Page 52 of Mafia King’s Broken Vow (New York Bratva #5)
THE FUTURE
YAKOV
I study Mila as she sits across from me on silk sheets, dark hair over bare shoulders. It’s never enough; this craving for her burns constant.
“The future,” I repeat. “What about it?”
Her fingers dance nervous patterns on silk, avoiding my stare. “This isn’t just about playing house, Yakov. It’s about what comes after. What we’re actually building here.”
I capture her restless hand, stilling it beneath my palm. Her skin feels fragile, misleading; I know the steel beneath that softness. “Whatever you want,” I tell her, and the words taste like truth for once.
She shakes her head, finally meeting my eyes. “It’s not that easy. We need to face what we’re dealing with.”
“I am facing it.” I drag her knuckles to my mouth, tasting salt and vanilla. “For the first time in years.”
“Then face this.” She yanks her hand free, the loss hitting me cold. “I can’t pretend you haven’t done monstrous things. Things that would destroy most people’s sleep.”
My jaw locks, every instinct screaming to deflect, manipulate, control this conversation’s trajectory. But Mila deserves more than strategy. “No,” I agree. “You can’t. And I wouldn’t ask you to.”
She inhales sharp, the psychologist surfacing, professional armor sliding into place even naked and vulnerable. “And you can’t promise me the violence is over. That you won’t become that man I watched break Pablo’s bones.”
The memory floods back, cartilage snapping under my hands, the righteous satisfaction of his agony. I’d do it again. We both know it.
“No,” I admit. “I can’t make that promise.”
She nods, as if my confirmation hurts and heals simultaneously. “So where does that leave us? How do we build something real with that poison between us?”
I get off the bed, unable to contain the storm raging inside my chest. Naked, I stalk to the window, city lights bleeding through glass.
My reflection stares back, a man I barely recognize.
Not the cold architect of kidnappings, not the nightmare Bratva whispered about, but not free of either shadow.
“When Ana died,” I begin, words crawling from some buried place, “I gave myself permission to be only the monster. Only the darkness.”
Mila’s presence burns behind me, close enough to feel but not touching.
“And now?” she whispers.
“Now I want to be more.” I turn, finding her wrapped in silk, eyes luminous with something that might be hope. “For you. Because of you.”
She stands and follows, vanilla and amber and sex flooding my lungs. “I don’t want you to change for me, Yakov. That’s not real.”
“Then what do you want?” The question emerges rougher than intended, frustration bleeding past control.
“I want us to stop pretending we’re other people.” Her palm finds my chest, pressing over the scar Jaromir carved. “I’m not asking you to become someone else. I’m asking if we can build something neither of us thought possible.”
I trap her hand against my heartbeat. “How?”
“By choosing each other,” she says, simple as breathing. “Not once in some dramatic moment, but every day. Making decisions that honor what we’re building, especially when it costs us.”
“Especially when it hurts,” I add, understanding igniting. “Not dwelling on the past or fearing the future. Just focusing on what we are doing now.”
Her smile stops my world completely. “Exactly.”
I pull her against me, needing to feel her skin, needing the anchor of her body to ground me in this moment that feels transformative. Her arms circle my waist, and I feel her surrender her weight to me.
“You’re mine, Mila,” I murmur against her hair. “Today. Tomorrow. For as long as you’ll have me.”
“And the past?” she asks, her voice muffled against my chest.
“I can’t undo the past. I can only move forward differently.”
She pulls back just enough to look up at me, eyes searching mine. “And the future? The violence that might still be necessary in your world?”
My hand comes up to cradle her face, thumb tracing the curve of her cheekbone. “I will always protect what’s mine,” I tell her, not bothering to soften the truth. “But I’m learning there are choices even in that.”
Her eyebrow raises slightly. “Like with Pablo.”
The name sends a jolt of cold rage through me, but it’s tempered now, controllable. “Yes,” I acknowledge. “I wanted to kill him for touching you. For threatening you. Every instinct I have demanded his blood.”
“But you didn’t take it.”
“No,” I trace the healing cut on her throat where his knife pressed. “I chose something different. For you. For us.”
Her eyes darken, pupils dilating as she presses closer. “That’s what I mean about choosing each other daily,” she says. “Not becoming different people but making different decisions because of what we mean to each other.”
“Move in with me,” I say, the words coming out raw. “Not because it’s practical or safer, but because I want you here. With me. Every day.”
Her smile is answer enough, but she gives me the words anyway. “Yes,” she says simply. “I want that too.”
I feel myself hardening against her stomach, desire flaring anew at the intensity between us. Her breath catches as she feels it too, her body responding to mine with that perfect synchronicity that still amazes me.
“I love you,” she breathes in my arms, bodies and hearts entwined. “Always.”
I silence her with another kiss, unable to form the words, but meaning them all the same.
I love you.
Always.
Later, we lie tangled together, her head on my chest and my fingers tracing lazy patterns on her back.
I feel a sense of peace I haven’t known in years.
Perhaps ever. It’s fragile, new, but it’s there all the same, tentatively nourishing that dying ember of my heart until it glows with smoldering life.
“I’m not good with words,” I confess quietly, as if someone might overhear. “Never have been.”
She raises her head to look into my eyes. “You don’t have to be,” she assures me. “As long as I know you mean it when you say you’ll always protect me, always choose me. I don’t need declarations.”
“I don’t deserve this,” I admit, voice rough with emotion. “Don’t deserve you.”
The words are a startling confession. Perhaps Mila understands how far I’ve come, how much I’ve opened myself to her, because she leans down to press a soft, sweet kiss to my lips, tears gathering in her eyelashes.
It’s such a foreign concept, belonging with this woman, belonging at all. To my former Bratva brothers, I was expendable, a cog in a machine powered by ruthlessness and blood. To myself, I was little more than a machine, a liability at best and a lethal weapon at worst.
But to Mila—dear, precious Mila—I am a man. I am a partner and a protector, someone worth surrendering her life and career and future to. Someone worth choosing every day.
Perhaps she’s right. Perhaps, in a world of immutable darkness, that is enough.
“What are you thinking?” she asks, pressing a kiss to my bullet scar.
“That I never expected this,” I admit, tightening my arm around her. “Any of it.”
“Regrets?” Her voice is light, but I hear the undercurrent of uncertainty.
I tilt her chin up, making her meet my gaze. “None,” I tell her with absolute conviction. “Not about you. Never about you.”
She studies me for a long moment, those perceptive eyes seeing more than I sometimes wish they could. “I believe you,” she says finally, and the simple acceptance in her voice feels like absolution I haven’t earned but desperately need.
“We’ll make this work,” I promise, sealing the words with a kiss on her forehead. “One day at a time.”
“One choice at a time,” she corrects gently, settling back against my chest.
Outside, the city continues its relentless pace, a world of danger, politics, and violence that won’t disappear just because I’ve found something worth protecting.
Pablo’s uncle is still out there, a threat that will need to be addressed eventually.
The Bratva families are cautious allies at best. My position with them remains complicated, conditional.
But here, in this bed, with Mila’s warmth against me and her steady breathing synchronizing with mine, none of that seems insurmountable. For the first time in my life, I’m building something instead of destroying, creating instead of calculating.
“I love you,” I whisper into her hair, the words still new enough to feel dangerous on my tongue.
She smiles against my skin, pressing another kiss to my chest. “I love you too,” she murmurs, voice heavy with approaching sleep. “All of you, Yakov. The monster and the man.”
The monster the Bratva feared isn’t gone; he’ll never be gone. But he’s evolving into something capable of mercy when it matters. Something capable of love.
Something worthy of the woman sleeping in my arms.