Page 60 of Nanny for the Bratva Daddies

“Excellent. I’ll be right back.”

“What kind of place doesn’t serve tea,” she mutters, snapping the menu closed.

“This isn’t a cafe. You picked a restaurant. They serve different things,” I point out. Clasping my hands together tightly on the table.

My heart pounds, sending trembles down my arms and the back of my thighs prickle with anticipation. I need to be honest with her and stand my ground, but the prospect is terrifying.

“Talk to me.” My mother leans forward and balances one sharp elbow on the table. “Do you have anything for me?”

I press my lips together and meet her gaze. “That’s it?”

“What do you mean?”

“That’s all you want to ask? Do you not want to know how I am? How I’m doing?” I touch my hairline where the wound from the car crash has become a small pink scar. “Don’t you want to ask about my health or how I’m healing?”

“Naomi, my dear, it’s impossible for me to gauge your health because of how plump you are, and I don’t care to listen to your self-inflicted ailments. If you are in bad health, trimming that waistline will help.”

Sharpness lances through my chest and my next breath wobbles.

“Besides,” she continues, none the wiser. “I taught you to take care of yourself so what is there to ask? Do you care to ask how your poor mother is doing, waiting for information from you?”

“I ask.” My knuckles bleed white. “I ask because I care but you always brush me off.”

“Because nothing is more important than what we are doing. Don’t you understand that? You’re going soft. I knew it. I knew you didn’t have the guts to do this.”

My breath is shaky, and my nerves begin to fray. “Mother, I’m trying to…to connect with you. I want us to have a better relationship, one that is just you and me and nothing else.”

Giving her a chance is a risk, but she is my mother. It’s bold of me to hope that I can have both her and the men back at the mansion, but I will try. I will try because there is a part of me that loves her.

“This is ridiculous.” My mother sits back and begins fiddling with her napkin. “You are being ridiculous. What you want, what you care about can only come after we’ve done what we set out to do.”

This is it. My chance. My stomach flips so violently that nausea bleeds up my throat. It takes all my strength to keep my sickness at bay.

“No.”

Her hands pause. She lifts her sharp gaze to me. “Pardon?”

“I said no.” Three words and my stomach cramps painfully.

I bite back a wince and continue, “This obsession with Fyodor’s family and revenge is unhealthy and will help no one. The people you’re angry at—half of them aren’t alive anymore, and the rest aren’t even in power—so what you’re asking of me will only hurt people not involved with what happened all those years ago.”

My voice doesn’t even sound like my own but I can’t stop talking. Once I start, it spills out of me like vomit. By the time I finish, I’m breathless. Sweat prickles down my back and my T-shirt sticks to me. I sit rigid, not trusting myself to move when I’m this nervous.

My mother’s face melts from shock to anger, then downright thunderous. I’ve never seen such venom in her eyes. She sets the overly folded napkin down on the table in front of her, and then her eyes snap to me so suddenly that I forget to breathe.

“You know nothing of what you speak,” she hisses, spit spraying from between her teeth. “You have no idea the pain I suffered. The trauma of having to scrape by as a child who saw far too much death.”

The face of the dead bodyguard flashes in my mind.

“I had to change my looks, pretend to be someone I’m not, and marry an American to disguise my name. I carved off pieces of myself to stay hidden, lost my accent and everything that connected me to my family just so I would be safe. So you would be safe. All to hide because some man in power thought another man was a traitor.”

The more she talks, the faster my heart beats until it becomes a blur of sensation in my chest.

“You dare sit across from me and tell me to get over it?”

“That’s not what I’m saying,” I try weakly, my resolve crumbling. “You want people to suffer. You want revenge. I understand that, but it won’t make anything better. The people who hurt you and our family don’t exist anymore.”

“Bullshit. Those people don’t care who gets hurt in the crossfire and neither do I. I don’t give a shit about them. I want them to burn and when they have nowhere to turn, I will remind them of the name Yenin and they will see they missed one.”

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