Page 50 of Immaculate Deception (Romanoff Bratva)

Brigitte opens her mouth to respond, but before she can formulate a coherent sentence through her anger, my phone rings.

I rip it out of my pocket. It’s Gennady. “What?” I growl into it.

“Caravan headed your way,” he says breathlessly. “I just passed them on the highway.”

“What do you mean, ‘a caravan’?”

In the motel room, Brigitte and Arya go deathly quiet.

“Armored cars, tinted windows. Three of them. They’re five minutes from you right now. You have to go.” He sounds panicked. “Do you want me to come back?”

“No. Keep driving. Thanks.” I hang up on him and grab Arya by the arm. “We have to go. Now.”

“Are people coming for us?”

I nod. “Get everything and go.”

“She’s already packed,” Brigitte says. “She can ride with me.”

I pivot towards Arya’s friend and tower over her. “You can fuck off. She’s coming with me.”

Arya lays a hand on my chest. I feel the angry fires inside of me simmer down at her touch. But different fires heat up at the same time.

“We don’t have time to argue,” she says. “Lukas and I will go with Dima. Brigitte, you can follow us.”

“She can go back to wherever the fuck she came from,” I bite.

Brigitte glares at me and I glare back, but Arya’s gentle squeeze on my arm brings me back to the reality at hand.

Bad men are coming. We have to go.

I pick up the bags and run through the motel door to where I parked, quickly tossing them in the backseat of Arya’s car. She comes up behind me, carrying Lukas. “I haven’t changed him yet. He—”

“Later. Put him in the car now.”

Brigitte comes storming up last as Arya straps Lukas into the car seat. She’s still looking at me with fury in her eyes. “At least tell me where you’re going. We could get separated on the highway.”

Arya looks at me, green eyes wide and pleading.

She almost left. If I hadn’t come back when I did, she might have been gone.

She tried to take my fucking son away from me.

When the time is right, I’ll explain to her who makes the decisions here. I’ll make it very clear that she does nothing without my explicit permission.

But time is the one thing we don’t have on our side right now. It’ll have to wait.

“Chicago,” I answer finally.

I don’t explain why. Not yet.

Just as Brigitte starts to balk at how far away we’re going, a window in the car behind Arya shatters.

Across the street, I can see a black SUV squealing to a stop in front of the gas station. Another one is parked next to the pumps, passenger door open. The barrel of a rifle is resting above the sideview mirror.

“Get down!” I roar.

I duck down and crawl across the ground to Arya. She’s still in pain from labor and is struggling to crouch or crawl. I scoop her up and drop her in the passenger seat as another shot whizzes by. This one pierces the door to our motel room.

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