Page 74 of Bratva and Betrayal: Kirill

“I’ve done that, too,” I admit to her, not going into details.

“I can help you remember things, Mommy.” She rushes at me and wraps her arms around my waist, pressing her small body against mine. “I’m so glad you’re back.”

A flood of emotion steals my breath. My arms come around her without thinking. Holding her close, my child, my heart breaks and heals itself all at once.

“I’m glad too, sweetie,” I say, hearing a creak from several feet away.

I look up, and fear pulses through me.

Kirill stands there, frozen in place, his gaze locked on us. Raw and unguarded emotion breaks across his carefully controlled expression. Something he does so effortlessly.

He gives a faint groan, but Violet hears it and drops her head back. Her dark hair nearly brushes the floor while she holds on to me like a pole.

“Daddy,” she says brightly. “I found Mommy.”

Chapter 22

Kirill

My throat tightens at the sight of Violet clinging to Sandrine. And the gasp that scraped from my throat startled them both.

Violet looks up at me with a grin so wide it nearly splits her face in half. “Daddy! I found Mommy!”

The delight in her voice hits me like a bullet to the chest.

Everything inside me goes hot. Not because I’m angry. Not because Sandrine disobeyed me and didn’t go back to her room after I told her to. Not because I found Violet’s chair at the kitchen table empty, her snack half eaten. Not because the sounds of laundry banging around a dryer behind the kitchen suggested Nadia was in there and she lost track of my daughter for all of ten fucking minutes.

Violet is five and doesn’t require 24/7 supervision. But with her mother in the house, I should have put them both on lockdown with several guards.

No.

For five years I have nursed this exact image in my head like a scar on my brain. Sandrine holding Violet. Violet clinging to her mother. I picked at it until it became mangled.

My daughter is finally in her mother’s arms again. My family is under one roof again.

It was a fantasy so dangerous I stopped letting myself picture it. And now I’m watching it breathe.

Sandrine glances up slowly, and I can see the panic in her eyes.

“I was on my way upstairs,” she starts, but her hands never leave Violet. “I didn’t mean to⁠—”

“Mommy was playing with me.” She says Mommy and grabs her mother’s arm before Sandrine can move away from her.

Jesus Christ.

My heart twists, seeing how Violet doesn’t hold back. Acts like Sandrine never left. I guess children don’t overcomplicate love. My daughter feels safe with her mother. Maybe that’s instinctive, too. That and all the sweet stories I told her so she didn’t feel like she didn’t have a mother. A make-believe one was better than one who abandoned her.

I wish it were that easy for me. What I feel for Sandrine today is complicated.

My wife braces, clearly waiting for me to stop this, to pull Violet away, to remind her this was not supposed to happen yet. To yell. To… God no, I would never strike her. If there is only one version of me that I want her to remember, it’s the one where I was gentler with her than I was with anything on this planet.

Before Violet.

But I had a plan. It was for their own good. Sandrine is fragile right now, whether she likes hearing it or not. Her memories are returning to her in rapid flashes, disorienting her. She could fall down holding my daughter.

And Violet… God, Violet attaches with her whole heart. If Sandrine rejected her, even accidentally out of self-preservation, it would devastate my daughter.

If Sandrine left again?