Page 113 of Obsessed Bratva Daddy
I stood. I kissed her. Not for show. For her.
I held her face. I held her there. I let myself have that one. Then I let her go.
I turned. I looked at Rhea.
She was holding Beom-Beom against her chest with both hands. She was smiling so wide it had gone out the top of her face into her eyes. She had not noticed yet that I was about to do it again.
"Rhea," I said. "Come here, please."
She came. Beom-Beom under her arm. The new stuffed fox tucked in her other elbow. She stopped in front of me with grass on the toes of her boots. I went back down. Same knee. Same grass.
"I have asked Chloe to be my wife," I said. Low. Slow. "There is one more person in my house I want to ask one more thing." I let the breath sit. "Rhea. If you say yes, Chloe and I would like to be your parents. Not on top of what you already have. With what you already have. I will sign the papers tomorrow. You willbe a Sorokin on paper the way you have always been one in my house."
She stared at me. The smile froze. Her chin trembled. She did not say a thing for one second. For two.
"Like Chloe would be my mom?" she said. Very small.
Chloe was beside me before I felt her move. She was in the grass on her knees. Her hand went onto Rhea's back, gentle.
"If you want me, sweet girl," Chloe said. "Only if you want me."
"I want you," Rhea whispered.
She launched. She hit both of us at the same time and at full speed. Beom-Beom ended up squashed between three chests. The fox went somewhere into the grass. My arm went around her, then around Chloe, and the three of us were one shape on the cold ground under white lights.
"Yes," Rhea said into someone's shoulder, muffled, wet. "Yes."
The half-circle broke. They came forward in the loose, slow way people come forward when they have been waiting for permission to. Grandma reached us first, her small hands out of her sleeves now, her eyes very bright and very dry in the way of a woman who had used up her crying years on harder things. She kissed Chloe on the forehead. She kissed Rhea on the forehead. She turned to me and laid her hand on my cheek for a beat. Her palm was warm through the cold of the air.
"Bring them all home safe," she said, low, only to me. "Always."
"Always, Halmoni," I said. Just as low.
She patted my cheek once. She moved on.
Mikhail was openly crying and pretending he was not, a thing he was very bad at given the size of his face. Alek's working blue eye was wet. He did not bother to hide it. He clapped my shoulder once with the weight of a hand that had hit mea thousand times for a thousand reasons. Lily kissed Chloe on both cheeks. Jade hugged Rhea without a word. Ivan looked at his shoes. His shoulders shook once. He looked up. He nodded at me. That was Ivan's whole sentence and I heard every word of it.
Jacob came up last. He waited until the others had moved off. He held out his hand. I took it. We shook. His grip was solid. Not a test. Just a hand.
"Take care of her," he said. Low. Dry. Real. "She picks her people for life."
"I know," I said.
He nodded. He let go. He stepped back to stand beside the grandmother, laid a hand on her shoulder, and that was the end of a fight that had started a year ago on a lawn in a different town. It had never really been about either of us in the first place.
I had spent years building a fortress and learning to count the people inside it. Tonight, in the cold grass under a string of small white lights in a town I had never bothered to name, I stood in the middle of my fortress with all of my people around me at once. I was not counting anymore. I was just holding them.
30
CHLOE
The light woke me before the alarm did.
I opened my eyes in Lily's guest room and lay there a second without moving, watching the cold gold of late autumn pour in through the gap in the curtains. The compound had the particular quiet of a place where everyone is awake and pretending not to be yet. A kettle clicked on somewhere down the hall. Outside, gravel shifted under a slow set of boots, one of Daniil's men walking the perimeter the way they always did, dark coat against pale sky.
I slid my hand under the comforter and rested it low on my stomach. There was a small curve there now, barely a curve, the kind only I could really feel. The seamstress had let the bodice out last week and tied off the new thread with two careful knots and said nothing about it. I loved her for that.
I thought, for one quiet second, about the version of me who used to wake up in a basement studio with one window the size of a shoebox, in a bed that creaked when I rolled over, who used to stare at the ceiling and tell herself she did not want anything she could not afford. That girl had been very good at not wanting. An Olympic-level athlete of not wanting. I sent hera small thought across the years, something quiet, something close to thank you, and then I let her go.
