Page 27 of Immaculate Deception (Romanoff Bratva)

Glass shatters across the asphalt and bounces up everywhere like upside-down hail. I run through a downpour of it to get to the driver’s side of Arya’s car.

Arya is just closing the door as I drop into the seat. The moment both her feet are off the ground, I throw the car into drive and we take off with a screech.

I hope to fucking God we make it.

9

Arya

Dima presses his hand to the back of my head and pushes it down below the window. “Keep your head down,” he growls.

“I’m crushing Lukas,” I argue, trying to sit upright.

His hand holds me firmly anyways. “Better that than making him an orphan.”

I scowl in irritation, but I’m not exactly in a position to fight back. Even when he takes his hand off the back of my head, I stay tucked down like he asked. Mostly because I don’t know what else to do. He at least seems to have some idea of how to operate.

The processing part of my brain has backfired after everything that’s happened. I’m not sure how to understand what is going on, so in a way, I’m grateful to have someone tell me what to do, how to act.

Even if he is even more of an asshole than I remember from the night we met.

“Okay,” he says a few minutes later, his voice a deep rumble. “We’re clear.”

I spin around and scan the road behind us. I can’t even see the hospital anymore. “Are they coming after us?”

“Not with two flat tires and busted-out windows.”

I sigh in relief.

Then I realize—I’m with Dima Romanoff.

The man from that night in the clinic.

Lukas’s father.

My stomach twists. I’m not sure if it’s because of shock, disgust, or the fact that I gave birth a little over six hours ago. Probably all three, plus a dash of the primal heat that drew me to Dima in the first place.

I assumed I’d never know the identity of Lukas’s father. There didn’t seem to be a way to identify him, aside from submitting Lukas’s DNA to one of those ancestry websites and hoping for a match.

I’d imagined explaining to my child that I didn’t know his father’s identity. That I didn’t know the man’s name. His face. Or even a single thing about him, for that matter.

That answer might work when he’s young. But eventually, he’ll realize what it means.

One-night-stand.

Accident.

Mistake.

So in one way, Dima’s appearance is a blessing.

In just about every other way, though—i.e., the ways in which I’m currently fleeing the hospital with my baby in my arms and armed gunmen behind us—it’s a curse.

My son’s father is a killer. A beast. A monster.

How do you tell a child that?

Dima is flying down a frontage road, headed for the highway, and I realize all at once Lukas isn’t in a car seat. He’s in the front seat. With an airbag. As we speed down the road.

---