He laughed, sounding far too amused at the prospect. “Everything will be fine, and at the very least, you’ll be able to meet the other wives.”
Real housewives of the bratva.
Seemed legit.
The restaurant where they arrived was lavish, complete with a red carpet that led up to the front doors and a valet who happily took their keys before having the doorman escort them inside.
Mishca kept his hand at the small of her back as they walked inside, and despite her apprehension, Lauren kept her head held high, reminding herself she had nothing to worry about.
It amazed her sometimes just how small her bubble was. Or rather, how much Mishca sheltered her from this part of his life. Of course, she had school and Sacha, but it wasn’t often that she had the chance to really delve into this world of his.
Now, for the first time, she wasn’t just Mishca’s girlfriend or a complication that Mikhail couldn’t get rid of.
She needed to carry herself as such.
The men had dispersed around the room, talking amongst each other as the women and children were huddled mostly to one side. In all her years with him, she had forgotten how the bratva usually ran things. Mishca was open and honest about most things—though he still had his secrets, she was sure—but not everyone was like that.
“Drink?” Mishca asked her, steering her over to the table of glasses.
“Quick introduction,” he whispered in her ear, his free hand sliding more firmly around her waist before pulling her against him.
She wasn’t sure whether it was because he wanted her close or if he was sending a message, but she didn’t mind either way.
“The Sanarovs,” he said, pointing with his gaze at the trio of men standing on the other side of the room, “Stick to themselves for the most part. The Cuban cartel down in Florida keeps them too busy for them to have a problem with any one of the families.”
With slight pressure on her waist, he turned her a little more. “Petrov and his uncle.”
He repeated this process until the names started to jumble in her head, and she was sure that if he gave her any more, they would go right over her head.
“Ready?” he asked as he took her hand, ready to lead her into the den of wolves.
Taking a breath, Lauren finished her drink and gave a nod of her head.
She was ready for anything.
Later, after they’d left the relatively uneventful dinner and returned to the apartment building, the air between them changed.
He stood across from her, his hands still tucked inside his pockets, though he was now leaning against the mirrored wall of the elevator. She could feel the weight of his gaze, skimming her in that lazy way that told her exactly where his mind had gone.
These were the moments she lived for. When responsibility went out the window, and it was just the two of them again. When nothing else in the world mattered.
They stumbled into the penthouse one after the other, her laughter echoing in the silence of the living room.
Now that dinner was over and her job was finished, she relaxed further, letting the night’s drama slip away. She also realized that they were well and truly alone since Sacha was staying the night at Alex and Luka’s house.
“You know,” she said, fingering the zipper of her dress. “The night is ours. What do you want to do with it?”
Oh, how she loved that look in his eyes. The way they seemed to smolder as he approached her, his gaze already falling to the low neckline of her dress—the same place he’d been staring all night.
Only now, he planned to do something about it.
Present.
God, she now realized that question had gotten her into trouble.
And what made it all the more ironic was the little fact that she had been tracking her ovulation for months to avoid this very thing, but she had been drunk enough not to care about anything other than getting him into bed as quickly as possible.
It wasn’t that she didn’t want a second baby—quite the opposite, actually—but now didn’t seem like the best time. Between school, Sacha, and spending time with Mishca—not to mention his duties with the bratva—she just didn’t see how they would have the time.
But as far as she could tell, she didn’t have much choice now since the truth had come in the form of two very solid lines.
Focusing back on Amber, who walked over to the kitchen and grabbed a pair of crystal wine glasses from the cabinet, she ran her fingers through her hair, trying to decide whether it was best to just come out and say it.
“You look like you could use a drink,” Amber said as she rooted around the wine rack, undoubtedly going for the bottle of rosé that was their favorite to drink whenever they hung out.
Though, tonight, she wasn’t able to gleefully accept the glass Amber poured.
She thought of various scenarios to explain why she wasn’t drinking, but even as her brain raced with the possibilities, she just ended up blurting out, “I’m pregnant.”
Amber had been on her way back to where Lauren was already sitting on the brown leather couch when she paused with both glasses in her hands, blinking in surprise.
“Congratulations?” she said, though it came out as more of a question than anything else.
Lauren didn’t blame her. With the way she sounded, she would have been just as hesitant if the situation were reversed.
“Okay, first … how are you feeling?”
“Like I want to throw up.”
Not because the thought filled her with dread, but rather … no, she didn’t know what she was feeling.
She was excited and terrified all at the same time.
“Have you told Mish yet?”
“I only took the tests last night.” She hadn’t had the chance to tell him.
Though she had a pretty good idea how he would feel once she did.
He’d been hinting for a while that he wanted to have another baby.
It looked like he was getting what he wanted sooner than she’d anticipated.
