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“I can handle the fucker.” I drain the glass and stand. “I’m going to need his help in bringing down someone as callous as Fedorov, and you know it.”

“You’re powerful?—”

“I’m not talking about power in brute strength. I’m talking about the new ways. I need help with that attack. His funds, assets, his territories and allies. I want to destroy and take it all and for that, we need coalitions.”

“You think Sergio will be fair?”

“I just want Niko dead. Let Sergio think he’s stealing myshare from me. It’s his. I just need his help in bringing the fucker down and reducing his empire to rubble before I kill him. To Sergio, the world, we want our share. But personally? His head is all I want.”

Ilya is about to say something, but the cries of Sasha fill the room from the little monitor I have.

“Maybe we should use baby monitors as the first line of defense. When an enemy approaches, we’ll know.”

“You think you’re funny, Ilya,” I say to him in Russian.

“Da, I am.”

Leaving Ilya to set up meetings, I head to Sasha’s room, the ratty plush toy in my hand.

Sasha’s sitting up in his bed, tear tracks on his face, the little night-light on, and he breaks my heart, huddled and small even if he’s on the verge of losing his shit.

“You don’t know how good you’ve got it, kid,” I mutter.

He cries louder, building to a wail, and I hold out the toy.

In moments flat, he’s quiet, his gaze zeroing in on the goat, and then he smiles and laughs. He screams. “Goat!”

I give it to him, and he hugs it tight. I try to shove away the guilt of ignoring Erin and the toy the first time she tried to give it to me. The kid loves the thing and now that he has it, he’s compliant, snuggling down, eyes wide as he struggles against heavy lids. “Story.”

There are books but some are in Russian and some in English, and I haven’t had a chance to look them over. I think Ilya just grabbed a bunch of books and didn’t think. Though, I’m not mad at him. Like me, he doesn’t have kids. He doesn’t know Sasha.

I stop.

I have a child.

I don’t fit that category anymore. I grab a book and start reading. I don’t even take in what it’s about. The adventures of a naughty bird. I show the pictures to him and he quicklygoes from awake to asleep, a small little smile on his face, the goat tight and safe in his arms, his head against it.

My heart flips and swells. He’s mine, this kid. This perfect child is mine. And he let me read he smiled for me. He went to sleep for me.

We’re forming a bond and it’s the most thrilling thing. Not to mention frightening. That’s how he makes me feel, like I need to make this world safe for him, and to keep him safe within it.

A pain that should be dull from years of carrying starts to cut into me again. It’s now a reminder that my fucked-up, shit childhood is mine to carry, not mine to share. If I had to have that, then it’s knowing not what to do with Sasha.

My father hated me on bad days, tolerated me on good, and the rest of the time I didn’t exist.

He blamed me for my mother dying when I was a baby. He always said I killed her. Slowly, painfully, that after giving birth, she’d declined until she died. And that was my fault.

I was a few months old when she passed.

When I did get attention, it was to berate, and belittle me. Communication was frigid silence or yelling. There wasn’t anything soft.

But like it or not, I was his only son. So I had to be the heir, the prince who didn’t deserve the crown but got it anyway.

That was my father’s view of me.

And yet when he married again and Alina came along, he loved her, doted on her. She was his princess. The holy one, who by fate of her birth, couldn’t inherit his crown.

I got why he loved her. Alina was and is an angel, and she is my heart. I never thought anyone else could find space, but this little boy has.