Page 56 of Bought By Sin

21

LEV

Maksim didn’t leave last night as I expected him to. I turned to head inside my home but he called me back. Adrik had texted that Uncle Dmtiri’s vitals were heading south, so I hopped in the car with Maksim to rush to the mansion.

The private nurses managed to adjust his medications to stabilize him, but we all waited until the doctor paid a home visit and checked him over as well.

The prognosis remained the same.

He was slowly dying.

Never to resume a fraction of the life he once led so vigorously with power.

But it wasn’t until I stood off to the side, watching and waiting for the scare to pass, that I felt so alone in the room. My brother was here. All my cousins, too. But Mila wasn’t.

I felt her absence so acutely that my chest ached. That was the critical moment where I realized precisely what Maksim was talking about.

She was mine.

She’d become mine via a transaction, but that didn’t mean that it had to define all she had come to mean to me.

“I’ll give you a ride home,” Alexei offered when we all decided that things were back to “normal”. That new normal that meant Uncle Dmitri was “breathing” with the machine doing the bulk of the work. The new normal that meant his heart was beating with the assistance of so many drugs to keep him limping along.

I rode with my brother, mentally exhausted and almost wary of seeing Mila now. If I so much as saw her delicate face, I’d crumble and need her so badly that I feared I’d never stop. That I’d keep pushing and going and begging for her submission in the back of my mind until it would fully consume me.

I was obsessed. And that was why I decided to call it a night instead of checking in on her at the gym.

Distance never solved many things in life, though, and it didn’t do a damn thing where my need for her was concerned.

In the morning, when I first saw her, my heart thumped faster and my dick woke up. No matter what she did, what she wore, and how she behaved, this longing to own her completely never faded.

“Ready to go?” I asked her after she finished her breakfast and I put my protein drink shaker cup in the sink.

She nodded. But she didn’t ask what I needed her to be ready for.

“Adrik wants to meet about a couple of developments.”

We headed to the mansion, and I couldn’t help but notice how much calmer I was on this ride versus how I’d been when I rode with Maksim after the unexpected alert about Uncle Dmitri. Being with Mila soothed me. And I hated the possibility that my view of her was shifting more and faster than hers ever could about me.

If I didn’t have that contract to make her be here, would she want to stay?

Now wasn’t the time to ask, because once we got into Adrik’s, it was clearly the time to discuss business. The business of trying to find Gregori and Yusef Antonov. Among all the things on our radar, that damn network was the biggest priority.

We filed into the office space that used to be Uncle Dmitri’s, and it didn’t faze me how we all had our places. We all had our positions for where to sit in the large room. It wasn’t crowded, but as we all took our places, it seemed like clockwork.

Even with the addition of Mila, a new constant at my side.

Viktor picked up on it and commented. “What, are we all bringing women in to the important meetings?” he quipped. Best known for his sarcasm and what would usually pass as wit, he smiled goofily at Elena.

“Shut the fuck up,” Adrik growled.

The first one of us to settle, he had the most practice in justifying why Elena would always be included. Even before they’d started getting serious—or serious about not hiding that they were together—Elena had a role here. She’d been the accountant from a distance and then was integrated with that same role.

“Are you implying they’re not welcome?” Maksim challenged as he held Carina’s hand and led her to sit on his lap. She went along with it, but she cringed and squirmed to get up.

“Sorry, it’s just not comfortable to sit at all today, this freaking sciatica pain,” she groused, standing and rubbing her baby bump and stretching from side to side.

“I’m not implying anything,” Viktor said. “Pretty soon, we’ll be outnumbered or something.” He was joking, but I read further into what he wasn’t saying.