He Chose His Pregnant Mistress. I Was the Bratva Princess. novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Red Dot
Tomasso brings his pregnant mistress home and tells Nika to take the guest room. She slides her ring onto the mistress's finger, a laser dot lands on the woman's heart, and Nika walks out. The man from the corner bench is waiting at the curb.
At six o'clock on a Friday, my husband walked a pregnant woman up our front steps in front of the whole household.
Two of his captains stood by the cars in the drive.
The housekeeper held the door open with a face that gave nothing away.
Three guards had come up from the gate to watch.
I was on the top step with a tray of lemon cookies I had baked for his mother's visit.
At noon my husband had texted that he'd be back at six, and that we needed to talk.
I had thought it was about his mother.
He had one hand under Alessia's elbow on the steps, the way he steadied me on ice.
"Nika, this is Alessia," he said. "She's seven months along. It's mine."
Nobody on the steps moved.
His consigliere, who had eaten at my table every Sunday for five years, looked at his shoes.
Alessia held her coat shut over her belly with both hands.
She was young, with soft brown curls and a face that had been crying in the car.
"I'm so sorry," she told me. "I said I'd stay at a hotel. I didn't want you to find out like this."
She sounded like she meant it.
That made it worse.
"Someone's been calling her at night," Tomasso said. "She's afraid to sleep alone, so she'll stay here. You'll take the guest room."
"For how long?" I asked.
"Until the baby comes. Maybe after."
He straightened his cuff, a small gold watch flashing.
"Don't make a scene, Nika. You've always been reasonable."
I looked at him.
In five years of marriage, Tomasso had never asked me one question about my family.
Not who my people were, or where my mother's ring came from, or why I spoke Russian to the old baker on Archer Avenue.
I had called that kindness.
Bruno Pace cleared his throat. "He'll make it right, Nika," he said, low. "He always does. Go inside and let him."
He didn't look up when he said it.
I set the tray down on the stone rail.
On my wedding day, my father, Fyodor Sorokin, had sent my mother's gold band through a jeweller, with one rule I was to remember.
A ring on a hand that is not yours is my order to kill.
One word from me would stop it.
I had worn that ring for five years and never once tested the rule.
I turned the band off my finger.
Tomasso's eyes dropped to it, and for a moment he looked almost alert.
"What are you doing?"
I smiled at Alessia and took her left hand.
"Here," I said. "If you're going to live in my house, you should have this."
"Oh, no," Alessia said. "I can't."
I slid it onto her finger.
It fit.
I stepped back, perfectly still.
A second later, a red dot bloomed on the front of her cream coat, right over her heart.
Alessia saw it first.
She looked down and made a small sound.
Then she screamed.
The captains had their guns out and nowhere to point them.
The guards ran, shouting about the roofs, the hedges, the street.
Tomasso grabbed Alessia and pulled her against his chest, and the dot followed her heart wherever he turned her.
He put his body in front of it.
It slid around him and sat on her again, steady.
"Nika!" he roared. "Call it off! Get on your knees and call it off!"
He thought I had hired someone.
In five years I had never once raised my voice to him.
He couldn't see that I was the one who owned the dot.
I didn't kneel.
I stood on my own front steps with my back straight and watched my husband shake.
His hand was spread flat over her belly.
"This is what it's like," I said, "when nobody asks you."
"Please," Alessia whispered. She was looking at me, not at him. "Please, I didn't know."
I believed her.
I said it quietly, one Russian word my father had given me and I had never once spoken aloud.
"Otboy."
The dot vanished.
Alessia folded to the stones and sobbed.
Tomasso knelt beside her with his hands shaking, and then he looked up at me.
He wasn't looking at a wife.
"Who are you?" he said.
"Give me my ring back," I told Alessia gently.
She pulled it off and put it in my palm.
The edge cut my skin, and I closed my hand around it anyway.
"If you walk out that gate," Tomasso said, "you are no wife of mine."
"That's the first true thing you've said tonight."
Nobody stopped me.
The captains stared at the roofline, afraid they would be next.
Bruno stepped aside from the stairs and said, so softly I almost missed it, "Go."
I went down the drive in my apron with the ring bleeding in my fist, and out through the gate.
A grey sedan idled at the curb.
The back door was already open.
The man holding it wore a long grey wool coat.
I knew that coat.
He had bought a coffee at the corner café every morning for five years and left the empty cup on the bench.
"Miss Sorokina," he said. "I'm Lev Karasev. Please get in."
I stared at him.
"The Greco cars were in the street before you took the ring off," he said. "Eight of them, engines running. Your husband's men knew before you did."
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