Within twenty-four hours I was flooded with images of the woman who had absconded with more than just my dignity. The more images I flicked through, the more I felt the blood draining from my face.
“Vadim?”
I zoomed in on the small face crowned by thick locks of dark hair that took me straight back to the day I saw Makari. My throat clogged and I swiped again quickly. More images. Then a clear picture—pale blue eyes, an open smile, a small hand raised toward her treacherous mother’s face.
“You’re worrying me,brat,” Konstantin said, his voice dropping.
I closed my eyes and handed him my phone.
“Bogdan—alert the captain. We fly as soon as we reach the airport,” I said, but my voice fell flat, matching the hollowness that had opened up somewhere beneath my chest.
He wisely left the room to make the preparations.
My child.
A girl.
A Dragunov daughter.
How could I have been so careless as to forget that drunken night?
“Wow. Holy—” My brother stopped himself.
I took the phone back from him, needing to see her again. The little girl who was unmistakably, entirely mine.
“You’re a father,” Konstantin said, his voice hushed with something approaching awe.“I’m an uncle.” A pause.“A girl uncle.”
Iskra looked different in the photographs. Younger. Glowing. So—happy. I went back to the beginning and worked through each image carefully, silently calculating what age my daughter was.
“I’m not sure how to be a girldyadya,brat,” Konstantin mused, apparently working through his uncle concerns regardless of my silence.
The baby was four months. Possibly a few weeks older.
“Damn,” he said, with a slow chuckle.“You’re a girlpapochka.”
I raised my head as something shifted in my chest.
A girl daddy.
I shook my head as the full weight of what had been stolen from me settled in. I hadn’t watched my child swell in her belly. Hadn’t been there when she entered the world—when she took her first breath, when she suckled at her mother’s breast for the first time. Every milestone catalogued in those photographs had happened without me. Every one of them taken from me.
If there was one thing the Bratva did not forgive, it was disloyalty. But theft of my flesh—that was the most intimate betrayal of all.
“You don’t look so good,” Konstantin continued, conversing largely with himself.
I dialled Nikolai’s number.
Waited.
“I got everything. Get every man available and guard them with your lives,” I said quietly. I didn’t need to addor else. It was implied.“I will let you know when I am due to land.”
“Of course, Pakhan,” he said—but I heard the curious note in his voice and chose to ignore it.
“Nikolai?”
“Da, Pakhan?”
“With yourlife,” I stressed, my voice dropping to something quieter and more absolute than a threat.
