Page 61 of Inked Athena

“I used to think it was normal.” His voice drops low, intimate. “What he did to us. How he raised us.”

“And now?”

“Now, I look at you carrying our child and I want...” He shifts, pressing his forehead to my belly. “I want lazy Sunday mornings teaching them to make blini. I want to watch them draw terrible pictures that we’ll hang on the fridge. I want to read them stories about brave little rabbits who outsmart wolves.”

My heart cracks open at the image. This fierce, dangerous man imagining such gentle moments.

“The day I found out about you being pregnant, I realized something.” His lips brush my skin. “A good father would have taught us that winning isn’t everything. That sometimes, the best victories come from working together, not tearing each other apart.”

I cup his jaw, tilting his face up to mine. “You already know more about being a good father than Leonid ever did.”

His eyes darken with emotion. “Because of you. You make me want to be worthy of this.” His palm spreads wide over our growing child. “Of both of you.”

My fingers pass over the stark lines of Sam’s tattoos—Cyrillic letters that mark his skin like prayers or curses. “The thing about being born into a family like yours or mine?” I press my lips to each letter. “It’s like being assigned a role in a play we never auditioned for.”

Sam’s chest rises beneath my touch. “Some roles are impossible to escape.”

“But we can rewrite the script.” I lift my head, meeting his gaze in the moonlight. “You’re not Leonid’s puppet anymore. You’re not his soldier or his heir or his weapon against Ilya.” My palmfinds his heartbeat. “You’re going to be a father. And you get to decide what kind of father you’ll be.”

His arm curls around my neck, drawing me closer until our breaths mingle. “What if this child grows up hating me the way I hate him?”

“They won’t.” I pour every ounce of conviction into my voice. “Because you know exactly how it feels to be unloved. To be a disappointment.” My fingers find his jaw. “You can give our baby what you always wanted: unconditional love. Real pride. The freedom to be imperfect.”

Sam’s entire body goes still beneath me. For a moment, he’s utterly silent. Then his arms lock around me, crushing me to his chest as if he could absorb my certainty through skin alone.

“Zaychik.” His voice breaks on the endearment. “How do you see straight through my armor?”

“Because I recognize the cracks.” I press my lips to his throat. “They match mine.”

23

NOVA

“This secure line won’t last forever,” Hope’s voice crackles through my phone. “Give me something juicy before Myles cuts us off again.”

I trace a finger through the condensation on the glass. “Fifteen extra minutes today.”

“What did that cost you?”

“My soul. Or yours. I didn’t read the fine print.”

Hope’s laugh comes through staticky but genuine. “You pimping me out to your jailkeeper?”

“More like listening to an hour-long speech about his many dateable attributes.” I push away from the window, bare feet silent on thick Persian carpets as I wander through the library stacks. “Did you know Myles can crack walnuts with his?—”

“Don’t finish that sentence.” Another laugh, but it fades quickly. “How are you really doing, Nova?”

Good question. Last night’s intimacy feels like a dream now. Sam spent hours whispering promises against my skin, sharing fears about fatherhood and his determination to be better than Leonid.

But morning brought reality crashing back—more meetings, more secrets, more walls between us. The tenderness in his eyes when he touched my growing belly has been replaced by that familiar arctic steel.

Sometimes, I think the only version of him I get to keep is the one that exists in darkness, when his guard drops and his masks slip away. Daylight steals him from me, no matter how hard I try to cling on.

“I’m fine.”

“Bullshit.”

“I am, really,” I insist. “I have Samuil back.” I leave out that having him here but unreachable might be worse than when he was gone. At least then I could blame the distance.

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