Page 100 of Bought By Sin

I nodded, glad that my loyalty would never be questioned. Even though Gregori was my blood relative, I was firmly opposed to letting him live for what he had done.

“We choose our family, too,” I said again. “And I will reconfirm it now and forever that I’ll swear to serve Uncle Dmitri, and you, cousin. I will always protect Uncle Dmitri’s line.” I meant him. Adrik, Maksim, Viktor, and Nikolai. My cousins would have the throne before Alexei ever would. I was last in line, so it never crossed my mind to even want to be Pakhan.

With all these thoughts about marrying Mila, though, it was on my mind.

I could marry and start a family and never have to be bogged down with that inheritance and generational expectation hanging over me.

“You do choose your family,” Adrik agreed, no doubt smiling because he was thinking about how he’d chosen to marry Elena despite their rocky and unconventional start.

“And I choose Mila,” I declared.

Not to own.

But to love.

She was the one for me. Her submission and trust were the greatest gifts I ever could have imagined, and with the beauty of violence and peace ebbing and flowing, I understood that I could never control either of them.

I didn’t want to. Because I intended to earn Mila’s love each and every day, hoping it would be freely given to me from the bottom of her heart—true and real love.

36

MILA

Warm and cushioned under the blankets, I struggled to fight the allure of sleeping.

Not a final sleep.

Just a lazy, this-is-cozy, I-don’t-want-to-get-up leisure mood.

I yawned, waking up on the second day after I was shot twice for insisting on lingering to get those files in Yusef Antonov’s office.

Lying around for too long made me restless. I was too hardwired to want to move. A fugue state of idleness would eat away at my sanity after a while—something I’d learned from when I had been cared for after that last beating I’d received.

After the surgery to patch me and sew me up, something I’d heard from the nurses at the hospital, who informed me that I would make a full recovery but would be tired from the sedatives and medicine, I knew that I’d be bed-bound for a while.

But now, a new force of spirit made me want to get up and resume the rest of my life.

The life I wanted to embrace fully, with Lev. With loving Lev.

Earlier, I’d been drifting in and out of sleep. In those blissful moments of being half awake but kind of out of it, I listened to Lev. He’d talked to Alexei. Nikolai might have come by as well because I could’ve sworn I heard him.

But it was the conversation I’d picked up pieces of between Lev and Adrik that had jumpstarted me to want to wake up fully. All so I could kiss this gentle assassin and control freak of an enforcer.

I heard bits and pieces of it.

His plans.

His intentions.

His goal and dream and fantasy all rolled up into one combination of a future that I wholeheartedly wanted to believe in.

He loved me.

I wasn’t just a slave.

I wasn’t only a thing to own and use as a tool.

Lev loved me.