Page 122 of Taken By My Grumpy Pakhan

I’d never felt more humiliated and exposed, not even when I was almost kicked out for not making rent while everyone watched.

I wiped my tears, pulling my laptop over. I typed my resignation in four sentences, short and final, and sent it.

Then I turned my phone off completely, watching the screen go black on his name still sitting unanswered at the top of my messages.

“What now?” Anna asked quietly.

“Nothing.” I wiped a stray tear from my cheek. “I’ll go away.”

“You’re making too many decisions too quickly.”

“I thought I was going to die, Ann.” I attempted a laugh that came out as a cough. “I sold everything I had, packed up and returned home to die only to discover my baby brother was in debt. I got caught in some bullshit, found out I wasn’t going to die and somehow made it out alive. Kazimir won’t break me. And I definitely won’t sit around for his pity.”

“And the baby?”

I stopped, my throat tightening around an answer I didn’t fully have yet. I had completely forgotten about that detail in my outrage.

“The baby is mine,” I said finally. “Whatever happened between us might’ve been a sham, but this part is true. I’ll figure out the rest on my own.”

Anna’s hand clasped around mine. “You don’t have to do this on your own, you know. It’s us against the world. Us, not you.”

For the first time in the past hours, something that resembled a smile touched my lips. “What would I do without you?”

She flashed me a cheeky smile. “You’re lucky you don’t get to find out. Now let’s get you rehydrated. You sound like a frog.”

My smile widened a little even though the ache in my chest worsened.

There were things I never thought were on my bingo card and things I could negotiate onto the bingo card.

Getting pregnant by another woman’s fiancé was not in the top one thousand list.

Kazimir had exposed me to a situation I had no idea how to navigate, and even worse, I couldn’t shake the notion that it was more my fault than it was his.

As though she could read my mind, Anna spoke. “It’s not your fault, Gen. He’s a cheap, cheating liar and you couldn’t have known better.”

I nodded even though the voice in my head thought otherwise.

“And I’m going to kill him.”

I risked a painful laugh. “I hope you succeed.”

Chapter Thirty

Kazimir

“Anything?” My head shot up the moment I heard my office door open.

“Nothing new.” Nikolai shut the door behind him and dropped into the chair across from me. “No flights under her name. No hotel check-ins. Anna’s phone is off too, so wherever they went, they planned it together.”

“Keep looking.”

“Kazimir,” he said my name carefully, the way he did when he was about to say something I wasn’t going to want to hear. “I’ve had four men on this since morning. She resigned by email, turned her phone off, packed a bag. That’s not a woman who got taken somewhere or got lost by mistake. That is a woman who ran.”

“I’m aware of what it looks like.”

“Are you? Because from where I stand, it looks like you’re tearing the whole of New York apart for a—how did you say it?—warm pussy.”

My eyes slashed to him. “Watch it.”