Page 177 of Filthy Promises

When I’m done, I rest my forehead against the cool porcelain, not even caring about germs anymore.

“You okay in there, baby?” I whisper, my hand finding its way to my stomach. “I’m sorry things are so messed up. I didn’t know… I still don’t know…”

Tears threaten again. How, I’ll never know. I’ve cried more in the last eight hours than I have in the past five years. At this point, the liquid coming out of my eyes is pure Pedialyte.

Back on the lumpy bed, I grab my laptop—my own, not Vince’s—and open a fresh browser window. My fingers hover over the keyboard for a moment before I type:

Grigor Petrov Russian Bratva

The search results load, and suddenly, I’m staring at the face of a man who is allegedly my father.

Silver hair. Unforgiving eyes. Scars pockmarking his cheeks and forehead.

He looks nothing like me, but I could swear there’s a glimmer of something familiar in the set of his jaw.

Or maybe I’m just imagining things, because I desperately want some part of this to make sense.

I click through article after article, piecing together a picture of the man who apparently contributed half my DNA. Grigor Petrov: notorious Russian crime boss, sometimes-enemy of the Akopov family, responsible for countless deaths and disappearances over a decades-long blood feud interspersed with periods where the families pretend to get along before inevitably stabbing each other in the back again.

Also, my father.

Or so Vince says.

One article mentions his family: a wife, two sons, no mention of a daughter. Nothing about an American woman named Margaret St. Clair.

Could it really be true? Could my absentee father—the man Mom always described as “just some guy who couldn’t handle responsibility”—actually be one of the most dangerous criminals in Brighton Beach?

Mom.I need to see her. But what would I even say?

Hey, Mom, funny story—remember my deadbeat dad? Turns out he’s actually a Russian mob boss! Oh, and the father of my baby has been investigating me for five years because he thought I might be a plant! Pass the Jello?

I close the laptop, feeling sick again. Not morning sickness this time. Just pure, unadulterated despair.

How could I have been so stupid? So naive? I let myself believe in fairy tales—that Vincent Akopov, of all people, had fallen in love with plain, ordinary me. That the most powerful, violentman I’d ever met had somehow seen past all his options to choose the girl from Marketing with the secondhand clothes and the mountain of medical debt.

But it was never about love. It was about control. Keeping your playthings close and your enemies closer.

My phone vibrates again.

This time, it’s not Vince, but Natalie.

Hey girl, just checking in! Haven’t heard from you in a few days. Lunch soon?

That gut punch hurts almost as bad as all the others.

My so-called best friend. Five years of friendship, and it was all a job. An assignment. All those late-night heart-to-hearts, the shoulders cried on, the secrets shared—nothing but intelligence gathering for Vincent fucking Akopov.

I hurl the phone across the room.

It bounces harmlessly off a pillow because even in my rage, I’m practical enough to know I can’t afford a new one.

Sleep eventually takes me, but it offers no escape. In my dreams, I’m running through endless corridors while men with silver hair and ice-blue eyes chase me, their hands reaching for the child I clutch to my chest.

No matter how fast I run, in the end, they catch me.

They always catch me.

“You look terrible, honey,” Mom says as soon as I walk into her hospital room.

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