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No one except me. No one will ever love you. Not like I do. No one will understand you, my baby boy.
I don’t realize how hard I’m squeezing the phone until I hear the plastic almost crack.
I slam down the phone and then glare at it, my pulse roaring in my ears and a cold, clammy sensation settling over my skin.
Fuck you.
Still throbbing with hatred, I snatch up my cell to text Eilish. When I do, I notice the time, and I groan.
Shit. I’m going to be late.
* * *
The mood is decidedly somberwhen I walk into the High Council meeting this time. Ilya and Lukas shake my hand firmly but grimly. Yuri and Viktor do the same, the former shaking his head.
“Dark times, my friend,” Yuri mutters. “Dark fucking times.”
He’s not wrong.
Marko Kalishnik is in hospital, still in a medically-induced coma in the wake of the car-bombing outside Crudo. This is an unprecedented attack on a head of High Council family. Afoundingfamily, no less. Vlad, his number two, is dead.
“Have you seen him?”
Yuri nods. “I went yesterday. No change in his prognosis. But, he’s alive. Technically.”
Lukas folds his arms over his chest. “So, what exactly is the protocol here? I mean, if a council member is unexpectedly unable to sit at the table. It must have come up before…”
Yuri and Viktor glance at each other uneasily before Viktor clears his throat.
“The last time we had anything like this wasyearsago, when…” His face darkens as he glances at me.
“When Semyon was killed?” I finish for him.
The man who raped my mother and sired me in the process. The man who also fathered my half-sisters Lizbet and Mara.
May he burn in hell.
Viktor nods. “After that, there were simply fewer chairs at the table. Until we voted in Ozerov, and then Anastasia.”
“This vote is going to be impossible,” Ilya mutters. “It’s deadlocked without Marko.”
“Or an opportunity,” Lukas murmurs, looking over at the door to the conference room just as Anastasia Javanovic walks in. “She might be able to be swayed.”
“I’ve had some of our people working on what we spoke about before,” Ilya mutters quietly. “So far, nothing.”
“Are we starting this party or not?”
The five of us turn together to glare at Abram, sprawled in his chair tapping his fingers on the armrest impatiently.
“In a minute,” Yuri growls at him before turning to me. “Can I speak to you privately for a second?”
I nod, following him to a corner of the room, where he leans close.
“I heard that Marko spoke to you about…well, you know…right before the attack.”
He means the arranged marriage to Milena.
“Ifit’s something you were considering,” Yuri murmurs quietly, “now might be a good time to put it in writing. As much as I’m hoping for his recovery, and as much as I consider Marko a friend, if he dies, there’s going to be an ugly power grab for his empire. Both from outside and from within, given that he has no male heir. If there was a marriage on the table, though—”
