Page 51 of Claimed By the Boss

It scares me how deeply I already care for him. How much I want this to work. How much I want him to be part of this… whatever this ends up being.

I press my hand to my stomach again and try to hold on to the warmth of his touch a little longer.

Some time later, Becca slams the door shut behind her, louder than necessary. I get up and go out to the living room and find her standing there like she’s seen a ghost. She’s pale, lips tight, clutching her purse like someone just tried to rip it from her hands. She doesn’t say anything at first. She just stands there, her eyes darting around the room like she’s trying to convince herself she’s safe.

“Becca?” I take a step toward her, but she lifts a hand and shakes her head.

“Sit,” she says. “I need to sit you down.”

Her tone makes my stomach twist.

I lower myself to the couch as she walks over, dropping her purse and keys onto the coffee table without her usual commentary about clutter. She sits beside me, knees angled toward mine and places a hand on my thigh like she’s trying to keep me grounded.

“There were these scary Russian guys at the hotel,” she says. “Heavy accents. Big guys. Straight out of an action movie, you know? Something felt off, so I kept my ears open. They were speaking quietly, but I caught a name. Damien Morozov.”

My chest tightens.

“Okay…” I say slowly. “He’s Russian. He’s probably got family visiting. You know how international those boardrooms are. Maybe someone from one of the partner companies flew in.”

She shakes her head slowly, solemnly. “No.That’s not what this was.”

Something about her voice makes the hairs on the back of my neck rise.

“I kept listening,” she continues. “I shouldn’t have. But I did. I pretended to be cleaning nearby. They weren’t even careful. They were talking about operations and shipments. The name Morozov came up again in connection to the Bratva. That’s the Russian mob.”

My breath catches.

Becca reaches for my hand, squeezing tight.

“He’s not just your boss, Lyra. He’s a mob boss.”

I feel the strength drain from my body.

“I’m having a Russian mob boss’s baby?” The words come out in a whisper. They don’t even feel like mine.

Becca nods, her own eyes brimming with fear. “I’m so sorry, Lyra. I didn’t know how else to tell you.”

I push a hand through my hair and try to breathe. The walls feel like they’re closing in. The man I’ve been sleeping with, the one I’m falling for, the man I trusted enough to let into my body again and again is dangerous. He’s deadly.

I think of the way he handled Rick. The flash of fury in his eyes, how quickly he turned violent, how his hands didn’t even hesitate before slamming him against the wall. That kind of rage doesn’t come out of nowhere.

I always knew there was something more behind his calm. Something deeper. I saw glimpses of it in his eyes. In his silence. In the way he watches people like he’s always calculating the cost of letting them live.

But I didn’t expect this.

I stare ahead, numb. “What am I going to do?”

16

DAMIEN

It’s been a month since my disastrous trip to Boston. I burned a jet, a dozen men, and firepower on bad intel. Rurik wasn’t there, and there was no record of his family coming into town. Now he’s nowhere to be found, and I’ve lost a month trying to nail him to the wall.

I lean against the edge of my desk, jaw tight, eyes scanning the wall of monitors in front of me. Footage from every Vasiliev-connected location we know of plays in near silence. I’ve watched the same angles on loop until my vision blurs, but there’s still no trace of him. His men show up, make deliveries, pass along vague messages, but Rurik himself is a damn ghost. There haven’t been any facial recognition hits or intercepted calls with his voice.

It seems he’s running his empire remotely now. It doesn’t make him any less dangerous, but it confirms what I already knew. He’s a fucking coward. He knows I’m hunting him, and he’s run away scared.

The problem is, he’s smarter than I gave him credit for. Every time we place a bug, we get static. Every time we sweep awarehouse, a bar, a backroom club, we pick up fragments of sound before everything goes dark. His people are using high-level, military-grade frequency jammers that kill our signal before anything useful gets transmitted. And without intel, I’m working blind.