Page 54 of The Pakhan’s Heir

I’m falling in love with him. And I want to have his baby more than anything in this world.

Only now he hates me because he thinks I’m a traitor. It’s only a miracle that he didn’t shoot me dead before Rikki called.

I wipe the tears from my face and get up to make myself some tea. I need to get a handle on myself if I’m going to survive this. Especially now since my father has lost his mind. Somehow, he found out. His spies somehow figured it out, or maybe I said something at the coffee house that tipped him off. No. I didn’t even know it then. He found out sometime after I did.

But how? Alex doesn’t even know. The day I found out, I emptied the bathroom garbage, threw it into the trash can in front of the brownstone just in case Alex might happen to see even part of the box in passing. And besides all that, I’ve told no one.

If my father knows, and judging from the message that he wanted Alex to know, he just might, he wouldn’t be able to abide the product of this union. If I don’t know anything else, I know that my father hates the Rostovs. I have no doubt that he would try to wipe us all out just to keep the Molotov bloodline from moving forward.

The teapot is set to boil as I look for the teabags. These kitchen cabinets have filled since I moved in here, and not by my doing. Alex filled the fridge and the cabinets himself and has been doing it since his father’s death. Another way to make sure I’m taken care of, I guess.

I find the box of teabags. My favorite flavor—Blueberry Mint. I must have mentioned that it was my favorite in passing because there’s always a box here for me.

The tears start to come again and this time, I can’t stop them. I set the box down as I sob, the rivers of tears rolling down my cheeks. How could I have messed things up so badly?

“Nona?”

I start and whirl around. Kostya is standing in the kitchen doorway, tilting his head as if to get a better look at me. I look away, wiping at my face frantically.

“Hi, Kostya.” I am doing my level best not to sound like I’ve been crying in the kitchen. It’s not working. My voice cracks at the first attempt at sound. Still, I don’t turn back around. “Alex and Rikki are in the living room.”

“I’m aware,” he says. He takes slow, careful steps into the kitchen. “Are you all right?”

“I’m fine. I’m just fine.” The sobs are starting to come back and suddenly, I feel like I’m going to collapse. I swallow them back hard. “Do you want some tea? All I’ve got is Earl Grey and Blueberry Mint, but you’re welcome to⁠—”

He’s walked all the way into the kitchen and now he’s standing next to me, looking into my watery eyes. He sinks a little and sighs. “I guess you and Alex have talked.”

I could laugh at the irony of the spy who told on me to Alex being the one to comfort me. “For the record, I didn’t rat on him,” I say. “He doesn’t believe me, but it’s true. I didn’t…” I cut myself off. Oh, well, he knows, anyway. I look up at him and finish my thought. “I didn’t tell my father anything. The truth is that he’s been watching me for a while now, since I got married and… and it just so happens that he chose that day to ambush me.”

His eyebrows lifted. “Have you told Alex any of this?”

I shake my head. “What good would that have done? He’d never believe that I didn’t tell my father whatever family secrets I’m supposed to know. Which, by the way, is practically nothing. How could I be the rat when I don’t know anything?”

Kostya regards me for a moment. Then the teapot goes off and he walks over to it and takes it off the burner. “You really care about him, don’t you?”

I nod. “I guess I do. I mean… I’ll admit, I certainly wasn’t expecting to. We barely knew each other before getting married. Now… Kostya, I want to make this work for real. And now, no thanks to your surveillance and my father’s surveillance, I’m pretty sure it’s all been trashed.”

“Well, you did meet with the enemy.”

“He’s my father, Kostya. What was I supposed to do? What would you have done?”

He walks over to the cabinets and gets two mugs for us. “I’m the wrong person to ask,” he says. “My mother abandoned me and my father died when I was baby. I don’t exactly have the experience to draw from.”

“But Fedor was like your father too, right? Alex always says that you’re like blood brothers.”

He pauses and glances over at me. “So, what would I do if I were in your position and it was Fedor?” He pauses, pursing his mouth to one side. “I honestly don’t know. And Fedor, Alex, Rikki, and Yeva are the closest things that I have to blood relatives. My loyalty to them goes deeper than just this brotherhood.”

“It’s not so easy, is it, when you really think about it?”

“That is a valid point. But your position isn’t the same as mine. Your father is still alive and kicking and has been your entire life. And unlike me, he was alive when you joined your new family. What it would come down to, I suppose, is who I truly owe my loyalty to. The family I left behind or the family who found me.”

I scoff. “You make that sound so clinical.”

“Sorry, I don’t deal in emotional attachments much,” he says. “So, you’ll have to excuse me if I sound cold. Like it or not, though, it is the way it is. You made a choice and it ended up putting you in the crosshairs. You can’t blame me for doing my job.”

We’re making tea together now. He grabs the box of Earl Grey and I take the blueberry mint. As we navigate the process, he says, “You’re going to have to prove where your loyalties truly lie, Nona. Not just to him, but to this Bratva. If you really want to make things work between you, what you need to understand is that the Molotovs don’t work like other blood families in Bratvas. They… they have a bond. And it’s unbreakable. I believe it’s why they’ve survived for generations.”

I’ve seen that for myself, so I know it’s true. I don’t think there is anything that Yeva and Rikki could do that would destroy Alex’s trust in them.