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Tori suddenly twists to face me. “What do you mean?”
“Look, I’m playing this daddy role now, but I don’t know what’s gonna happen with Larysa, her family, the baby. She lives in Ukraine with her family. This isn’t anything permanent.”
Tori’s jaw drops. “How can you say that? I mean, look at this girl. She is you. What would Mom say if she was here?”
“Well, she’s not.” I stalk toward the refrigerator and pull open the door. I ordered a whole bunch of food early this morning. I figured I’d make a lot of stuff to find out what Daniela would like. “So it doesn’t really matter.”
“She would be horrified if she knew you were planning to walk away from your daughter, regardless of the circumstances.”
“She’d be okay with me being linked to the family who was responsible for killing her?”
“You don’t know that for sure. You’re angry and sad and I get all that. But you should be open to the possibility that you’re targeting people who aren’t responsible for what happened.”
“I guess the pregnancy really mellowed you.” Scooping some butter into the sizzling pan on the cooktop, I grit my teeth and crack two eggs. “Before your husband knocked you up, I think you’d have been first in line to castrate the bastards. Now you’re telling me to give them the benefit of the doubt.”
“The hormones have messed with me, but not enough to make me tell you that your plan to leave them is a good one.”
“Who said anything about me leaving?” I scramble the eggs with the spatula and sprinkle a little bit of salt into the pan.
“D, you went to that place to…” Tori’s voice trails off and she glances at Daniela. “Unalive the girl, and you came home with two, one of whom you fathered in a night of drunken abandon. Don’t you think that maybe the universe is trying to tell you something?”
“I think it’s trying to tell me that I’d be a goddamn headcase for thinking my life can be any bit normal.”
“That’s ridiculous. Look at all of us. Me, Luka, Nik, Taras. It happened for us.”
“You think you’re all normal?” I shake my head and scoop the fluffy eggs onto a princess plate. “You’re all twisted way worse than me.”
I strain my ears. “Was that another knock?”
“Oh, yeah. Konstantin has some more stuff for you guys. I couldn’t carry it all.”
A few minutes later, my foyer looks like a baby shower just threw up all over it. Konstantin used a hand truck to deliver a load of boxes that blow my freaking mind. Who the hell knew that kids needed so much crap?
“Congratulations.” Konstantin claps me on the back.
Congratulations. How fucking ironic that he uses that word. The only reason I was even in that bar was because I’d just done something that would set my family up for a major fall, and here we are, celebrating the end result of that night.
“I fucked my family’s enemy and knocked her up. Is that really something to congratulate?”
“She’s not the enemy.”
I lift an eyebrow. “After all the shit you pulled, you really have the nerve to say that to me, fucking kettle?”
Konstantin shrugs. “Sue me.”
“I figured out of everyone, you’d get it.”
“I do get it. But bigger things are at play now. Take your head out of your ass and focus on those.”
“Why the hell don’t either of you seem to give a damn that her family may have been the ones who killed Mom? How the hell can I separate the two?”
“Your father had my father killed.” Konstantin folds his arms over his chest. “I learned to separate the two.”
“You hated your father.”
“Not the point. It was still an attack on my family.”
“Family you hated.”
