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When my replacement came running in, full of apologies, I barely acknowledged her before getting the heck out of there. At home, I lay listlessly on the couch trying to keep the canned chicken soup down. I finally called Lynn to complain. I’d been putting on a brave face and pretending everything was fine, but I was never great at being sick so needed to whine.
“I’ve been barfing almost nonstop,” I told her. “I thought it was a twenty-four-hour bug, then a forty-eight-hour bug, but now it’s been almost a week. And I’m tired and irritable and—”
“Do your boobs hurt?” she interrupted.
I snorted. “What?” But I squeezed my arms across my chest, realizing I was a bit tender. “Oh shit, no.”
“Take a pregnancy test, pronto. Right now.”
“I don’t keep those lying around the house, Lynn,” I snapped, taking my horror out on her.
“Go get one and call me back the second you know.”
I sat there staring blankly at my phone for the longest time after she hung up on me. She was crazy, she had to be. Then I thought back to that wild night with Ivan. Even through my anxiety I couldn’t help but smile at the memory. It had been hard not going back for more, but then I got so busy with my crappy new job and trying to get a better one that I mostly forgot about him.
Talk about an amazing night of pure, unadulterated passion. A whole lot of passion. And I’d been pretty drunk, so I really had no recollection of whether or not he used a condom. Certainly not every time, if at all. My cheeks burned with shame at the stupidity. Ignoring the newest bout of nausea, I raced to the corner store and bought up a variety of different pregnancy tests, not sure which were the best brands.
They were all either great or awful, because they all turned up the same result. I called Lynn back.
“Positive,” I croaked.
“This is fine,” she said.
“Not really.” I slumped against the edge of the tub in my tiny bathroom. I lived in a one room apartment. My bed was also my couch. There was no room for a baby here, and I couldn’t afford a bigger place with my current wages. “I guess I’m coming home,” I said dully. “I certainly can’t raise a kid on my own here.”
“What about Ivan?” she asked.
“What about him?”
She sucked in a breath. “You have to tell him. Even if you’re going to be stubborn and not accept help and even if he’s an asshole who doesn’t want any part of it, he has a right to know.”
I groaned, knowing she was right. “Fine. I’ll try to find him at his club tonight and tell him.”
I just prayed he’d remember me.
Chapter 6 - Ivan
It was still early, right before we opened the doors of the club, and I sat at one of the empty tables with Aleksei, who had his head in his hands. The servers bustled around, getting things ready for that night’s crowd but they were lost in their own worlds or were smart enough not to try too hard to listen in on our conversation. I liked coming here for meetings if they weren’t of the utmost confidentiality. The way the strobe lights circled despite the house lights still being on, casting red and blue lights across Aleksei’s harried face, kept things from seeming out of control. And things weren’t out of control, no matter how worried my brother was.
I didn’t worry, I took care of things. I took care of it when the Balakins were encroaching on this place, my second home, my legitimate business, with their dirty drug dealing, and I would take care of whatever Aleksei was having so much trouble telling me.
“Just spit it out,” I told him. “What’s got you looking like someone kicked your puppy?”
He scowled at me, because that was a real thing that happened to him. When he was only eight and we’d just arrived here in America, our father had given him a slobbering yellow lab pup to keep him from being too sad about leaving our home. Dmitri had kicked the annoying thing, and Aleksei had been in a spitting rage. My father told him to stop flailing and shouting and get the justice he needed for his dog. That was the first time my brother ever beat the hell out of someone. Our ten-year-old cousin had to have a nose job after that, which we still teased him about. It took a lot to make my slow-to-anger brother mad enough to get violent, and he was still that way today, but he loved that dog. The only times I saw him cry were when our father died and when the dog died his junior year of high school.
He drew in a breath. “It’s the Balakins again. They’ve been collecting protection money.”
“Then we’ll need to recoup those funds and teach them the error behind thinking they could do that.” I cracked my knuckles and shook my head, not finding the flashing strobe lights so comforting and whimsical anymore. This was a flagrant act of disrespect, especially after we’d gone so easy on them after the drug incident. Probablybecausewe’d gone so easy on them. “We need to come down hard this time, Aleksei. No more of your diplomacy.”
“I still feel we can find a way to join forces with them,” he said. “We’re all Russians. We’re all Bratva.”
I slammed my hand down on the table, making it shake. “We may all be Russians, but we are not all Bratva, Aleksei. You must remember that.”
He put his head in his hands again with a groan, working up to arguing with me, but knowing me well enough to know he’d lose. I knew him well enough to know he’d still try and waited to hear him out. There was a commotion by the bar, and I heard a raised, feminine voice that made me stand up to see what it was all about. I’d spent the last several weeks dealing with the fallout from the Balakin problem, but that voice still snuck into my memory from time to time. Now it wasn’t soft and breathy in my ear, but agitated. I must have been mistaken, just hopeful to see her again. I called for the bouncers to stand aside, and there she stood, small but fiery, her fists clenched at her sides.
Reina, my little runaway queen.
She wore jeans that hugged her rounded hips and the sense memory of them curled my fingers as if I was still holding her tight. Her chest heaved beneath her frilly white tank top and her eyes were filled with tears.
