Page 150 of Mafia King’s Dangerous Vow

“That’s it, my love,” I murmur against her ear. “Let go. Stop thinking.”

She comes with my name on her lips, her body arching into mine, and I drink down every sound. Before she can catch her breath, I’m positioning myself at her entrance. She’s slick and ready, and when I push inside, we both groan at the sensation.

“Yes.” Her nails dig into my shoulders. “God, yes.”

I start moving, slow and deep, watching her face. The tension that’s been carved into her features since this afternoon finally eases. Her eyes close, not in grief but in surrender.

This is what she needs. To feel something other than fear.

Her heels are digging into my hips, pulling me deeper. I comply because denying her anything feels impossible right now.

The rhythm builds. Her hands are everywhere—my shoulders, my back, holding on as if she has decided, for this hour, not to fall alone. The sounds she makes drive me harder, faster, chasing more than physical release.

My hand slides between us, finding her clit, and she shatters. The feeling of her clenching around me destroys what’s left of my control, and I spill myself into her, driving her through the aftershocks.

Eventually, her shaking eases, though sleep is still far away. I keep my hand moving slowly along her spine, counting the minutes by the softening of her breath.

There are things I can do.

I can stop Kalinin’s men. I can block a car. I can put enough force between that boy and David Kalinin that no one gets close to him without my permission.

I know how to do all of that.

I do not know how to give Tamara back eight years.

I do not know how to make a child recognize a mother he never knew existed.

Tomorrow, that may matter more than anything.

Tamara’s voice comes once more in the dark, barely there.

“Sasha?”

“I’m here.”

“Don’t let me make it worse for him.”

The words move through me like a blade. I close my eyes and hold her closer.

“I won’t.”

35

I PICKED UP THE DRAWING. (TAMARA)

Children pour through the front doors in bright coats and crooked backpacks.

A little girl drops a mitten and screams as if the world has ended. A boy with a cello case nearly the size of his body takes a cookie from a friend and vanishes into his mother’s arms.

I should be one of those mothers. Annoyed about mittens, asking about lunch, already thinking about dinner. Worrying about whether my son should try soccer or fencing or piano. Asking if he ate lunch, if he remembered his gloves, if someone was kind to him on the playground.

Instead, I’m sitting in a café across from his school, waiting to see whether he’ll be removed by men who have reduced him to leverage. In my father’s hands, even a child becomes infrastructure.

The rage arrives clean enough to use.

I sit across from Aleksander with a paper cup of coffee cooling between my hands and scan the school entrance. No one at the neighboring table knows why we are here. They don’t see the Sokolov men near the main doors, the side entrance, the Meridian vehicle half a block down, or the route Anna Morozov usually takes when she comes to collect Ivan after art.

A woman near the counter laughs into her phone. The sound scrapes against every nerve I have.