Grigori remained resolute, and everyone beneath him stayed in order. Aleksandr and Mikhail had no issues with the senior captain. Smart men, both of them.
It was poker night.
The cards had been dealt, the cigars lit, the vodka poured—and every single one of these fuckers was eyeballing me.
I studied my hand and said nothing.
“So, Pakhan,” Grigori said, with the certain ease of a man old enough to risk it.“Is this yourmal’chishnik?”
I looked up from my cards and stared at him.
“I don’t need a bachelor party.”
“Leave my brother alone,” Konstantin said, tossing a card onto the table without looking up.
“He has a few weeks yet. He might change his mind,” Ruslan said, lifting his cigar and examining the ash with great interest.
“End of an era,” Aleksandr said mournfully.
“We’re growing old,” Mikhail joined in.
“Speak for yourselves. I’m the youngest one here,” Konstantin said.
“You’re two years younger than me,” I said, shaking my head.
“And I have never once wanted to be in your shoes,brat.” He grinned and reached for his glass.“Not even for a second.”
The table shifted—small smiles, exchanged glances, the atmosphere of men who were enjoying themselves at someone else’s expense and had no intention of stopping.
I set my cards face down.
I reached into my holster, drew my gun, and placed it on the table with a quiet and deliberate click.
“The next man to mention marriage gets a bullet in his skull,” I said.
Silence.
“Harsh,” Ruslan muttered, and took a long draw of his cigar.
Chapter 6
Iskra
Something curled up and withered inside me the day my parents read the prenuptial agreement and encouraged me to sign it.
Papa said the Pakhan was being generous. Mama couldn’t meet my eyes, but she said it was just a safety measure—standard practice for someone in his position. She said it the way she said everything difficult: quickly, quietly, with the efficiency of a woman who had spent years not looking too closely at things. Decades of cowardice that had left her spineless.
I read every clause.
Multiple times.
I had two choices, as far as I could see. I could spend my life trapped—a wife in name, a body in practice, watching my children grow up in a world I had no authority in. Or I could treat it as what it plainly was: a surrogacy programme with a payment schedule, and conduct myself accordingly.
The thought should have felt cold and strategic. Instead it left me hollow.
A sharp pang in my chest stole my breath when I reached the clause about birth bonuses. The gap between a son and a daughter. One hundred thousand against twenty. An eighty thousand dollar difference in what my body was worth depending on what it produced. As though the value of a child—of my child—was determined before it took its first breath by something neither of us would have any say in.
Women held little to no value in the Bratva. I had always known that in the abstract. Now I had it in writing, notarised and legally binding.
