Page 120 of Bratva Brother’s Bride

“With you.” The room disappears around us. “I spent years waiting for you to admit you were wrong. Then I spent years telling myself I didn’t care.” My throat feels tight, and I hate that. “Turns out I don’t need either anymore.”

Konstantin stares at me. Then he laughs, and there’s nothing amused in it. “You’ll come crawling back. You always do.”

“Not this time.”

His gaze slides to Vera, and something in him changes.

It’s small. His right shoulder drops, barely an inch. But I’ve seen my father reach inside that jacket too many times to mistake it for anything else, and my body knows what’s coming before my mind can name it.

He isn’t looking at me. He’s looking at my wife.

Lev lunges. I’m faster.

Everything narrows to a single point. Whatever this room decides, whatever my father was, none of it exists anymore. There is only Vera, and the child she carries, and the family I chose over his.

Konstantin’s hand clears his jacket.

Mine is already up.

The shot cracks through the chamber. Vera flinches against my side. My father stops.

For one long moment, he stays on his feet, and then his gun slides from his fingers and hits the floor. His eyes find mine, and there’s no fury in them, no hatred. Only shock. The disbelief of a man who never once imagined the son he threw into the dark would be the one left standing over him.

Then my father folds and drops beside the chair at the far end of the table. The chair that used to be his.

No one breathes. My ears ring. Blood creeps out from under him, dark against the floor, and I feel nothing at all.

I stare down at him. My father. The man who made me, dead by the very thing he made. I keep waiting to feel it land—the grief, guilt, or the dark thing that might pass for satisfaction. Nothing comes. Only a strange, hollow quiet, as if some door that stood open my whole life has finally swung shut.

Then Vera’s hand slips into mine, and I turn to her. “Are you hurt?”

“No.”

I search her anyway, my eyes moving over her face, her chest, her stomach, hunting for blood I don’t find. She’s unhurt. Only then do I let myself breathe.

Pavel rises slowly from his chair, his gaze moving from Konstantin’s body to the gun lying inches from his hand. “He drew first,” he says. No one contradicts him. Another elder reaches down and kicks the weapon farther from the body.

“The evidence will still be reviewed,” Pavel continues. “But I believe Konstantin has answered one question for us himself.”

I turn to Vera, pulling her against my chest. When I kiss the top of her head, she lets out a sigh.

“Let’s go home.”

35

ROMAN

Five minutes into the drive, I remember exactly why Lev isn’t my driver.

His hands are steady on the wheel, his eyes fixed on the road ahead. But he doesn’t play music, and he doesn’t talk unless he has to.

So there’s just the silence.

Long, awkward, painfully boring silence that Lev seems perfectly content to leave unbroken.

I’m in the back with Vera. She’s pressed against my side, her head on my shoulder. She’s asleep, or close to it. Her breathing is slow and even, her body limp with exhaustion.

I should let her rest. After everything that’s happened, she deserves to sleep.