Page 32 of Sexting my Bratva Daddies

We had retaliated on multiple occasions. All of them, in fact. Leo did not let any infraction against our brotherhood stand. And if there were a board of tally marks showing our battle against one another, our brotherhood had done far more to Anton than he to us.

It was the way of things.

Leo stopped at the corner of his desk.

What would Peyton think of this version of Leo? Gone was the warm man who crooned to her. This was our truth. We were cold and unyielding. This could not change.

“Send a message.” Leo drilled me with a look that locked my knees in place. “Make it a good one.”

“Yes, sir.” My hands bunched into fists. They would be bruised and bloodied by nightfall. As the Petrov Bratva’s enforcer, this was my reality. Soft was not meant to be in my vocabulary. They had beaten the word out of me as they killed my mother.

To accept anything less would lead to ruin. We were Bratva. We did not kneel, nor did we succumb to such weakness as love.

13

PEYTON

The quarterly budget review consisted of a twelve-page document that required my full attention.

I’d read the same paragraph four times.

It was becoming a problem. Since when did I slack on my work simply because it existed in the same building as Viktor, Misha, and Leo?

Viktor had walked past my desk forty minutes ago, his fingers brushing the back of my chair without touching me, and my brain had taken that as an excuse to check out. That almost touch became more important than anything else.

I ground my teeth and leaned closer to the computer screen, letting it fill my vision.

Leo’s laugh trickled out from the meeting room, the low timbre vibrating in my core. It was a real laugh, not the one he deployed like a weapon during meetings.

I knew the difference now, and that was the problem. I’d wanted to know things about them, real, genuine things. And now that I did, it left me craving more and apparently unable to concentrate on my job.

I was going to lose my mind… in the best way possible and at an alarming rate.

I gave up on the budget review after reading the opening sentence twice and leaned back in my chair to stare at the ceiling. There was nothing unique about it. Just another ceiling, but staring at it let me reminisce about Misha’s offer. He’d tossed it out there last night with one of those casual tones that I used to think meant he didn’t really care.

I knew better now, and when he’d asked if I would consider moving in, I’d gaped at him.

I mean, yeah, we spent almost every night together anyway, and my apartment felt lonelier by the minute, but that didn’t mean I’d uproot all my shit after a couple of weeks.

Then again, my toiletries sat on a shelf in their shower, and my favorite coffee brand appeared in the kitchen cabinet overnight.

Misha had said, with a straight face and factual delivery, that it was more efficient.

Like efficiency was the only thing that mattered.

I was considering it only because I spent the last week falling asleep in the middle of a sentence and waking up warm and tangled in their arms and feeling more rested than I had any right to be after the things we’d done.

I always went home to my apartment and lay awake too long listening to traffic and remembering the feel of their arms across my stomach as they slept.

The rational part of me–a part growing smaller every day–had a list of objections.

And at the top?

My family.

I rocked back and forth in my luxury leather chair and groaned, lifting my hands to my eyes and grinding my heels into the sockets.

My family would not judge me. I knew that in my heart. My parents were the most open-minded people on the planet.