Total pages in book: 99
Estimated words: 92843 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 464(@200wpm)___ 371(@250wpm)___ 309(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 92843 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 464(@200wpm)___ 371(@250wpm)___ 309(@300wpm)
Standing, she carefully repeated my movements, and passed Walker to me. He was slightly lighter than his brother, and although they were twins, I was starting to notice the differences between them.
I repeated what I’d done with his brother, and then reluctantly passed him back to Nell, using her distraction to kiss her on the side of her neck.
Keeping our faces close, I whispered, “I will see you soon, malysh.” And then, with a nod at Tracker, I walked out of the room, totally focused on what I had to do next.
I needed a plan to make this happen smoothly. For the first time in almost eight months, it felt like I could breathe again, even though I knew there was a lot of shit ahead.
Chapter Seven
Nell
“You’re going to have to tell your dad, petal,” Pop-Pop told me, crossing over to sit where Taras had sat only minutes ago. “Don’t expect he’s gonna be too happy ‘bout it. We’ve all been writing possible names down for who’s the father, and now it’s fuckin’ Bogdan Fedorov’s son of all people, so we can’t kill him.”
I winced slightly at the thought of how my dad was going to react, but what he said was right—I was going to have to tell him at some point.
“I’ve told Taras I don’t expect anything from him,” I said over the lump in my throat. “He’s- he’s married,” I choked out, and it pissed me off because I was supposed to have made my peace with that and suffocated the emotions I had for him. “He’s married, and that’s it.”
My Pop-Pop eyed me for a moment. His ability to read people was normally useful, but right now it wasn’t.
“Petal,” he sighed. “The man that just walked out of here, he ain’t gonna accept that. I heard his words, but his face said more. You might wanna cut him out but he’s gonna force himself in and dig deep.”
That was what I was afraid of.
I was just about to say something when a movement at the window next to the door caught my eye, and I saw a flash of dark hair and brown eyes before it disappeared.
Getting up, I moved slowly to the door and opened it to look out into the hallway, but there were only the regular people I recognized and a couple of older people walking around.
Closing it, I frowned at my grandad. “That’s weird. A woman was looking in, but there’s no one out there.”
His eyes went sharp, and his face took on an expression I’d never seen before. “Call Bruce and tell him we need to talk. Also, tell him we need two men here to watch the boys.”
The bomb going off had been fucking terrifying, but I’d been so focused on what followed that it’d been pushed aside while I focused on my sons.
Almost losing one of your kids while they were inside you changed you as a person. But I could honestly say the tone in his voice, and the fact he knew something was going on enough to need two men to watch my babies while I wasn’t there?
It felt like I was struggling to breathe and get oxygen into my lungs.
Chapter Eight
Taras
My brother was waiting for me outside our father’s office as I walked down the long hallway to it. The house was large and formidable, surrounded by concrete walls with steel barriers that went deep into the ground vertically.
If someone managed to get through them and into the compound, they not only had a lot of specially trained men, but the doors and walls had the same steel through them, and the windows were bulletproof.
Nothing was infallible, though, and Dad took no chances, so there were measures few of the staff knew about to protect not just him, but everyone else who worked for him. Loyalty was hard to come by, but he had it from all of them, thus they had it back from him, too.
My brother, my sister, and myself all had the same measures in our properties as well. And at a glance, as I walked down the hallway, it still struck me that you couldn’t tell the work that had gone into them.
As I reached him, Dmitri held his hand out. “Brother.”
Shaking it, I motioned to the door. “Best not keep him waiting.”
Knocking once, he opened the door and I followed him into the room that was big enough to have a seating area with couches, a bar on the other side, and still leave a large area for his desk and the seats in front of it, without the room feeling crowded in any way.
Rising from his seat, he walked out from behind his desk and over to where we were once we reached him. Holding out his hand, I shook it, accepted the hug that accompanied it, and then watched as he did the same to Dmitri.