Page 84 of Punish Me, Daddy

I swallowed back the instinct to smart off again. This wasn’t a man you poked. This was the man the others deferred to, even Nikolai, who sat beside me like none of this was unexpected.

Maxim’s eyes raked over me, not in a way that felt lecherous, no. In a way that felt like he was figuring me out. Like he’d already decided who I was and how I fit into this whole charade, and he was just waiting to see if I’d prove him wrong.

He gestured to the drink in front of me.

“Welcome to the table.”

I nodded, fingers curling around the chilled glass of vodka that had somehow appeared beside me. The moment settled. He leaned back, and just like that, the room exhaled again.

Glasses clinked. A few words in Russian slipped between the brothers, too fast for me to catch, but the tone shifted. More focused and way more serious.

As I sat back, the door swung open, and my father walked in.

He stepped into the back room of the Iron Wolf like he owned it, which, of course, he didn’t. Not here. Not in this room. Here, it was the Morozov name that mattered. The brothers’ presence was so thick in the air it might as well have been painted onto the walls.

Still, my father held himself like a man who’d forgotten he’d lost control a long time ago. His suit was perfect. Dark gray, crisp white shirt, the mayoral pin on his lapel like a silent challenge to everyone else in the room. But there was a certain tension in his shoulders. He nodded once toward Nikolai and the rest of the brothers.

“Thanks for letting me come.”

Maxim gave a grunt of acknowledgment from the far side of the table. Sergei didn’t even lift his eyes from his drink. Ivan glanced up from his tablet, his pale blue eyes assessing. Aleksei just smirked. Nikolai rose slightly when he entered.

No one introduced him. They didn’t need to. He was the other king in Boston.

Dad’s eyes skimmed around the table—Nikolai, Aleksei, Ivan, Sergei, and then Maxim—before landing on me. His brow furrowed as his mouth constricted into a thin line. He walked tothe empty seat across from Nikolai and sat down like the weight of the entire goddamn city had followed him in.

“I assume you know why I’m here,” my father said.

Nikolai leaned back in his chair, arms crossed over his chest. “Let me guess. Stillwell?”

Dad nodded once. “Word is he’s going public with everything he knows, sooner than we expected.”

I straightened in my seat, the weight of the moment pressing down. “Which is what, exactly?”

“That you manipulated the odds on a high-profile underground fight,” he said flatly.

I looked at Nikolai, then at Maxim, then back at my father. “So?”

“So,” Dad snapped, “he’s threatening to drag your name through the mud. Mine. Nikolai’s. All of us.”

Nikolai’s jaw ticked. “I knew he was going to be a problem from the moment you called me.”

Dad didn’t flinch. “Listen, I would step down if it would help smooth things over, but then Stillwell wins the office. If I stay in, he threatens the family. And if he goes public with this, the cops come forher.”

He turned toward me then, his stare hard, jaw clenched tight. “If you hadn’t done this?—”

“Iknow,” I cut in, my voice sharper than I meant it to be. “I know I caused this.”

I met his gaze and held it.

“But if you say one more word about how this is all my fault,” I seethed, “I will lose my shit.”

The room went still.

Not just quiet—still.

That did not stop me.

“One more thing. If you step down, that’d be a little bitch move. You’re the fucking mayor. Act like it.”

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