Page 34 of Pregnant By the Russian Pakhan

“Listen to her voice note, Mikhail,” Mira said, clutching his arm in her urgency.

She felt him go still at her touch, and it made her look up at him. His dark eyes had darkened even more and they blazed down at her with something so raw and naked and powerful that she felt scorched. She jerked her hand away and pressed play on the voice note.

Sarah’s trembling voice filled the room again.

When they were done listening to it, Mikhail looked from her to Williams and something passed between the two men, something like understanding, but no words were spoken.

Mikhail transferred his gaze to hers. “I understand she’s important to you?”

“Yes. Please get Sarah out. Get her out of there for me,” Mira pleaded, beside herself with alarm for her friend. “Sarah rarely complains about anything. She bears everything quietly. If she’s saying anything now, it means it’s a whole lot worse than she’s letting on.”

Mikhail searched her gaze for a minute, then he sighed and said, “Give me the layout of your father’s house. I need to know my way around if I’m going to get her out.”

Mira hesitated for a fraction of a second before she began mapping out the sketch of her father’s villa with a pen and paper. Some inner instinct, a deep-seated loyalty to her undeserving father, made her omit the location of his bedroom and his library from her sketch.

When she was done, something in the way Mikhail’s gaze scanned the document quickly, flicked to her face, and then scanned the page again made her realize that he knew exactly what she’d done and what it meant.

Mira felt her heart sink to her toes when he said nothing at all of this discovery that she didn’t trust him. He was willing to walk into his enemy’s den at her behest, even though, for all he knew, it might well have been a trick by her and her father to trap him. He was willing to trust her, but she hadn’t trusted him.

“Mikhail, wait!” she called.

But he had already thrust the paper into the back pocket of his jeans. “I’ll be seeing you,” he said as he leaned forward and pressed an incredibly gentle kiss against her lips.

Then he strode from the room.

“That boy has given you his trust, you know,” Williams said quietly, worsening her pain and guilt.

“Mikhail is a mafia boss. He doesn’t trust anyone, Williams,” she said.

The old man stared at her through narrowed eyes for a minute, and Mira had the unnerving feeling that he saw far more than he was letting on. Finally he said, “Whenever you’re ready to talk to me, little one, I’ll be here.”

He gave her a gentle paternal pat on the shoulder and turned and walked away.

Mira was beside herself with worry as she waited for Mikhail to return. She already knew how dangerous her own father was, and she was sure she probably didn’t know the half of it—unlike Mikhail, who was in the same business as her father and who her father had tried countless times to kill.

Yet knowing all that, he had risked his life for a servant he had never met, simply because she’d asked him to. That was saying a lot. Her heart turned over in her chest as she thought about it.

Mira sank onto the nearest chair in his office, thinking about Mikhail and what he had done. He was special, she thought. He was the reason she still had any faith left in humanity.

He was so tough and so powerful and yet he could be so gentle and thoughtful. When he made love to her, he was so giving and generous. He showered her with gifts every chance he got, no matter how much she protested that she didn’t want them. He made her feel safe. He was possessive, and—

Are you falling in love with him? her subconscious queried.

Mira sank onto the bed, letting the thought wash over her. But before she could consider her feelings, her phone beeped with the sound of an incoming message. She looked down at her WhatsApp chats and saw that it was a message from her father. She’d forgotten to block him on WhatsApp.

Why was he messaging her? He hadn’t captured Mikhail, had he?

Mira opened the message with more than a little trepidation, and the entire world tilted on its axis.

It was an old picture of a seventeen-year-old Mikhail. His face was that of a teenage boy, but the dark heavy eyebrows, the proud aristocratic nose, and the granite jaw were unmistakable.

He was standing over a woman; she was red-haired and bent at an unnatural angle that made it obvious she was dead. A keening cry escaped Mira’s throat as she recognized the woman at once.

That was her mother in the picture—Marybeth Dostoevsky.

Mikhail was standing over her mother’s dead body with the murder weapon, a knife, in his hand. Her mother’s entire midsection was covered in blood where she had been stabbed, and the knife he held dripped blood.

Underneath the picture, her father had written a cryptic note: Happy married life.

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