I closed my eyes, a single tear escaping and disappearing into the pillow. I had tried to save my father, and in doing so, I had invited a war to our doorstep.
Outside the thick stone walls of the Lobanov estate, I knew the engines were starting. Guns were being loaded. The Italians were moving, and the Bratva was mobilizing to meet them.
The peace was over. The silence was gone. And as I lay there in the arms of the man who was both my captor and my savior, I knew that the blood that was about to be spilled would be on my hands as much as his.
The war wasn’t just coming. It was already here.
Chapter Sixteen
Alexei’s POV
Usually, this room was my sanctuary—the place where logic reigned, where the chaos of the world was reduced to pins on a map and percentages of probability. However, tonight, it felt like a cage.
I sat at the head of the heavy oak table, the wood scarred by decades of Lobanov history. Across from me, the map was spread out like a flayed skin. Red pins marked the Italian routes—the veins through which their poison tried to flow into our city. Blue pins marked my safehouses—the fortresses that kept my wing of the empire breathing. And then there was the black pin. It sat dead center at an old, decaying dockyard, a place the Italians hadn’t touched in three years. It was a ghost of a location, a relic of a previous war. But the tech team had traced the intercepted message back to a relay station less than a mile from those rotting piers.
The bastards knew her father was alive.
“The chatter is spiking,” Roman said, leaning over the table. “They aren’t just feeling around anymore, Alexei. They’re mobilizing. They think they’ve found the one thing you can’t afford to lose.”
I didn’t answer. I couldn’t. Every time I opened my mouth, I felt the words like a knife balanced on the edge of my tongue. I wasn’t thinking about the dockyard. I wasn’t thinking about the shipments of Ricci’s heroin that we’d need to intercept to cripple their funding.
I was thinking about Mila. I was thinking about the way she had looked at me this morning—that flicker of defiance masked by a layer of bone-deep terror. She had lied. The realization was a low-grade fever in my blood, a constant, throbbing heat. I had given her everything. I had brought herinto the heart of the Lobanov machine, protected her from the monsters at the gate, and given her my name.
And she’s carrying my child.
My hand instinctively tightened into a fist on the table.
A part of me was growing inside a woman who didn’t trust me enough to tell me her father was still breathing.
“We have to move,” Dimitri said, his voice the steady pulse of a soldier. “If they get to him before we do, they’ll use him to force a parley. Or worse, they’ll execute him and pin it on us to turn the remaining neutral families against the Bratva.”
“He’s leverage,” Roman added, his eyes meeting mine. “We find the father, we bring him in and use him. We dangle him in front of the Italians, draw them out into the open, and finish this.”
“No one touches him,” I practically growled. Then I lowered my tone in silent apology to my older cousin as I added, “I’ll deal with him.”
Roman raised an eyebrow, but then he nodded.
It wasn’t about the old man. I didn’t give a damn if Mila’s father lived or died. But I knew Mila. I knew the fragile architecture of her heart. If one of my men killed him, if he died in a crossfire of my making, the bridge between us wouldn’t just be cracked—it would be gone. She would never forgive me. And the thought of her looking at me with nothing but hatred for the rest of our lives was a vacuum in my chest.
I wanted to be the one to decide his fate because I was the only one who understood what he meant to her.
“Fine,” Dimitri said, sensing the shift in the room’s temperature. He cleared his throat and pointed to a blue pin on the outskirts of the city. “Then we need to talk about Mila. The estate is secure, but the Italians are bold. We should move her to the safehouse. It’s isolated, easy to defend, and away from the line of fire.”
“No,” I said instantly.
“Alexei,” Konstantin spoke up for the first time. While Roman worked with me more often, Konstantin and I were closer—it probably had something to do with the fact that he was my youngest cousin and we were in the same age bracket. He had a way of looking at me that stripped away the cloak of my title or office. He knew me. “Dimitri is right. She is your greatest vulnerability right now. Moving her is the logical play.”
But that didn’t mean his opinions were unshakable to me.
“She doesn’t leave my sight,” I said, my voice like iron hitting stone.
“You can’t run a war and watch her at the same time,” Konstantin countered calmly. “You’re walking a fine line, Alexei. Protection is one thing. Obsession is another. One keeps you alive; the other gets you killed.”
I looked at him, my jaw tightening until it ached. I knew he was right. I knew that keeping her here, in the center of the storm, was a tactical nightmare. But the idea of her being miles away, behind walls I didn’t personally stand guard over, made my skin crawl.
I didn’t trust my men to protect her. I didn’t trust the safehouse to hold. I didn’t even trust Mila herself not to run, not to try and find her father on her own.
“She stays,” I said, turning to Dimitri. “Double the perimeter guards. I want a drone in the air twenty-four-seven. If a stray cat crosses the property line, I want to know about it.”
