I clench my jaw. “Contractually.”
“No,” she corrects me. “Legally.”
With that, I turn around. “Is there something you want?”
“I want to be included in your decision making,” she says. And if I were a man with a normal sense of humor, I might laugh right now. But I’m not.
“There’s nothing to include you in. This, along with everything else, doesn’t concern you.”
“I want to be your partner,” she adds.
I suck my teeth before letting out an exhausted breath. “Why?”
“Because I had reasons for marrying you too!” Jenica cries out.
“You mean besides the status, name, and money that comes with marrying apakhan?”
“I have my father’s money; I don’t need yours. He would have worshiped me till his dying breath even if I hadn’t carried on the family name.”
“Then why did you marry me?”
I check my phone again. I don’t have time for this. But the woman is clearly unhappy. Her tone is wound up high enough to come out in an octave that only dogs can hear and the last thing I need is her whining to daddy.
Jenica chews her lip for a moment. Jesus Christ, is she going to cry? I have two minutes before I need to be out the door and that’s pushing it. I hardly have time to pose as a supportive husband, let alone deal with the emotional needs of waterworks.
Luckily she stays strong. “Because I don’t want to live this life.”
“Which life is that?”
Jenica motions around dramatically. “This. I didn’t ask to be born into this. The same as my mother and your mother and just about any other Bratva woman doesn’t want it.”
“I am not having a conversation with you about my mother,” I say, heading for the door.
But again, her words stop me. “Am I wrong? Is this the life she wanted?”
If Jenica is asking if my mother wanted to be married to a controlling, overindulgent, lazypakhanwho more or less ran our name into the ground only to lose a son in the process, the answer is an obvious no.
But that’s just how these things work.
“I agreed to marry you because you seem to have a different idea than our fathers did about how things should work,” she goes on. “I also don’t want to see what will happen when Tristan decides to fight back. It’s going to be ugly, Ransome. And I don’t think you’re prepared.”
I step closer to her, looking down over her, my voice low and stern. “I have spent the last decade of my life preparing for what could happen between our two families. Don’t underestimate me.”
“And don’t underestimate him,” she says back up at me. “He doesn’t play by the rules. And he hates to lose.”
“That makes two of us,” I say before walking out the door.
The only thing better about Manhattan, Montana than Manhattan, New York is that there is zero chance I will see anyone I know. But I’m not gonna lie, rural America has me feeling like a fish out of water. Only one person on the planet could have motivated me to come out here. But it’s not Amara.
It’s the baby inside her.
Baron had a point. If that baby is in fact mine, and that baby is a boy, he is the next Rozanovpakhan.The only option for the Rozanovpakhan. Which means he cannot live in the middle of fucking nowhere, Montana. He has to grow up in the family. He has to learn young.
He has to be with me.
And by default, that means his mother does too, as much as the idea of it makes my skin crawl right now.
It’s not a disgust factor. Far from it, unfortunately. But that woman betrayed me on more than one level.
