Chapter 44

“Don’t look at me like that.”

“Like what?” Sofi protests. “It’s not like I’m⁠—”

“Stop. Don’t try to moonwalk into the conversation you’re clearly angling for.”

“Rude,” she sniffles. “Extremely rude.”

I roll my eyes. “You want polite? Fine. I’ll thank you for keeping your thoughts to yourself. How’s that for polite?”

“Which thoughts specifically?” Sofi tilts her head to one side in mock concentration. “The ones about you being head-over-heels in love with Daphne?”

I clench my jaw. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

“Oh? So, you don’t find it interesting that, after your gushingly romantic date, you’re brooding in your office instead of home with her?” She lifts a hand. “Don’t start with me on that ‘I have work to do’ bullshit. You don’t. This isn’t work; it’s avoidance.”

It wasn’t gushingly romantic, I think to myself. Matter of fact, it was a silent, bitter disaster. After she brought up my father, I shut down, and it’s taken hours since dinner ended for me to claw my way back out of the psychological hole I jumped into.

“You make it sound like I don’t want to be around her,” I mutter.

Mak, who has also decided to make himself my problem tonight, leans against the wall and scrolls through his phone. “You don’t want to be tormented, either, which we understand. It’s gotta be tough: you on that couch, listening to her take a shower, watching her climb into your bed, knowing she’s probably sleeping in the nude⁠—”

“Watch it, asshole.”

“Just speculating. Painting a scene. But anyway, moving on—you can’t look me in the eyes and tell me it isn’t complete torment holding yourself back from thoroughly enjoying the mother of your child.”

I narrow my eyes at him. “That is entirely different from love.”

Sofi scoffs. “Not with you, it’s not. The sooner you accept that, and own it, the better. And the sooner you own it, the sooner you can get this inevitable wedding over with.”

Not this again. “I told Mama I’d think about marriage. Nothing is official yet.”

“And why not? You know you could do a whole hell of a lot worse than Daphne. I don’t know if you could do better.”

That’s for damn sure. I’m reminded on an almost daily basis of how much better Daphne is than my… shall we say, “previous options.” One in particular who needs to wear a longer skirt before I fire her.

“Amen,” Mak chimes in. “And don’t bother disagreeing, because we won’t believe you. So what’s holding you back?”

I sigh. I despise having my younger siblings poke around in my psyche, but I know they do it because they love me. They’re not afraid of me. They know I value them and everything they say and do, even when it’s irritating—and when it’s the truth.

I close my eyes and breathe. When I speak, I take even myself by surprise.

“I’m worried I’ll turn out to be just like… him.”

The room falls silent.

They know exactly what I mean. They were there. We all were.

Our father was a force to be reckoned with. Kostya Chekhov took no prisoners and left no witnesses. “Compassion” was not a word in his vocabulary, in any language—and he was fluent in seven.

Strangely enough, “love,” “loyalty,” and “family” were all words he understood and embraced—at least, so long as they suited his needs. Whenever an outside force threatened us, he would make a show to protect his family. Whenever my siblings and I fought, he would lecture us about “family loyalty” and how our enemies could tear our empire down if we started doing it ourselves from within.

And in the end, it was “love” that got him into trouble. He knew how to use it for his benefit; he knew how to weaponize it against his wife and to lure in his mistresses. It’s not a stretch of the imagination to assume he whispered all sorts of dark and lovely promises. How else could so many women fall into his trap?

Our mother, Asya, was all but shoved into his arms against her will. That much we know. I like to think there may have been a time where he might have loved her—at least enough to create us—but I will never allow myself to delve into the what-ifs.

He doesn’t deserve the mercy.

He was a cruel man to her. Took her to the breaking point, though never beyond it. He loved playing with her too much to completely break her.

I still have the scar on my eyebrow from the one time I threw him off of her. I was taller, stronger than I’d ever been before. Trained. And angry.

Still, I was only fourteen. So, as trained as I was, as big, as angry, I was also stupid. So when I saw Kostya backhand her so hard that she fell against the table and cracked her head on the edge…

I saw nothing but him as my enemy.

I felt nothing but pure, unadulterated rage.

The one lesson I learned from my father that day was to never allow my emotions to overrun my logic. If I let my heart get in the way, I’ll miss the knife coming for my back.

The one lesson he learned that day?

My little brother and sister don’t care how big my enemy is. My enemy is their enemy, and they do not hold back when it comes to protecting their big brother. They may have cowered in the corner while our mother screamed for them to run.

But when I hit the floor, they turned into demons.

Kostya never raised a hand against our mother after that night. He also lost half the sight in his left eye and walked with a permanent limp. He’d do his best to fake it, to pretend like he didn’t need a cane, but his men knew.

Everyone knew.

“You’re not like him,” Sofiya offers, her voice quiet.

“I look like him.” I rub a hand over my jaw. “And sometimes, I… Blyat’. I catch myself sounding like him. Making the same decisions as him.”

Mak shrugs a shoulder. “There you go. You catch yourself. And you stop yourself. Yeah, you’re brutal sometimes, but anyone can see you’re nothing like the bastard.”

“And what happens when I get married? If I get married?”

Sofi scoffs. “Do you have a harem of women we don’t know about?”

I squint at her. “Fuck, no.”

“Do you plan on entertaining women in and out of a revolving door?”

“Absolutely not.”

“So what’s the problem?” they ask in unison.

Fucking hell, I wish I had a drink in my hand.

I also wish my siblings weren’t so goddamn perceptive.

“If I marry Daphne…” I sigh and try again. “If I marry her, I’ll have everything I’ve been so sure I didn’t want or need. I’ll have my wife, my daughter, my own family. Shit, maybe even a few more kids.”

Makari’s looking at me with his soft eyes and sympathetic smile. “Again, Pash… what’s the problem?”

My teeth clench. I don’t want to say it out loud. “What does she get if she marries me? Aside from my name, my money, and everything this Bratva has, what else is there? What if I’m just as bad to her as Kostya was to Mama, and I don’t even realize it?”

“You can’t beat yourself up over shit that hasn’t happened, and probably never will. And if it does…” He glances at Sofi, who nods in agreement. “… we’ll be right there to kick your ass. We happen to adore Daphne. You really think we’d let you raise a hand against her?”

I clap a hand on his shoulder as a sign of gratitude, but I’m all talked out. Sharing my feelings is fucking exhausting.

I wipe my hands on my pants and head to the car. But when I get there, I stop.

My reflection glints under security lamps in the darkened window of the driver’s side door. A man with a shadowed jaw, a furrowed brow, a stormy gaze, frowns back at me.

I know that man. I’ve fought him, and every time I did, I lost.

For a fleeting moment, his left eye clouds over and the scar from my brow changes places to the top of his cheekbone. He scowls at me. Weak, I hear my father’s reflection snarl in my ear. You’re weak and pathetic. Letting a woman get under your skin? You’ll be the end of everything I built. Be a man and grow the fuck up.

I blink. The illusion vanishes.

The scar shifts back into its proper place; the eye clears.

But nothing changes the fact that when I see my reflection, it’s not me who I see.

And when I think about everything I am doing for the Bratva, everything I’ve done for Daphne, my stomach sinks to recognize one horrifying truth.

Kostya Chekhov would have done the exact same things.