Page 66 of Sinful Blaze

I shoot my blabbermouth brother a vicious glare before smiling at her. “It’s true.”

Mama looks at me expectantly. I don’t know what else she wants me to say.

“Well?” she prods when I don’t speak up. “Are you a medical miracle and birthing this child yourself?”

Sofi and Mak snort into their respective drinks, but neither one offers any help. Figures.

I sigh and set my fork down. “Her name is Daphne. You’ll like her.”

Whether you want to or not.

“Bozhe moy! One moment, you’re fighting me tooth and nail for even thinking about you having a family. And now!” She flails her napkin through the air like a whip.

“To be fair, Mama,” Sofi chimes in, “Pash wasn’t exactly thinking when he… should we say, ‘met her’?”

“Would either of you like to whip that bus in reverse? Maybe throw me under it a little harder?” I snap at my siblings.

Mama smacks my arm and passes me the potatoes. “Be nice. Now, tell me more about my future daughter-in-law.”

I damn near choke on my own water. “It’s not that serious.”

“‘Not that serious’?!”

“Not at all.” Sofi smirks and stabs her fork into the roast beef. “He just got her drunk, got her pregnant, and decided to live with her.”

Mama whirls on me. “She’s living with you? And you’ve not proposed?! Have you no decency?”

“I barely even know her, Ma?—”

The whole table erupts into a cacophony of Russian and English, both languages criticizing my life choices and skewering my “typical man brain.” The only other “man brain” in this room thinks this is all just fucking hilarious and joins in just to bury me even deeper.

I love my family.

But fucking hell, I hate this.

“Enough.” I raise a hand and, as much as they might defy me on a regular basis, the women in my family respect it enough to fall quiet. I’m still the pakhan at the end of the day. Still the one who wears the crown. “I know you have questions. I’m asking—not demanding, but asking—for time to figure everything out.”

Mama spreads her hands out with an incredulous shrug. “What’s to figure out? You are pakhan, and you are about to become a father. Are you going to sit here and tell your own mother that you’d prefer a bastard child take over the family business?”

Blyat’. I don’t have an answer to that and she knows it.

That doesn’t stop her and my siblings from looking at me like I’m about to give them one.

“I don’t want to stress her out. Daphne has been through a lot and?—”

“Psssht! Excuses, excuses.” Mama waves her hand at my bullshit and returns to her meal. “If she can live with you, she’s handling her stress just fine.”

My siblings exchange glances, the two of them way too smug for my liking. Outside this house, I am their brother, but also their boss. No one questions me. No one dares.

Inside this house, though?

All gloves are off. This is Mama’s house, and here, Mama is in charge.

But she must see something in me, because she relents. She always understood what it meant to lead the Bratva. What it takes. Even as Otets took, and took, and took from her until she was barely a husk of her former self.

She wasn’t always able to hide the bruises. She couldn’t hide the vacant hopelessness in her eyes, either, and the tears often fell freely when he brought home yet another mistress to fondle and fuck in their marital bed.

Until the day he fucked the wrong mistress.

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