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I remember now that she took a week off at the end of January. I’d been annoyed as hell about it and made no secret of that fact. But she gave me no explanation, apart from the very vague, “I have family commitments.”
In retrospect, I feel like a fucking asshole.
“Yo, bro,” Aleksandr greets as he walks in without warning. “‘Sup?”
“What do you have for me?”
He purses his lips and drops heavily into one of the chairs opposite me. “Once again, I see we are dispensing with manners. ‘Hello, beloved younger brother of mine. How’s it going with you? What is new in your world? You are looking especially handsome today.’ I’d take any of that.”
“Must we do this every time?”
“You’re the only man on the planet who gets crabbier when he’s juggling two women,” he accuses. “It’s insane.”
“I’m not juggling either one of them. One’s a ploy and the other’s a surrogate.”
Aleks looks skeptical. “Does she know that?”
I’m eyeing the blue envelope in his hand impatiently. It’s sealed at the top, so I know that Aleks probably doesn’t know what’s inside. Neither do I, though I’m itching to find out. “Did you look into her background?”
“Oi!” Aleks says, snapping his fingers in my face, which makes me realize I’ve been staring into empty space. “My eyes are up here.” He rolls his eyes dramatically to prove his point. “Men.”
“I feel less and less bad these days for beating you up when we were boys.”
“Touché.” Aleks chuckles and raises the envelope. “Shall I do the honors?”
I nod and he tears the flap open. My jaw is pulsing with anticipation. From the moment Wren told me about her sister, I haven’t been able to expel the nagging suspicion that there is more to this story.
And that I might have more to do with it than either one of us has realized.
“Well?”
Aleks squints down at the papers as he shuffles through them. But slowly, the squint turns to wide-eyed shock. “Shit. Shit! Shiiiiit.” That’s about all I need to confirm that my suspicions, my instincts, were right. “She’s his sister-in-law?” Aleks asks, glancing up at me. “How is this possible? How is the world that small?”
“Fate’s a cruel bitch. That’s how.”
Aleks’s jaw goes slack as he tries to process through it. “Does she know?”
“Fuck no. And she can’t know, either. Not until that baby is safely delivered.”
He nods and looks back down at his papers. “Well, you want the good news? There doesn’t seem to be a man in the picture. Seems as though she’s been unattached for a while. Probably why she decided to stop waiting for a man and have this baby herself.”
“She didn’t want the baby for herself,” I explain gruffly. “She was doing it for her sister.”
Aleks’s forehead wrinkles with confusion. “I don’t get it.”
“Her sister and brother-in-law were the ones who wanted a child. But because of Rose’s infertility problems, Wren was donating her uterus and her egg so that they could have a baby.”
“Oh. Fuuuck.”
What I can’t get past is that, when she finally caved and told me why she wound up in Shithead Saeder’s clinic, it was clear to me that she didn’t actually want to tell me of her own volition. It was a concession on her part. She was choosing to trust me. Whether she realized it or not.
“That’s kinda fucking awesome of her,” Aleks muses quietly.
He’s not wrong about that. It kinda fucking is. I stretch my hand out over the table for the documents and Aleks hands them over. I flip through them, picking up little sound bites of Wren’s life as I go.
I grew up with this idea that everything in life has limits. Including and especially love. Elena used to call me her soulmate, but she still didn’t want to have my babies. I considered Elena the love of my life, but I would never have given up my Bratva for her.
There were always lines. Always.
