Page 18 of Til Death Do Us Part (Kornilov Bratva Duet 2)

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Theo is sittingon the living room floor with a mountain of blocks in front of him. He is arranging them into a single tower, his tongue sticking out the side of his mouth from concentration, so he doesn’t notice my entrance.

The nanny is sitting at the kitchen table with a book and a cup of coffee, and after a quick glance to see who I am, she goes back to her book. I don’t blame her. I love Theo, but I learned how exhausting he can be when Molly ran away for a week.

He stands up to place another block on top, holding it carefully in his small hands. As he places it, however, the whole tower wobbles and topples over. The second it does, I grab him from behind and swing him off his feet. He shrieks and then giggles when I tickle his side.

“I didn’t know you were coming.” He grabs my face and then wraps his skinny arms around my neck.

If someone had told me six months ago I’d be the pseudo-father to a four-year-old boy, I would have told them they were crazy. Yet, here I am.

“I’m here to get your mommy. We are going out.”

“Me too?” he asks, his eyebrows lifting to his hairline with expectation.

He looks so much like Fedor. So much I feel my heart squeeze. They have the same pointed chin and narrow nose. People who don’t know any better will say he looks just like me—we are related, after all—but knowing Fedor as intimately as I do, the truth is obvious. Theo is Fedor’s.

I sit down on the couch and plop him on my knee. “Not today, I’m afraid. We are going somewhere that is just for grown-ups.”

He frowns, but I flick my thumb over his lower lip and release it quickly, making a loud popping noise that, despite his disappointment, makes him smile.

“Next time,” I promise.

He climbs off my lap and goes back to working on his tower, enlisting my help to gather up all of the blocks that skittered under the couch after the first collapse. The tower is half as tall as it was before when I hear the muffled shouting upstairs.

I turn around and the nanny is glancing towards the stairs as well. When she sees me looking at her, she nods for me to go and walks over to keep Theo busy. I thank her with a half-smile and hurry up the stairs.

Voices are coming from Molly’s room, and as I approach the door, I can hear sobbing mixed in.

“I can do something else with it, Mrs. Kornilov. If you don’t like it—”

“Don’t call me that,” Molly interrupts the hairdresser. “Molly, please. Call me Molly.”

I walk into the room without knocking.

Molly and the hairdresser both start, eyes wide. Molly’s dark hair is half up, twisted into a crown of braids on the top of her head with the bottom half curled and flowing down her back. She looks incredible, even more enchanting than normal.

The hairdresser backs away from Molly and goes to the vanity table, needlessly rearranging her supplies. Molly sags onto the bed, her shoulders hunched forward. She looks nothing like the happy, sated woman I left in bed this morning.

“What’s going on?” I ask, turning my ire on the hairdresser. “Why did I hear my wife screaming?”

Don’t call me that. Call me Molly.

She is regretting her decision already. Less than twenty-four hours later, and she wants to back out. When Molly agreed to the fake arrangement, I knew I needed to act quickly before she could change her mind, but maybe this was too fast. Maybe it was too much, too soon.

Though, the alternative was to wait and allow more of my men the opportunity to defect to Fedor’s side of this war, and the Bratva can’t afford anymore losses. Neither can Molly. Fedor got close enough the night he sent one of his men into the apartment holding Theo. I couldn’t let him get any closer. This was necessary, regardless of how Molly felt about it.

“It’s nothing. It’s not her fault,” Molly says, shaking her head. She sits up, a breath hitching in her chest like she is going to say something, before she sinks back down and shakes her head again. “It’s nothing.”

“Yeah, it seems like nothing,” I say, voice thick with sarcasm. I move to sit on the bed next to her and lay my hand on her knee. “What is it?”

All of a sudden, Molly stands up, slipping out from under my touch, and begins to pace across the room. I can clearly see she is upset, but I also can’t take my eyes off the figure she cuts in her dress.

She is in a black dress that I hand-selected for her. The wedding was about love, but the ceremony tonight is about loyalty. It is about the men seeing Molly as their leader, not as an innocent, pure bride. They need to respect her authority.

The top is rigid and structured in a bustier style with a tight skirt that hugs her body close through mid-thigh. Then, over top, is a layer of lace that drapes to her knees. It is sexy and powerful—a dress befitting a Bratva queen. A dress befitting my wife.

“I can’t do this,” she says, waving her arms over the dress and her hair. “This. All of it. I just … this isn’t who I am. I don’t wear fancy things or have my hair done like this. I feel—”

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