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What time is your break today?he’d texted.
I don’t know. Why?
Because we need to talk.
30
ROMAN
“Does she know?” Max asked from the driver’s seat.
Traffic was light — typical for an early Sunday morning — and they were flying over the RFK Bridge on their way back to the loft.
“No,” Roman said. A hundred excuses came to mind but they all died on his lips. There was one reason and one reason only that he hadn’t told Ruby about the bratva.
He didn’t want to lose her.
And once she knew who — and what — he really was, that was a foregone conclusion.
“How will we protect her?” Max asked.
Roman was relieved, although not surprised, that Max didn’t further broach the subject of Roman’s impending confession. He knew he was fucked. He didn’t need anyone to drive the point home, least of all Max whose longest experience with a woman had been somewhere around twelve hours.
“I’ll assign some men to tail her,” Roman said. “But it won’t be an issue. No one knows.”
He’d spoken of Ruby to no one. The only person who knew about his obsession was Max, who’d driven him to Roasted more times than Roman could count before that fateful day in the alley with Adam Bishop and who had been camped out in front of her building all weekend.
“You enjoy her,” Max said. “And the daughter.”
Roman thought of Olivia, her eyes filled with wonder over every small thing, her tiny arms holding Bear, the stuffed animal Roman had brought to the hospital. It had been…comforting,to sit with her on the sofa, to feel her small body leaning into Roman’s as she drifted off to sleep.
“Yes,” Roman said. “I don’t understand it, but… yes.”
He’d always thought of progeny as a legacy, something to add to his empire, something to complete the picture.
A box to tick.
He hadn’t expected to feel… this.
Especially not for someone else’s child.
It was a bitter irony to have the realization now. Once he told Ruby about his life, the odds were against her remaining in it.
The thought pierced his heart like an arrow. She’d only been in his life for a couple of weeks — not counting the months he’d gone to Roasted to admire her from afar — and already his former life seemed gray and dim.
“They’re nice people,” Max said, looking for parking in front of Roman’s loft. “Good people.”
Roman nodded. Maybe that was it. Maybe after spending his life surrounded by criminals, by abusers like his father, he just wanted something good.
And there was nothing moregoodthan Ruby and Olivia.
Nothing more pure.
Roman forced himself to push thoughts of them aside. He couldn’t afford the distraction. Today he would do an accounting of the gold that had been sold. He would calculate his working capital and put his security plan into place, and if all went well, he would confront his father tonight at the Brighton Beach house.
The timing wasn’t accidental. He couldn’t approach Igor during business hours at headquarters when Boris and Dima would be on hand, to say nothing of Konstantin. Roman probably wouldn’t make it out alive.
But the Brighton Beach house on a Sunday night?
