Page 24 of Unwilling Bratva Bride

My stare circled up to the ceiling again, and I handed the thing back to Vlad.

“Because I want her here. End of story.”

Abe picked up on what Vlad had asked. We had both gotten pretty good at it, actually, and he regarded me with a bored smirk.

“You’ll excuse us if we’re a little…surprised. It’s not like you to want ‘em around for longer than they’re useful. And need I mention that a stranger in the house equipped with enough arms to take out the military might not be the smartest move?”

“As I said, Abe,” my words eeked out through gritted teeth, “lock up the shit that she shouldn’t play with. She’s not going anywhere. For the foreseeable future.”

I tried to leave, but that bombshell hit with enough force to knock Vlad and Abe off their asses and into motion. Abe stepped in front of me, blocking my way downstairs to get a much-needed drink, and Vlad posted up on my side so that I couldn’t just head in the other direction.

“Move, Abe.”

“Oh-ho, no. You’re not getting away with that one so easily. Foreseeable future? The fuck does that mean?”

Vlad grumbled low, his version of a “yeah, that.”

My heart was pounding again, and for a much less fun reason. I didn’t know how to talk about this shit regarding Adley with either of my brothers and while I knew they had every reason to question me, I was leaning toward the “put that conversation off” route.

“Look,” I met Abe’s eyes, trying for my usual cocky confidence, “Adley will be living here. So get used to it, or get out.”

Abe’s brows sank low over his eyes as he clenched his jaw. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see him ball his hands into fists, and he cocked his head as he held my stare: shit, good job, Ivan.

It was Abe’s quintessential “I’m about to fuck you up” pose, and I knew I’d managed to piss him off, which wasn’t my intention. Not really. I just wanted the guy to drop it.

“You’re risking us for some cheap piece of ass?” He bit out.

Everything inside me snapped; my rational mind kicked to the fucking curb.

There were a rare few moments when my brothers and I actually fought. I could count them on one hand. We were siblings, after all, and it was bound to happen occasionally, particularly when you lived with the grumpy bastards.

Still, they were my family above all things, and we’d stuck together through thick and thin since we left Russia. Our father had been a piece of shit, and we’d all outgrown his uniqueform of corporal education. Once he’d managed to kill our own mother with his temper, we were out.

Abe and I were a bit older when it happened. Vlad though. He’d been lovingly referred to as “the mistake” by Dear Old Dad because it was clear that the fucker hadn’t meant to knock up our mom that time.

With us, Igor Ustinov had wanted to sow his seed and flood the world with little carbon copies of himself. It hadn’t worked, clearly, so he’d stopped trying. Vlad’s arrival after that was, of course, a bit of a surprise. You know, as much as unprotected sex leading to a pregnancy can really be considered a surprise.

However, it meant that when he’d lost his shit on a drunken bender, Vlad had still been small. He was playing with our mother when it happened. Hell, Abe and I had barely gotten him out of the line of fire.

Considering what he witnessed, let’s just say that if I’d been him, talking would have seemed too much to me, too.

After that, we’d left—the three of us and nothing else.

But we made a name for ourselves. We dealt justice to people who appeared unstoppable, and we chose an alliance with the Vadims based on mutual understanding and respect. We were a team, a family. Unbreakable.

Except, of course, for right fucking now.

Faster than anyone untrained, I shot forward, pinning Abe to the wall behind him with my forearm pressed into his jugular. My blood roared hot in my veins, drowning out any other sound, and I zeroed my focus on Abe’s eyes going wide, veins filling up the white as he struggled to breathe.

“You will not say shit about her again. Am I clear?”

Abe struggled against me, scowling harder than I’d seen him do in quite some time. A hard yank jerked the arm that was pinning Abe, and I distantly understood that Vlad was trying to pull me off him.

Still, my brother decided to remain quiet. I knew I’d left him enough room to speak, and for several long moments, we just glared at each other. The room was deadly silent, pins dropping and jaws clenching were loud as gunshots in the space.

“I can wait here all day, asshole. How long do you think you can keep this up?” I lowered my face a hair closer to Abe’s. “I, for one, am loving this shade of blue on you.”

It was still about twenty seconds before Abe exhaled hard, and I felt the tension go out of his chest.

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