Page 42 of The Bratva's Sextuplets
“I should regret this,” I finally whisper against his chest.
“Do you?” His voice is carefully neutral, but I feel the way his body tenses as he waits for my answer.
“No.” The admission comes out breathless, honest. “I should, but I don’t.”
His arms tighten around me. “Neither do I.”
“What does that make us?”
“Complicated.” I can hear the wry smile in his voice. “Very, very complicated.”
I lift my head to look at him, studying the face that’s become so familiar yet continues to surprise me. “Can we be complicated and still make this marriage work?”
“I don’t know, but I want to try.”
“So do I.”
He brushes a strand of hair back from my face, his touch gentle despite the calluses on his fingertips. “To do that, you need to understand what this means and what wanting each other costs in a world like ours.”
“Tell me.”
“It means we’re both more vulnerable now. Our enemies have another weapon to use against us. The stakes of everything we do are higher.” He pauses, his fingers tracing patterns on my bare shoulder. “It means what happened today was just the beginning.”
I consider his words, weighing them against what I feel for him, against the connection that’s grown between us despite every rational reason it shouldn’t exist.
“I’d still be a target even if we hated each other, right?”
He shrugs. “If Avgar followed the unwritten rules, no. You’d be safe either way, but he’s not doing business as usual…so, yes, you’ll be a target either way.”
“Right, so why wouldn’t we see where this leads?”
“That makes sense.” He smiles.
“Then we should proceed without hiding what’s developing between us?”
He nods after a moment. "Yes, but are you sure, knowing the risks?”
“Yes.” I settle against his chest, my ear pressed to the steady rhythm of his heartbeat. “Pretending we don’t want each other hasn’t made us any safer.”
He kisses the top of my head in a soft and sweet gesture. “Then we stop pretending.”
“No more pretending.” I nod. The comfortable silence stretches between us for several minutes before I force myself to address what happened earlier in the afternoon. “The house arrest won’t work,” I say quietly against his chest.
His body goes still beneath me. “Zita?—”
“I’m serious. Locking me away until the threat passes isn’t a solution.” I lift my head to look at him. “It’s just postponing the inevitable while making me feel like a prisoner instead of a partner.”
He’s quiet for a long moment, clearly struggling with his protective instincts versus the partnership we’ve been building. “I know,” he finally says. “I realized that the moment you walked away. I was acting like my father by deciding to keep you safe at any cost while knowing you’d hate and resent me for it.”
“We agreed to be partners after the conference room incident.” I trace patterns on his chest. “That means working together to solve problems, not you making unilateral decisions about my safety.”
“You’re right, but I don’t know how to keep you safe without wanting to lock you away from everything that could hurt you.”
“We’ll come up with a plan.” I press a kiss to his throat. “When we’re both more awake and less exhausted, we’ll talk about how to handle threats without abandoning everything we’ve built,but you have to promise to include me in the solutions instead of trying to protect me from them.”
“I promise.” He tightens his arms around me. “Even when every instinct I have screams at me to hide you somewhere safe.”
“Maybe that’ll work as long as you’re hiding with me. I don’t want to be left in the dark.”
