Page 71 of Inked in Devotion

“Your wife doesn’t trust your ability to handle this?”

Kirill shrugged. “If what happened was before my time, then Ivan has more information. I’m a big fan of saving time.”

The door to the study opened, and Ivan walked in.

“Why didn’t you tell me the Vozhokari is pestering you?” he asked me.

“Have a seat, Ivan,” Kirill said. “If there was anyone Kolya should have informed, then it should have been me.”

Ivan huffed and sat in the chair in front of the desk. Kirill had an ancient tome open and he’d been flicking through it. A book that was a hundred and fifty years old and passed down for generations. Everything about the Vozhokari was in there, including the time the Petrovs broke away from them and joined Russian organized crime.

“What does Vozhokari even mean?” Lucy was typing on her phone. “I can’t determine its etymology. Sounds Russian, even Japanese.”

I shrugged. “No one knows. Grigori suggested it might be a derivative of the Russian word for harbinger…predvestnik.”

Lucy frowned at me disbelievingly.

Yeah, Grigori was full of shit.

“Oh my God, what is that?” Lucy pointed to a drawing of a man fucking a woman on top of a stone slab. Torches and hooded figures surrounded the couple fucking on the surface.

“The blue-eyed Petrov warrior is to keep the line of the undying alive,” Kirill said, and the way he said it, he was trying not to laugh. He scratched his brow. “He is tasked with impregnating a vessel to continue the line.”

“Undying?” Lucy laughed. “What are you, a vampire?”

“There were rumors we were,” I murmured. “In reality, we were simply hard to kill.”

“The genetics of a blue-eyed Petrov,” Ivan said. “Duncan King was interested in the Petrov genetics. That was why we were associates.”

My brows drew together. “Is that why Esther knew about these Vozhokari assassins enough to hire them to go after Chloe and her mom?”

“Yes. Duncan regretted telling her about them.”

“When?” Lucy asked.

“Several times,” Ivan said. “He tasked me with watching over Renée. Even after Aralina was born, I kept tabs on Renée and Chloe.” He nodded to me. “Remember that time I sent you to Georgia because two assassins were after them?”

“So you had already met Chloe before then?” Lucy asked me, and I didn’t like the accusation in her question.

“I hadn’t ‘met’ them. My job wasn’t even them. It was the assassins.”

“I remember that incident,” Kirill said. “The bratva had to pay off an organization for interfering with a legitimate contract. That was the Vozhokari?”

Both Ivan and I nodded.

“Grigori kept bringing up that incident against me. What he couldn’t get was I owe my allegiance to the bratva. Not the Petrovs, and especially not the Vozhokari.” Because the Petrovs did nothing other than take me in when the Vozhokari killed my parents. The Petrovs considered it a justified response when my father refused their vessel to marry my mother. “Grigori said we were going against our tradition and I needed to pay.”

“With your sperm?” Lucy said with a straight face, but the twitching of her lips and amusement in her eyes irritated the hell out of me.

Kirill chuckled. “Apparently, Kolya has super-soldier sperm. Maybe we should bottle it up and sell it on the black market.”

“Fuck you, Zahkarov. That’s not even funny.”

“It’s not.” Lucy crossed her arms. “So if it’s a myth, why is Duncan King interested in the Petrov line? There must be science-based genetics backing it up, not merely mythology.”

Kirill leaned back in his chair, as if hanging on to some succulent information.

I wanted to roll my eyes.