Page 19 of Bratva Knight

“Sounds boring. Put on that show we were watching before I left. You know the one I’m talking about, the one with the scientists.”

I smiled, laughing softly. “You meanBig Bang Theory?” I picked up the remote, switching toBig Bang, and Dad nodded. He settled back further into the couch, holding his hand out for more cookies as we watched TV together, enjoying each other’s company. It might soundsuperlame, but my dad is my best friend. Without a shadow of a doubt. Don’t tell Illayana.

It’s always been me and him. Him and I. Growing up, I was the textbook definition of a “girly girl”. Everything I ownedhadto be pink. I liked putting on make-up and wearing pretty dresses. I liked having tea parties with my dolls and doing their hair. I hated getting sweaty or getting dirt under my fingernails. You’d think a man like my dad would struggle raising a daughter; a big, rough, rugged Bratva man who had zero experience with children. But instead of trying to change me, shifting my interests into things he might have been more comfortable with, he embraced me. He would let me paint his nails bright pink, put make-up on him, style his hair with pretty butterfly clips. He’d sit there for hours and play dollies with me, pitching his deep, heavy voice higher to imitate whichever of my Barbies he was holding. He would read me books, fairy tales about princesses and their knights in shining armour.

I would fall asleep every night dreaming of finding my knight. Someone who would love me, protect me, take care of me. Be there for me in every way.

But when I needed my knight, he wasn’t there.

Not once did I ever feel like I was missing something in my life, missing a mother. My dad was everything I ever needed. A father. A mother. A friend.

“You haven’t asked me how my trip was?” Dad asked, giving me the side-eye.

“Maybe because I’m afraid if I ask, you’ll tell me.”

He exhaled an exasperated breath. “We have to talk about it eventually.”

“Do we?”

Dad snatched the remote and turned the TV off. “Tatiana—”

“I don’t even know why you went in the first place. Don’t get me wrong, after what happened with the attack and everything, I’m glad you went. If you stayed, you could have been hurt. But she didn’t deserve you flying halfway around the bloody world to see her.”

“Despite what happened, what she’s done, she’s still my wife.”

“Sheabandonedus,” I snarled, my anger climbing rapidly. “Just packed up her shit in the middle of the night andleft us. Leftyou, her husband of fifteen years. Left me, her two-week-old infant. She left us like we didn’t mean a damn thing to her. Because guess what? We didn’t. And now what? She thinks that after twenty-four years of silence, she can just waltz back into our lives like nothing happened?” I shook my head, getting to my feet.

Angry, restless energy flowed through my body. Any time the subject of my so-called “mother” came up, a dark, unrelenting rage took over my mind. I hated her. I hated her with every single cell inside me. I didn’t care what excuses she had for leaving us, why she did what she did. A mother was never meant to abandon her child.

My dad and I pretty much had this exact same conversation right before he left, and from the looks of things, this was going to end the same way too.

Dad leant forward, resting his elbows on his thighs as he steepled his fingers. He waited before responding, picking his words carefully. Smart idea, considering I had a pretty bad temper when I was riled up.

“You have every right to feel the way you do. She understands what she did, and she wants to apologise. Make it up to you.”

“I don’t need her to make it up to me. I need her to fuck off. I don’t understand why you’re so quick to forgive her, after what she did.”

He looked at me, eyes filled with sadness and hurt. “I love her,” he whispered, his voice the softest I’d ever heard it before.

I instantly felt bad. It was easy for me to forget that he’d had a life before me. A life withher. The daughter of Satan.

“She doesn’t deserve your love, Dad. Not then, and certainly not now.”

He gave me a small smile. “You know as well as I do that we can’t help who we love, Tatiana, whether they deserve it or not.”

I sat on the front porch at my house, the cool Las Vegas air nipping at my skin and making me shiver.

My thoughts were chaotic, volatile. The conversation with my dad about my mother still played over and over again in my head, worsening my mood by the second. How fucking dare she? Who did she think she was? What right did she have trying to come back into our lives like she had every right to be there?

The bitch that was my mother—Svetlana Andreeva—tried contacting me a few weeks ago, which I promptly ignored. I had no desire to hear a damn word that came out of her mouth. There was nothing she could say that would make up for twenty-four years of abandonment. For twenty-four missed birthdays and twenty-four missed Christmases. For never being there for me during all the moments a mothershouldbe. When I lost my first tooth. The first time I got my period. My first day of highschool. My graduation. To teach me about make-up, or boys. To teach me what it means to be a woman.

All of that made it impossible for me to forgive her.

When she couldn’t get in touch with me, she decided to go through my dad instead. She asked him to fly all the way to Russia, and he had no problem dancing to her tune. It irritated me how all she had to do was click her fingers and my dad would come running.

I told him not to go. That there was nothing either of them could say to me to get me to change my mind. I had no idea what she could possibly want from me, and I didn’t fucking care. She didn’t have to be six feet under to be dead to me.

The weight of my phone in my hand brought me out of my mind. I glanced at the screen for the hundredth time, staring at Nikolai’s name, a mix of emotions taking over me.

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