Page 22 of Trapped by the Bratva (The Valkov Bratva #5)

HANNAH

I spent the entire day helping with the newborns. It was a very different mentality to shift to from working with Dmitri. Handling fussy babies required a specific sort of patience. And they’d try to make me lose it anyway.

“Is it colic?” Amy asked as she fussed with her pumps.

“I think they’re just hungry,” Nadia said as she held Sophia and swayed with her. She caught my gaze and shrugged. “I mean, I’m not an expert. But she keeps nuzzling my arm.”

I smiled. “Yeah, they are hungry.”

“But I can’t make any more milk come in!” Amy sniffled, pushed to tears.

“Nonsense,” Becca said calmly. “Either more milk will come in or it won’t. If it doesn’t, you can use formula. There is nothing wrong with that.”

“But nothing’s coming!”

“It will,” I advised. “They’re increasing their demands with cluster feeding. It’s a growth-spurt thing. And once you adjust to their demand, they’ll grow again and it’ll happen all over again.”

Becca nodded. “It was hell with Emily. That first cluster feeding, I felt like I was going insane. But then it evened out.”

“That was with just one baby,” Amy protested. “I’ve got two.”

“And you’ve got two sources, right there,” I said and pointed at her. “Feed them in tandem and your milk production will even out. Or, like she said, add formula.”

Amy sighed, shaking her head as she adjusted the pillows for the twins to go to her again. “This is…”

“Rough,” I filled in for her. “But you’ve got this, Mama.”

She huffed at me as Nadia brought Sophia over to her. “How’d you learn to be so chill and cool like this?”

I shrugged. “Part of the job description.”

“Nah. Not all nurses are as easygoing as you, Hannah.” Becca shook her head. “One of the nurses in the maternity ward when I had Emily was this absolute nightmare. Like Atilla the Hun or something.”

I laughed. “Well, not everyone is cut out to be a nurse.” I frowned quickly. “I mean… It’s not like I should talk. I’m not a nurse.”

“But you will be,” she argued. “If you want.”

I raised my brows.

Amy smiled as the babies latched on. “Yeah. Dmitri will pay for you to go back to school.”

“Oh. Well, uh…” I rubbed the back of my neck, instantly embarrassed. “We’re not… He’s not…”

All three women smiled.

“Yeah you two so are,” Becca teased.

“And he totally is,” Nadia chimed in.

I furrowed my brow.

“No one’s going to be asking you for details,” Amy said. “But it’s obvious you guys are getting”—she cleared her throat—“close.”

As close as a man and woman can be.

“Oh.” My cheeks heated up. “I didn’t realize it was already common knowledge.”

Becca sat and rubbed her baby bump. “It’s not. It’s not like those guys go around kissing and telling. We can just tell.”

“How?” I crossed my arms.

“The way you smile when anyone mentions him,” Amy answered.

“Or”—Nadia smirked and pointed at me—“the way you try not to smile and roll your eyes when anyone mentions him.”

“With how grumpy he is,” Becca said, “I bet he can either drive you crazy or make you crazy about him.”

“He has been rather hot and cold lately,” I admitted.

This was weird. And new. I’d never done girl talk like this.

Not with any friends, since I was always too busy working or studying to really have friends.

And I had not experienced girl talk with Melissa, either.

These women felt more like sisters than Melissa ever had.

Plus, I’d only just met Dmitri and lost my virginity to him.

I didn’t have anything to kiss and tell about before.

“It’s good to know that he’s found someone,” Amy said. “Especially after all he went through from the Avilovs.”

Nadia shook her head, sadder and more morose. “It was terrible. He was so weak and wounded when I found him in that warehouse.”

I shivered and hugged myself, bothered by how these women had to get used to it. This lifestyle of crime and danger. All the guards and just the basic knowledge that enemies waited out there, people who’d want to kill them.

“These Mafia power plays all go over my head.” I shrugged, feeling like the odd one out. “I’m not sure how you all adjusted and…” I shrugged again, at a loss for what else to say.

“Well, we had incentive.” Amy sighed. “Nik saved me from a worse fate.”

Becca raised her hand. “Same here, with Ivan.”

“And Maxim spared me a forced marriage with the previous Avilov leader. A creepy-ass old dude.” She shuddered.

In a way, Dmitri was “saving” me, too. By taking the opportunity to help him recover, I was given a chance to escape my crappy former life with Melissa.

That wasn’t why I inched closer to loving him. It was because we clicked. We meshed. Somehow, we made sense together.

“Isn’t it hard to know that you’re forever in this life, though? No way out?”

They all smiled.

“I wouldn’t dream of having it any other way,” Amy said, looking down at her twins as they nursed.

The door opened behind me, and I whirled around to see Alek. “Hannah.” He stepped in only one foot, staring at me with a stern and serious expression of urgency. “I need your help.”

I glanced at the other women, but they didn’t seem aware of what was happening. “What’s wrong?” Dmitri? I hurried after him. By the time I reached the door, he was already jogging down the hall.

“Nik’s been hurt and the doctor can’t come soon enough.”

