Page 9 of Inked in Devotion

“How…” Dom started.

“Were you sent to kill her?” Trevor asked.

This motherfucker.

“See, I wasn’t paranoid to think that earlier.” Chloe backed away from me.

Trevor glanced at her. “Are you all right?”

Meanwhile, my phone kept buzzing, and even without answering, I could hear Kirill yelling at me.

“My son?” I gritted.

Chloe pursed her lips and started typing on her phone.

A door opened, and a woman in her fifties emerged with a baby in her arms.

All activity and talking in the room ceased. I couldn’t hear anyone and anything except my breathing, or was it the pulse in my ears? The excruciating anticipation of not knowing what my reaction would be once I came face-to-face with my son.

Then I saw him.

My heart expanded to what my rib cage could accommodate, and an ache throbbed. I exhaled a massive breath and blinked.

And blinked again.

He had my dark hair, instead of his mother’s chestnut brown. The other features were not as decisive except for one. His eyes. I was staring into the same cerulean-blue irises that graced the chosen Petrovs. Blue-eyed, undying, and fearless warriors. Undying wasn’t true, of course. We were simply hard to kill.

“He’s mine,” I breathed, gravitating toward the baby, but Chloe blocked my path.

“What are you doing?” she whisper-yelled.

“I want to hold my boy.” For the first time since I entered this apartment, I felt genuine contempt for Chloe. She’d already kept my son from me long enough. “What’s your problem?”

“You can’t just go up to him and grab him.”

I narrowed my eyes at my son’s mother. “I wasn’t going to grab him. You coddle him, and that’s why he needs to grow up in the bratva.”

“How dare you!”

“Whoa. Whoa.” Both Trevor and Dom inserted themselves between me and Chloe.

“Back off, Petrov.” Dom planted his palm on my chest, and shoved.

“You didn’t just put a hand on me,” I told him mildly, but I was imagining ways to carve him up.

He chuckled darkly. “That look in your eyes? Lose it.”

“You’re telling me how to behave in front of my son?”

“You didn’t know he existed until today.”

He had a point, but keeping my son from me? Nonnegotiable. “I want to hold him.”

“Let him through,” Chloe said. “But the first sign of distress from Sebastian, and you back off, are we clear?”

“Of course.”

“I mean it!”