Amber tossed back her drink before plopping down onto the couch beside her and wrapping her hand in hers before sighing. “You look worried.”
It was probably written all over her face, and if Amber so easily read her, that meant Mishca would too, and that was the last thing she wanted.
“I don’t know if I’m worried. I just … it’s … a surprise. It’s just a surprise.”
Which she knew sounded ridiculous. She knew very well how babies were made—she had one—but getting pregnant with baby number two hadn’t been on her agenda, at least not for the foreseeable future.
Maybe after she graduated from med school.
Or after she secured her internship with a hospital and finished her probationary period.
At the same time, however, those all sounded like excuses to her.
“Kyrnon always says everything happens for a reason,” Amber said, always the best at offering comfort. “I asked him once what was the reason behind him getting nearly beaten to death by a psychotic assassin, and you know what he told me? He said I shouldn’t think of it as a terrible thing that happened to him, but rather a new beginning for us.”
Because he’d been able to void his contract with the Kingmaker, Lauren knew.
Because he now no longer had to travel to unknown locations for a man whose motives were mysterious at best from what Amber shared.
“Everything happens for a reason,” Lauren repeated quietly, nodding her head absently as she accepted that.
“Exactly. Now the question is, what do you do about it?”
First things first, she needed to make an appointment.
Closing her eyes before the wand ever touched her stomach, Lauren drew in a calming breath, waiting for the inevitable.
It didn’t matter that she had already birthed one happy, healthy baby or that she felt fine and the only thing that had changed in a matter of a week was the positive pregnancy tests she had tossed before Mishca c
ould find them.
None of that mattered.
She was still nervous—that flutter of anxiety making her chew on her bottom lip as she waited, and waited, and waited some more.
“Right there,” the technician said, making Lauren’s eyes pop open as she frantically looked at the monitor she was pointing at.
Because as much as she had been nervous before, now she just wanted the truth.
She needed to know.
And right there, in the center of the screen, was a tiny mass.
A cluster of cells and hardly more than that, but the longer she stared, the technician’s voice fading to the background of her thoughts, the more she fell in love.
Quickly.
Easily.
Because right there in black and white was another baby.
A little girl or another little boy.
Her daughter or son.
Sacha’s younger sibling.
“Oh God, if you start crying, I will too, and no one wants to see that,” Amber said with a watery laugh, sniffling herself as she swiped at a tear that spilled over.
The smiling technician excused herself, promising to return shortly with a picture of the ultrasound, then left them alone.
“So are you still planning on surprising Mish?”
Lauren wasn’t sure where the idea had come from. Her first intention had always been to share the news with Mishca once she got confirmation, but leading up to today’s appointment, another idea had struck her. One that both elated her and made her nervous.
She rarely kept secrets from her husband. Not only because she wasn’t very good at keeping them—she loved to share and often got too excited to contain them—but because they made it a point not to keep secrets from each other.
But this time, she was determined not to give it away.
Because with Christmas coming up, she had the best idea for his present, and knowing him as well as she did, she knew it would be the best one yet.
Chapter 5
Mishca had known, for nearly ten years now, that someone else with his face walked the earth.
It was one thing knowing it—Niklaus had always lingered somewhere in the back of his mind, though he hadn’t had to give his twin much thought until he’d popped back up again—but it was something else entirely to actually be around him.
Like staring at a reflection of himself.
And sometimes, when his mood was low and his thoughts turned that way, he saw the bad he had done.
He had made excuses for himself—explained away what he had done with a roll of his eyes as if it shouldn’t have mattered anymore.
He had been twenty-one at the time and had even felt younger some days.
But that didn’t mean he didn’t still feel the weight of what he had said that day that sent Niklaus off into a different life. One that had further hardened him—turned him into a thing of vengeance and violence.
Sometimes, he wondered whether he was responsible for all the pain Niklaus had suffered over the years.
After all, it was because Niklaus had his face that he had been taken in the first place.
The road he’d ended up on would have never been walked had they not been related.
But an apology could only fix so much—words could do only so much. Which was why he had done something he never thought he would do—he sought out Niklaus’s mother.
“It’s hot as balls,” Luka complained as he stepped off the plane, glaring up at the sun bearing down on them as if it were offending him on purpose. “Who the hell wants to live in this shit-eating humidity?”
Even if the Albanian hadn’t been antsy during the flight—because, of course, the one thing that scared him was riding on an airplane—he would have been in a bad mood regardless. If he could be in New York right now with Alex, who had dropped in unexpectedly for a visit, he would.
But Luka had never been one to shirk his duties, so when Mishca had called to let him know the plan, he’d grudgingly agreed even while complaining.
“It’s eighty degrees, Luka,” Mishca said dryly as they headed for the rental on the other side of the hangar.
