimed her, marked her, put my fucking child in her. In all pretenses, she was my wife. I realized now that Sveta would never have fit in my life, even being the daughter of a Mafia leader. I would have broken her quickly and forgotten her just as fast.
But Naomi. She vexed me. She pushed me to be something I wasn’t ready to be, someone that gave a damn about her, and now that I did, it was my weakness.
Because of her, I had to worry not only about my Bratva but her and our unborn child.
I should have gotten rid of her at the first opportunity.
Rubbing my temples with my fingers, I pushed past my thoughts. What was done was done. I would be fighting the biggest war of my life, and it wasn’t all just because of the Krasnaya fuckers.
No, now I had to outwit a fucking FBI agent who was obsessed with the mother of my child. When he would strike and how wasn’t something I could predict. At any moment he could throw the gauntlet down, and I would lose this war before it ever truly began. If I survived this, then there would be no question to what I could do in my Bratva, in the entire fucking world.
My personal life? That was still up for debate, and I couldn’t think about it right now. I couldn’t let my emotions, my fucking feelings, whatever they might be, cloud my judgment.
If I did, we were all dead.
So I pulled deep down internally until all the worry turned into rage, all the pain turned into a familiar foe that I had compartmentalized long ago after Katya’s death.
I was the Pakhan of the Belaya Bratva, the darkness that consumed and destroyed.
I was the stuff of nightmares, the shadow that no one would see until it was too late, and by then, my knife was in their gut and they were begging for their lives.
Enough of the softness.
Enough of the many second chances I had given people along the way. It was time for me to kill or be killed. My mother would be the first one to tell me that I had grown weak, allowing other options when really there was only one, the very one she had drilled into me at a young age.
No mercy.
It was time to show no mercy in my dealings, no matter what the cost.
Because at the end of the day, the only one I could rely on, could fucking trust, was myself. No one else mattered.
I glanced at the shattered crib as I started toward the door. That had been a wish that hadn’t come true, a moment of pure insanity that no longer mattered.
I couldn’t let it get to me. I had a war to win.
