Page 3 of A Baby for the BRATVA Boss
The driver keeps a steady pace. Snow drifts sideways, muting the world until it feels like we’re moving through nothing at all. The hum of the engine is low, familiar. My men in the front seat don’t speak either.
It’s a long drive to the mountains. Long enough to let the decision settle.
I told myself I was doing the right thing, cleaning up another man’s mess, making sure a debt is paid. But the truth sits heavier.
I didn’t have to take her. I wasn’t going to. When Akimov used her as a bartering chip, I was annoyed, but considerably more furious with myself. I’m forty-five years old and have no heir. There are my nephews, but we are close in age and all childless. One wrong move and the Dubovich name would cease to exist.
Akimov knew that and used it against me.
Then she answered the door. All long dark hair and pillowy lips. The moment she met my eyes, I saw something I hadn’t in a long time: defiance buried under fear. A kind of fire that doesn’t go out when it’s scared, it burns hotter. Her pupils blew, narrowing the dark blue of her irises. Under any other circumstances I would have found it amusing. Her attraction to me being betrayed by her own body. But somehow it made me angry, that her father had traded the use of her womb like she was a brood mare and nothing more.
She is obviously more.
That’s when I knew I’d be honoring his ludicrous offer.
I would take her and breed her in payment.
She finally speaks again. “How will this work? You’ll have sex with me and then I’ll have your baby, and then I’m free to go?”
My face briefly flickers in surprise at her bluntness.
“Something like that,” I reply.
She studies me in the glass, pretending not to. Her reflection trembles every time we hit a patch of ice, and I wonder what she sees when she looks at me like that. A monster. A devil. Maybe both.
I lean back, stretching my hand along the seat behind her. Close enough that she knows I could touch her if I wanted to. She stiffens just a little, and the reaction curls something tight and dark in my chest.
“You’re not as afraid as I’d expect, considering the circumstances of our meeting,” I tell her.
Her gaze swings toward mine. “Would you like me to scream?” Her tone is defiant, almost sarcastic.
I like it.
“No,” I concede. “I don’t like pointless noise. And there’s a time and a place for screaming.”
She turns back to the window.
I let the silence return.
Outside, the landscape starts to climb. The snow deepens. The road narrows into a single winding track that cuts through the pines. I know this route by instinct. The turns, the bends, the way the car shifts when the ground gets steep. I’ve driven it more nights than I can count. Always coming back to the only place that feels like solace.
When the trees thin, I see it: the first glimpse of light below us.
The town.
Nestled deep in the valley, a scatter of golden windows glows through the white, smoke curling from chimneys, the faint shimmer of Christmas lights strung across narrow streets. It looks almost peaceful from here, like something untouched by what we are.
Sophia leans closer to the glass. “It’s beautiful,” she whispers.
Her voice has that tone again, the one that slides under my skin before I can stop it. I shouldn’t let it. Beauty is dangerous. It makes men careless. But I still reach over and adjust the vent so warm air hits her knees. She notices. Of course she does. Her mouth parts like she’s about to say something, but she doesn’t. She just stares straight ahead as the road begins its final climb.
The bells start when we crest the ridge. Not from a church. There’s a bell tower in the town square that rings every hour, soft and distant. It carries up through the trees like a memory.
She turns toward the sound, eyes wide.
I shouldn’t look at her like this. Not with the thought that hits me then, that maybe I didn’t bring her out here to collect a debt and to make a baby. Maybe I took her because the loneliness of my life has been killing me, and I needed something other than work beside me.
Her reflection watches me as if she’s already figured that out.
