Page 42 of Daddy's Reluctant Queen

“He’s been having night terrors for a good chunk of his life,” I say. “When he was small, I would let him come into my room until he fell asleep. Now, he’s older and he needs to deal with these sorts of things on his own.”

Her eyebrows deepen, but she says nothing.

“I have been at a loss as to how to teach him to be self-sufficient in that way. Chasing away nightmares isn’t something I’ve ever considered finding a way to fix.”

She tilts her head slightly. “You never worked on stopping your nightmares?”

“No,” I tell her. “When I had them as a child, I couldn’t exactly go to anyone for help. Both my parents were dead and I was in the care of my Pakhan. His job wasn’t to hold my hand when monsters came calling in my dreams.”

Her face softens to something adjacent to sympathy. I continue.

“This kind of thing, I have to admit, I’m lacking in skill. Ironically enough, Natalie wasn’t great at it either. She was very old-world tough. She’d have sooner given him a Benadryl-laced cup of cocoa before she offered a solution the way you did.”

“You… you overheard me.”

“I did. Thank you for being there for him. In every sense. He needs someone…” I trail off. I don’t really know how to phrase this part. Not in a way that might not be offensive to her.

“It’s no problem,” she says. “Somebody has to do it and… and it kind of looks like he’s only got one parental figure in his life, so I’m glad to step in in some capacity.”

I drink my coffee. She’s spoken the thought better than I could have.

“So, what happened to his mother?”

I pause, looking down at cup of coffee, trying to decide whether I should tell her. I suppose I can tell her part of it.

“She’s dead,” I say. “Killed for being adjacent to me in a way that… that I could not have protected her from. No matter how hard I wanted to.”

“That’s cryptic. Care to give a little more detail?”

“I would, but code of silence and all that.”

She snickers. “Am I not in your inner circle?”

I narrow my eyes at her and drink my coffee.

“Okay. So, then, she was your wife?”

“Girlfriend. For at least two, maybe three years. She got pregnant about a year and a half in and Luka was born.”

She pokes at her eggs. “So, she died and you had to take care of her son… who you keep locked up.”

“Yes. You see, no one can know about him,” I tell her. “Outside of myself, no one except you and mysovietnikis aware of his existence. And Ignat only knows because he’s the only person I could ever trust to keep my secrets.”

She nods. “So, he’s a secret child, then. Intriguing. I can also relate.”

“Oh?”

“My little brother and I were ‘secret children’ for a while,” she says. “Our mother didn’t really want us to be a part of the Bratva. I mean, she didn’t reject the life, she just wanted us to have a chance at something… normal, I guess. So, when we were little, there were certain times where we weren’t allowed out of our rooms.”

She ate her food, talking as if what she was saying was nothing at all. “We weren’t allowed to be seen with my father in any way. So, like, when we had to go to school, Mom had to take us and we had to duck down in the car until we were off the property. That went on until I was around ten and Adam was eight. I don’t know how she kept it up for as long as she did.”

“That clearly changed at some point.”

“After she died,” she says, again, casually. “Cancer took her out. Once she was gone, I guess Papa decided that he could trust in nannies and staff to hide us from the Bratva… or he could bring us into the fold. Obviously, he chose the latter.”

“I see.” I mull that over for a few seconds. “I guess you can relate to Luka in more ways than I thought.”

She shrugs. “Not his fault he’s got to be hidden. In a lot of ways, he reminds me of Adam. He used to have really bad nightmares too, so, I’m kind of used to talking little kids down in the middle of the night.”