Page 37 of A Surprise Baby for the Russian

Solenne detaches from my leg and stands directly in front of me with her hands on her hips.

“Did Raya go on vacation with you?” she demands.

“Yes,” I smile.

She squints up at me. “Why did she go without telling us?”

“She needed a break.”

This is apparently a satisfactory answer, because she moves on immediately. “Can you do voices?”

I look down at her. “Which voices?”

“For the stories. Raya always does the voices. Aunt Sofie tried, but she can’t do the monster one right—it sounds like her normal voice but louder, and Aunt Anka said she wasn’t allowed to do the scary one anymore because Tomas cried for twenty minutes.” She fixes me with her most serious look. “Can you do a monster voice?”

I think about Yaroslav and me in the dark of our childhood bedroom. “I can do a monster voice,” I tell her.

Her face breaks into a wide grin. “Good. You can do stories tonight then. Raya does them best, but you’ll do.”

Arron lets out a high-pitched cheer, jumping up and down. “Yes! We can show you the treehouse tomorrow, too!”

“Go on, run along, you two ozornyaki,” I say, the old Russian word for little mischief-makers slipping out before I can stop it. “Go back to your aunt before she comes looking for you.”

They don’t need to be told twice. They let go of my legs, cheer again, and sprint right back into the chaos of the house, nearly taking out one of Matvei’s guards on the way. Raya looks across the room at me over the kids’ heads with an expression I cannot fully read—somewhere between amusement and something softer—and I look back at her, tucking that expression away into a corner of my mind to think about later.

I look back at my sister’s face and think about all the years in that house; it’s a miracle that we survived them. I don’t say it out loud; we both know it, the way people who share the same scars do.

Matvei walks in quietly, his expression an unreadable block of granite. He doesn’t need to perform his authority; the entire room automatically orients toward him the second his boots hit the floor. He catches my eye across the crowded room and gives me a solitary, heavy nod. I nod back. The terms of our alliance are sealed in that one look.

I keep to my wall for the rest of the afternoon, intentionally stepping back. I don’t force myself into her space. I don’t demand her attention. This is her moment to heal from the trauma I dragged her into, and she deserves every single second of it.

I watch how everyone in this room drifts toward her without realizing it. A brother catches her eye from across the room and visibly settles. A child detaches from someone else and finds its way back to her legs. She’s here, and the room reorganizes itself around the fact of her. She holds the emotional weight of this entire empire on her shoulders, and she makes it look as effortless as breathing. She belongs here in the light. Safe and fiercely protected.

As the sun begins to dip, throwing long shadows across the foyer, she ends up briefly alone near the hallway. She’s holding a glass of water, staring out of the window with that quiet, processing look I’ve come to know intimately. I leave my wall and cross the polished floor, my boots heavy against the wood.

“You alright?” I ask softly, halting a step away from her.

Raya looks up, her dark eyes wide as they search my face. For a split second, the protective Volkov armor slips, and I see the same electric heat we generated in that bedroom last night flashing across her features. She looks at my mouth, her breathing hitching, before she forcefully locks her expression back down.

“Yes,” she whispers.

“Do you need anything?”

She holds my gaze for one more breathless second, her fingers tightening around her glass. “No,” she says. “I’m good.”

She means it. She is back where she belongs. I give her a tight nod and step backward into the shadows. I watch her for the rest of the night, my left hand curled into a fist inside my pocket, fully aware that while I have successfully traded my family name to keep her safe, the cold reality of what I never had is going to haunt me long after the lights go out.

Chapter 20 - Raya

Matvei materializes at my elbow the way he always has when he has something to say that he’d prefer not to voice in front of a crowded room. Steering me slightly to one side with a hand that barely brushes my arm, he asks quietly, “What do you want us to do with him?”

I look across the living room. Yakov has somehow ended up in the corner armchair with his niece and nephew. Both are talking at once, and he is listening to them with the same intense focus he gives to everything—unhurried, patient, devoid of the cold distance he maintains with adults. Arron is explaining something of enormous importance with wild gestures, while Yakov nods seriously as if the information is critical to a mission. Solenne has apparently decided his knee is a private seat, making herself comfortable there without asking. He hasn’t moved her. I think about his childhood stories.

“What do you mean, what do I want you to do with him?” I look my brother dead in the eye.

Matvei studies me, his expression locked in that blank slate where he tells you nothing while thinking through every option.

“He hasn’t once put his own safety before mine, Matvei,” I press, my voice dropping to a fierce whisper. “Not once. Not since the day he took me.”