He Chose His Pregnant Mistress. I Was the Bratva Princess. novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The Man on the Bench

Lev drives her to the banya, where Fyodor wants war. Nika refuses, and a summons arrives from the Commission.

I got into the car because I had nowhere else to go.

The door shut. The driver's side opened and closed.

Lev Karasev pulled away from the curb without hurrying, and nobody came out of the Greco gate after us.

"Say it plainly," I said. "How long?"

"Since the week of your wedding." His eyes found mine in the mirror and went back to the road. "Your father chose me."

"Five years on a bench."

"Thursdays at the bakery stall before that. Mornings at the corner after you moved."

I looked at the back of his head.

Light-brown hair cut short. A white scar that ran up through his left eyebrow.

I had passed that scar every morning on my way to the café, and I had never once looked at his face for longer than it took to pay.

"You saw everything," I said.

"I saw the house from the street. Not inside."

"But you reported it."

"Every week. In writing."

"To my father."

"Yes."

I opened my right hand.

The ring had left a red line across my palm, and the line had bled onto my apron.

Lev reached into his coat with one hand, steering with the other.

He held a folded handkerchief over his shoulder without turning.

He didn't touch me. He didn't look back.

I took it.

"Press hard," he said. "It's shallow. It will stop."

"You put the dot on her."

"I held it on her until you spoke. I didn't move it once."

His voice was perfectly even.

"If you hadn't said it," he said, "she would be on the stones."

"I know."

"I know you know." His hands tightened on the wheel. "Miss Sorokina, I want you to understand that I wanted to wait for the word. That's what I was given. Wait for the word."

I pressed the handkerchief to my palm and watched Chicago go by in the dark.

We drove south on Archer for twenty minutes.

The banya stood between a tire shop and a Polish bakery, a plain brick building with its windows painted shut.

My father had called it his office since before I was born.

I had learned to walk on those wooden floors.

Two men opened the iron door before the car had stopped.

Behind them stood Fyodor Sorokin in a black wool coat with his hands already out, wider than the doorway and smelling of birch smoke.

"Nikushka," he said.

I hadn't heard that name in five years, and it took everything out of my legs.

He held me against his coat with one hand on the back of my head.

"I will kill him," he said into my hair. "Tonight. I will hang his body from his own dock."

"Papa."

"Four hundred men. I have called them already."

"Papa, listen to me."

He let me go and looked at my face, the apron and the blood.

He looked at my hand.

Then he looked at Lev, who had stopped three steps back with his hands clasped in front of him.

"Who touched her?" my father said.

"The ring cut her," Lev said. "No one touched her."

My father's shoulders came down a little.

"Good," he said. "Come inside and sit."

The steam room was empty. He had cleared it.

He poured me tea in a glass with a metal holder and stood over me until I drank it.

"Tell me everything," he said, and I did.

I told him, and he didn't interrupt once, and his knuckles went white around his knees.

When I finished, he was grinning, a fierce wide grin that showed his gold tooth.

"You gave the word," he said. "My girl gave the word."

"I gave it to stop it."

"You gave it. That is all a pakhan ever does." He turned. "Lev, how many do we need on his house?"

"No one," I said.

My father stopped.

"If you hit his house tonight, he has what he wants," I said. "A wife of the Greco family is sitting in a Bratva banya. By Commission law, that is abduction. He doesn't even have to prove it. He only has to say it at the table."

"Then we say you left on your own."

"He will say I was taken. And you'll have started the war yourself."

I hadn't known I knew the rule so well until I said it aloud.

My father took his tea glass, looked into it, and set it back down.

"What do you want, then?" he asked.

"I want him to let me go," I said. "In front of the families, out loud. And I want to watch him do it."

Someone knocked at the steel door.

One of my father's men came in with a black card between two fingers.

My father read it.

The grin went out of his face a piece at a time.

"It's from the Commission," he said. "Tomasso went to them before you even reached my door."

He read it aloud in a flat voice.

"Sorokin men aimed a rifle at a pregnant woman on the Don's own steps. Greco asks for the right to take his wife back by force."

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