Oh, my God! At least he didn’t say this in front of Amy and startle her. “What happened?”

“Just a cut.”

I shot him a look. “ Just a cut?”

He winced. “A significant cut.”

“But I’m not a doctor.” I ran with him. “I’m not even a nurse.”

“Close enough.”

I did a double-take at him. “How would you know how close I am to being a real nurse?”

“Because Dmitri already put in requests for coverage of your tuition to complete your degree.”

He what?

“And you’re close enough.” He opened the door to the kitchen, where Margie and another soldier were busy cleaning up the blood. Nik sat in a chair as Mila compressed the wound on his arm.

“Now tell me what happened,” Alek said as he led me closer.

I slumped into a chair and looked over the supplies that Mila must have laid out.

“Go on,” she encouraged. “You’ll be better at this than me.”

I glanced at her. “You’re a nurse?”

She shook her head and looked at Alek. “I just had the, um, unfortunate experience of pretending to be one. A long time ago. I did the best I could.”

My God. The life she must have lived. Forced to learn how to stitch people up, then stolen at the altar in an arranged marriage, only to be married elsewhere to a man not of her choosing. She had a tale to tell, and it sounded like the other women did too.

Is that what I want? To join the ranks of danger like that?

I got up and washed my hands while she compressed the wound. Once I was clean, I sat back down and took over. The gash on his arm was long, but not terribly deep, and I gestured for Margie to bring a tray over so I could irrigate the opening.

“Some of those fucking Cartel assholes,” Nik explained to his older brother. “They were tracking me, following me near their territory, and then once they spotted me, they tried to get to me.”

“Why?” Mila asked.

“To get Amy back,” Nik replied, clenching his teeth as I readied to sew him up.

“Get Amy back ?” I asked.

“They’re still bitter that we took her out of their warehouse when we busted up a fraction of their trafficking ring.”

“Trafficking?” I gaped at him, then resumed with the stitches. This stuff just keeps getting worse and worse.

“Yes,” Alek answered. “The Ortez Cartel took Amy off the streets, along with other women. They were going to sell them all.”

“Diego already bought Amy,” Nik reminded him as he sat still so I could stitch him up.

“Diego already paid for Amy, but Nik got her out of that situation,” Mila explained.

It sounded like another hero story. Knowing this, it became easier to view the Bratva in a new light.

They weren’t just thugs and criminals causing mayhem for the hell of it.

They had their own code of conduct, it seemed.

They were self-proclaimed lords and governors of their territories and turf, but they weren’t all bad guys.

How could they be if they saved women from being trafficked and such?

I didn’t want to know about the illegal activities. I didn’t condone any of that. But… not every person was all good or bad, and I opened my mind to consider that Dmitri and his family weren’t terrible people to stay with.

Once I cleaned up Nik’s wound the best I could, I returned to Dmitri’s room. I knew he was busy with a meeting earlier, but I’d truly lost track of time helping the women with the babies. Poor Amy sure was struggling, but I knew she’d get the hang of it with all the help available here.

As soon as I walked in, I stuck close to the door of his private wing. He was shouting, but not at me.

“It’s bullshit. Letting the fucking Feds have Avilov?”

The tap of his cane on the floor suggested he was pacing, and I prayed he wouldn’t hurt himself, agitated like this.

“I agree,” Ivan replied. “But it’s early yet. We’ll see how this shakes out.”

“No. I don’t care what Alek wants. I need to kill Erik.

I need to get the ultimate revenge for what that motherfucker did to me.

He cut off two of my fingers, so I’ll remove all of his.

He cut me up, beat me with a bat, and tore my arm out of my socket.

He took a motherfucking hammer to my hand until it was goddamn pulp.

That motherfucker deserves the same in kind. And more.”

I shrank back, ready to turn and exit. The utter anger and fierce malice in his tone scared me. He sounded obsessed, like a maniac, to kill the man who’d tortured him. Hearing him like this made me debate whether I should be wanting someone like this.

Dmitri looked weak and vulnerable, wounded at the moment. But overhearing him like this, he sounded like a ruthless and hard killer.

I’m a fool to want him.

To want to commit to this.

I slunk back out the doors and closed them, wondering how I could be so blind, so driven by lust, to covet a man who could be so wicked and nefarious.

I was falling for him. I knew I was. But this served as a stark wake-up call, a reminder that he wasn’t just any other man who could be my lover. He was a killer, a criminal, so hell-bent on murdering another man that I wasn’t sure if I could relate to him again.

We were different. We were opposites on the best of days. While that antagonism pulled us together, I felt like there might be a chance that we were too fundamentally different to truly belong as a couple.

As a pair of souls matched in life and lust.

How can I think that a man like him, a killer so stuck with the need to take someone’s life, could be my man? Could be the one I’d want to father my children and take me as his wife?

Because I’d already started the path to those daydreams. When I woke up in his arms, safe in his bed with him this morning, I began to fantasize about just that—uniting my life with his, for good.

Now, I mused whether it was all foolishness to want that future at all, regardless of how certain I felt about him in my heart.