“And it feels like it’s fucking ninety,” he bit out as he fisted the hem of his shirt and dragged it over his head, far too happy to be half naked and walking through the midday sunlight. “This is my personal hell.”
“Are you going to be like this the entire trip?”
He shrugged. “My burden to bear.”
Sometimes, Mishca forgot that he was already a parent of two.
Complaining or not, they had come here for a reason, and he needed to focus on that.
When he’d first considered this, he’d wondered why Niklaus hadn’t done this himself. He knew, even without specifics, there was good money in what he did for a living.
Mercenaries tended to attract high bidders simply because of their namesake—that fee was practically doubled as one of the Kingmaker’s mercenaries.
Yet, in all the years since he’d returned from the dead, not only had Niklaus not mentioned his mother—not voluntarily, anyway—but he had never mentioned why he hadn’t tried to move her from Florida.
A part of him had wondered if the woman had died in the years since Niklaus had disappeared, but that wasn’t a question he had any intention of asking his twin, considering his predilection toward violence.
So he’d looked into it for himself and found the answer.
Malvina Antakova was alive and well.
And Mishca had made it his mission to find her.
Which had brought him here, now, driving through swamplands and the Glades until he reached an older neighborhood that was located two streets down from a more affluent one.
The bungalow he was looking for was tucked behind a short palm tree, the overhanging leaves nearly preventing Mishca from seeing the house number.
The yard was small but neat with the sort of grass and flowers that said the owner maintained it.
An older style car—one that was popular in the eighties, he imagined—sat parked in the driveway to the left. The oldest of the cars he saw in this neighborhood.
Besides the garden, Mishca realized as he slid from behind the driver’s seat, everything about the property seemed … dated. It might have been the peeling paint on the exterior of the house, or maybe even the cracks in the foundation of the driveway.
It was curious. The careful detail of the front yard contrasted greatly to the rest of the place, which remained untouched.
As if frozen in time.
He tried to imagine what life must have been like for Niklaus here, so different from the mansions he had grown up in.
He remembered the stories Niklaus told, only ever in passing, about his life before the Den. How once he had graduated from high school, he immediately went to work to help his mother pay the bills.
How he had been bullied in school because he didn’t have as much money as the other kids.
Or that his mother had been their maid, and they never went a day without reminding Niklaus of that fact.
Money had never been a thought for Mishca. That was the privilege of growing up under a man as powerful as Mikhail Volkov.
Luka’s expression locked down, but he could still see the way the man’s gaze darted up the street, taking in the neighborhood—imagining what it might have been like two decades ago.
Mishca tucked his phone in his pocket as he crossed the sidewalk, pushing the broken gate open and heading for the front door. The porch steps creaked under his weight, making him think they needed to be replaced, but he put the thought to the back of his mind as he rang the doorbell.
He stepped back, making sure he was within view of the curtain if Malvina checked to see who was there first.
“Might have been better if I did this,” Luka muttered, sounding far less amused than he usually did.
“Why’s that?”
“I imagine it’ll be a hell of a shock to see your face standing here.”
Mishca opened his mouth, ready to respond, but he found he didn’t know what to say. Because Luka wasn’t wrong. He’d completely forgotten, momentarily that Malvina probably thought Niklaus had died considering his disappearance years ago. He knew, without question, that his brother hadn’t been back since then.
Too painful, he imagined.
But as painful as it probably would be for him, it was probably doubly so for Malvina.
“Maybe I should—”
Before he could get another word out, the audible turn of the locks drew his gaze back to the door as it was pulled open, and a woman with graying brown hair and kind but sad eyes stepped out.
A spectrum of emotions crossed her face as her gaze landed on him.
Surprise was the first—dropping her mouth open, stuttering her step.
Then a relief so profound even Mishca had to clear his throat against the flood of emotion he felt.
At that moment, all she saw was Niklaus—her son.
A day she had probably prayed for.
But in the next second, that relief slowly changed to something else—something that sagged her shoulders and made what little light there was in her eyes dim.
Because he was here. And if he was here, that could only mean one thing.
“He’s alive,” he said, the words sounding strained to his own ears. But she needed to know that before anything else he had come to say—that was most important. “He doesn’t know I’m here.”
A laugh escaped her, a soft sound that grew in volume even as tears pricked at her eyes.
Everything seemed to hit her all at once.
He knew the feeling well. He’d felt it the day Sacha was born.
Malvina pulled him into a hug so tight he almost couldn’t breathe, but he didn’t dare complain, not when he could feel the way her body shook with each wrenching sob.
The way he wasn’t quite sure whether he was holding her steady, or she was keeping him balanced.
“I always told her you boys would find your way to each other. A blessing of twins,” she said as she pulled away to pat his cheek.
A curse, Mishca would have said before, but that thought had faded with time.
Down the Line (Volkov Bratva Book 6) Page 4