“You think Danyl’s doing this on purpose?” I ask.
My mother paces restlessly.
“Most definitely,” she says. “He’s buddied up with Foma Kushnir. Foma’s been tracking our withdrawals from the Gazprombank. He knows something’s up.”
“Yeah, he thinks Dom’s stealing money,” I snort, remembering how Bodashka Kushnir accused my cousin Kade of treachery and embezzlement.
“They’re not stupid,” my mother warns me. “They’re putting it together.”
My head is pounding, my blood pressure at a constant high for three fucking years now. I don’t know how much more I can take.
Forcing my voice steady, I ask her, “When’s the meeting?”
“The first week of January.”
I’m trying to think strategically, the way my mother would think.
Slowly, I say, “Dean knows Danyl, and he used to be friends with Bodashka Kushnir, though I don’t think they’re as close anymore. If Danyl plans to make a move, Dean could keep us informed . . .”
“How are you going to ask him that as Ares?”
“I’m not gonna ask him—I’ll tell Kade to do it. Dean likes him. He defended him to Bodashka last year.”
My mother considers this carefully before nodding.
“Talk to Kade. Don’t let Dean know you have anything to do with it. And for god’s sake, don’t let Cat hear about any of it.”
If only it were that easy to hide things from Cat Romero.
14
Ivan Petrov
Twenty-one Years Ago
The party on the HI SO Terrace is intended to celebrate the birth of my son, though no one in Russia would ever call it a baby shower.
I’ve become familiar with many American traditions since marrying Sloane. She clings to few of them, considering herself a citizen of nowhere and a resident of anywhere she pleases.
Still, she likes to compare Russian customs with American.
This is her nature as a chameleon: observing and adapting the practices of those around her, until she might convince you that you’d grown up next door to one other.
She finds the Russian superstitions around pregnancy and birth highly amusing.
She laughed when my soldiers firmly refused to acknowledge her burgeoning belly, even when they bumped right into it in a cramped hallway.
“They don’t want to invite the eye of the devil on your unborn baby,” I informed her.
“I think he already has the devil inside him,” Sloane said, giving me a wink. “Do you remember what we were doing when we conceived him . . .?”
I remember that night well. Sloane and I had just liberated four million in unmarked American bills from an armored truck outside of Gatchina. Robbery is not a usual part of our business, but Sloane had gotten a tip on the unusually large cash transfer, and she was intent on intercepting it.
I had never seen her as energized as she was that night. She insisted that we go, just the two of us, and she organized the entirety of the heist. I let her take the lead for once, watching her work with the skill and precision of a master.
Once we had the money, we hauled it up to the penthouse suite of the Astoria hotel, bribing the clerk for the use of the service elevator.
Sloane spread the money out on the bed, then stripped naked and lay on top of the pile of bills, offering me her body and the cash as our anniversary present.
We had been married four years.
I never expected an heir from her. Dominik had a son to carry on the Petrov name. And I knew how Sloane valued her independence and her physical prowess.
Yet, I must admit . . . every time she showed me her cleverness, her ruthlessness, and that wild joy that bubbled up inside of her like an endless fountain, I thought to myself, What a child we could make, her and I. He’d rule the world.
She was possessed of a kind of madness that night. We fucked like demons, scattering the stolen money like leaves in a hurricane. I took her in every position, harder and harder as she urged me on.
She dug long scratches down my back, she bit my shoulder so hard that it bled, she rode me like a prize stallion in the final stretches of the Triple Crown.
As I erupted inside of her at last, she cupped my testicles in her hands, stroked her fingertips on the underside of my balls, milking every last drop out of me.
We were drenched in sweat, cash stuck to our backs, the hotel room destroyed.
A few weeks later, she told me she was pregnant.
“I thought you were on the pill?” I asked her.
“I must have forgotten to take it,” she replied, in her enigmatic way.
I was obsessed with the changes in her body. Every day I wanted to run my hands over every inch of her, marveling at the fulness of her breasts, the darkening of her nipples, the swelling of her belly.
My lust for her was so intense that I followed her around the monastery from room to room. Nothing ever required more self-restraint than keeping my hands off her when she was in the throes of nausea.
I was rewarded by a libido surge in the second trimester—then it was Sloane who attacked me at odd hours of the day, ripping my clothes off my body and mounting me without foreplay. Her pussy was wetter and warmer than it had ever been, her curves filling my hands in new and satisfying ways. She was a goddess of fertility: I only wanted more of her to worship.
My happiness was violent in the extreme. I felt a new level of protectiveness that probably annoyed her at times.
“Of course I’m going down to the gym!” she scoffed, lacing up her sneakers at eight months along. “Do you think women in olden days sat around eating bon bons?”
“The royals did,” I growled. “And you are my queen, after all . . .”
Sloane flatly refused the Russian traditions of the husband not accompanying the woman to the birthing room and the forbearance of buying any baby items until after the infant’s safe arrival.
“You know I’m always prepared,” she told me. “I’m not giving birth without a single damn onesie in the house.”
“Usually the husband buys the baby clothes while the wife is in hospital.”
“Not this husband,” she said. “You’ll be right beside me, rubbing my feet.”
In truth, I mostly held her hand, brought her ice water, and terrorized any nurses who dared chastise Sloane for cursing.
She birthed our son as she does all things: with single-minded intensity.
She pushed him out and demanded to hold him at once, before he had even been cleaned.
If I had any question whether my wife possessed maternal characteristics, it was answered when the doctor pricked our infant’s foot, making him squall.
“You take one single drop of blood from my son, and I’ll answer it with a gallon of yours,” she snarled in perfect Russian.
The doctor retreated, hands upraised, mumbling apologies and excuses about hospital policy.
I admired our son’s thick head of hair, his lusty screams, and his long frame.
“He’ll be tall,” I told Sloane.
“Of course he will,” she said. “Look at his parents.”
She surprised me by nursing him, and by carrying the baby in a sling everywhere she went.
I suppose I should have known that Sloane does nothing by halves. She would never have a baby only to neglect it.