“What about you?” Lev asks suddenly, eyes fixing on me with unsettling directness. “Do you know how to shoot?”
“Lev,” Alya hisses, shooting him a warning look.
“What? It’s a fair question,” he counters. “If she’s living here, she should know how to defend herself.”
I meet his gaze steadily. “I can handle a gun, if that’s what you’re asking.”
All three children look at me with varying degrees of surprise.
“Really?” Lev sounds surprised.
“My father thought every woman should know how to protect herself,” I reply, the memory bittersweet. “He taught me when I was about your age.”
“Was he in security?” Nikolai asks, finally looking up from his book.
I laugh softly. “No. He was a literature professor who watched too many crime shows and worried too much. But he was right about some things.”
Konstantin’s hands still briefly as he looks up at me, something unreadable flickering in his eyes.
“Perhaps you can join us at the range sometime,” he says finally, returning to his task. “Show us what you know.”
“Is that an invitation or a test?” I ask.
The corner of his mouth quirks up. “Both.”
As the kitchen fills with the scent of yeast and herbs and the barely contained energy of three children who are clearly sizing me up in their own ways, I feel something dangerous unfurl in my chest.
No. Do not go there, Bella.
This isn’t a real family, and this isn’t my real life. This is a business arrangement with pizza night thrown in.
This is a contract, not a Hallmark movie. There is no us,I remind myself firmly.
16
Bella
Thirty minutes in, Konstantin is elbow-deep in dough, sleeves rolled up, forearms flexing like they’re getting paid to audition for a fantasy I am actively tryingnotto have.
I’m supposed to be helping.
Which is hard when my entire nervous system is busy tracking every movement of the man beside me like he’s a live wire and I’m a moth with a martyr complex.
He kneads the dough with brutal efficiency, veins rising along his arms like a roadmap to bad decisions. I try not to stare. I fail instantly. One particularly thick vein snakes up his bicep and disappears beneath the hem of his sleeve.
Oh God.
And then there are his fingers.
Jesus.
Those fingers. The ones currently stretching and folding dough like it owes him money. The same fingers that hadme unraveling on satin sheets not even forty-eight hours ago. Fingers that hadno businessbeing that precise, that thorough, that devastating.
I should not be thinking about how they curl. Or how they press. Or how they linger— No.Stop it.
Bad girl.
This ispizza night.Family-friendly. Notpound-me-like-doughnight.
