Page 54 of The Bratva King's Auctioned Bride

They were so begrudging in their agreement that I worried they might not carry out my new orders. I had left them on their own too long, and while they did a great job of putting the pieces back together after the fallout, they had grown a bit too independent for my taste.

The sour taste of my uncle’s betrayal still lingered in my mouth, so it wasn’t going to be easy to trust anyone fully for a while. Another thing I’d have to contend with when this was over. If it ever ended.

The next meeting went a little bit better, but there were still rumblings. I wasn’t quite so patient and laid down the hammer. If even one of the attacks continued ahead as planned, the people involved were done. I left what that might mean to their imaginations.

Now that the first round of calling off the attacks was taken care of, I couldn’t wait to get home and try to patch over the cracks that appeared between us when I put my foot down about her brothers. I just needed a little more time before I could figure out a way to enable a meeting between them. Two days tops, because I still had to fly to San Francisco to make sure they understood the plan was off up there, too.

I already had the jet scheduled for first thing in the morning, and I probably could have flown up later tonight, but I needed to be with my wife. To make things perfect between us again. Or at least better, which was all I could hope for at the moment.

However, before I could make it onto the freeway toward home, I got word from my second in command that the guy in charge of the soon-to-be-canceled operation in San Francisco was making noises about jumping the gun.

With a sigh, I pulled over into a rest area so I could deal with it immediately and not end up wrapped around a safety barrier. I found his number and called, waiting to hear what he had to say before jumping down his throat. He had proven to be smart in the past and wasn’t usually a loose cannon. I respected him as much as I did my number two man, and he’d never gone against me before.

“You aren’t going to like what I have to say,” I told him as soon as he answered. “No one else has.”

“Yeah, I heard,” he said. “But hear me out first. This is big and might change your mind.”

As it turned out, he did have a solid argument for going ahead with the San Francisco plan, albeit with a few changes. A series of warehouses that were important to Lev Fokin, thebrother in charge of their operations up there, were currently being fumigated. That meant no one would be in them.

“Wasn’t one of your main directives not to hurt anyone if at all possible?” he reminded me. “Here’s our chance. I can have those buildings and all their contents under our control in no time.”

It was tempting, very tempting. Should I go for it? Since there was no way I would ever use Mila as a bargaining chip now, this might be a way to show the Fokins that I was willing to be reasonable and give as well as take. Send the message that I meant business, but in a way that wouldn’t cause any lasting harm.

The only thing keeping me from giving the go-ahead right away was the very real notion that Mila might still perceive it as a betrayal, even if no lives were lost. She’d see soon enough that I was going to return the property as soon as we all came to an amicable agreement.

“Hang tight until tomorrow,” I told him. “Let me get up there.”

“The window for this is small, boss,” he said. “We gotta make a decision.”

With a sigh, I started the engine and pulled out of the rest area, no longer heading for home, but toward the airport. “I’ll be up there in a couple of hours. Nothing happens until I’m there, got it?”

He got it. This wasn’t in the plan, and I still would have much rather been on my way home to Mila, but I owed it to the men who’d sacrificed so much to check it out first and then decide if all our well-laid plans were off. I could whip up there and be home later on tonight, and then fill Mila in on everything.

No more secrets.

Chapter 38 - Mila

I hid out in the guest bedroom until Arkadi was out of the house, then wandered around, vacillating between hurt and furious. Either way, something had to change if we were going to truly be a married couple, and not prisoner and jailer. And I needed to be as calm as possible to get my point across, so I tried putting together a flower arrangement with blooms I picked from around the gardens. It was a nice, relaxing project, and I was pleased with the outcome, meaning to put it in the middle of the table when Arkadi and I had a civilized conversation over dinner.

Then, one of the guards showed me a message bluntly telling me he wasn’t going to be home for dinner. No explanation why, just to eat without him.

Oh hell, I wasn’t going to be civilized at all. I meant to have a knockdown, drag-out fight if that was what it took to make him see reason and let me see my brothers. Or at least tell them I was all right.

I was willing to keep the fact that I was back home a secret for a few more days. Underneath my current anger, I really was beginning to trust Arkadi, so I could give him that if he could, in turn, promise to give me what I wanted. It had to go both ways.

A phone call, nothing more. So damn simple that it was unbelievable that I even had to fight for it. Was I still a prisoner? Or a partner, like I longed to be? It seemed like it leaned far more to one than the other. I couldn’t even shop online without supervision, for goodness’ sake.

Fired up, I decided to put it to the test. I found the guard who had relayed the text message about Arkadi ditching me for dinner and gave him my sweetest look.

“Can I use your phone?”

He didn’t burst out into laughter, which was a good sign, but he certainly didn’t hand it over with no questions. “I can call Arkadi for you if you like,” he said, as stony and unshakeable as any of them.

Well, I meant to shake this one. “I want to talk to him in private,” I said, trying not to take out my ire on him. I kept my hand out, and we had a tense stare-down, but I was determined to win this tiny battle or else turn it into a war. “Is there some rule against talking to my husband that I don’t know about?”

Reminding him, I was the boss’s wife cracked him, and he begrudgingly handed over the phone. Following me for a few steps, he hung back, miraculously letting me go into the next room.

I closed the door, waiting a second to see if I heard his footsteps, but it seemed like he wasn’t going to listen in. I looked down at the phone as if I had never seen such a marvel before. That was way too easy. Now, who to call. It had to be my most reasonable, even-tempered brother. The problem was that the only one whose number I could recall off the top of my head was Ivan. He was just about the most hot-headed of them all.

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