Page 48 of His Ruthless Vow

"I'm on my way," I say, but even I hear how tired I sound. "I'm about an hour out. Are you okay? Is the baby keeping you up?" There's no good reason she should still be awake at this hour. It's almost four a.m.

"He's doing somersaults," she says, and I hear the smile on her face. "I'm fine, just anxious. How was Maksim? What did he want?"

I hesitate because I don't know how to tell her that the world we ran from has followed us. "It's bad," I finally say, "worse than we thought. There's another organization moving in, using the war to pick our families apart, and they know about you and the baby."

The line goes quiet for a long moment, and I can only imagine how she's feeling. I picture her sitting there with a blank expression as fear starts to coil around her. "What are we going to do?" she asks calmly, but it's edged with fear.

"I don't know," I admit, passing a slow-moving truck and watching the sun begin to appear on the horizon. "Maksim thinks I should go back, take control of the family, end the war before the Korelovs destroy everything."

"And what do you think?" she asks softly. I already know what she thinks about this. She doesn’t have to say a word. She won't like me rushing back in to play hero, but I swear this time, it's not my ego at stake. It's really my family.

Our son does deserve to grow up in peace, and that will never happen so long as this feuding continues. "I think," I say slowly, merging onto the joint highway that leads toward St. Petersburg, "that we can't keep running. I think that our son deserves to know his family without fear, and I think that the only way to give him that is to go back and finish what we started."

"You want to return to Moscow?" she asks, but there's so much fear in her voice. I hate doing this to her. I know it's the right thing, and maybe I could find a way to leave her in St. Petersburg, but she'd never let me go alone.

"I want to end this," I confess, though we both know they're the same thing now. "I want to give him a world where he's not a target and you're not a bargaining chip. I want us to be a family without the shadow of this war hanging over us."

She's quiet again, and I expect her to come back with a refusal that I might have to fight her over, but she sighs and I feel tense waiting for her to speak. "Okay," she says. "Then we go back together, on our terms."

"Alana—"

"Don't try to protect me from this," she interrupts, and she sounds stubborn and headstrong. "We're partners, remember? You promised."

I stare at the road ahead, the headlights cutting through the darkness, and I know she's right. Going back means becoming the man I was raised to be, the heir, the enforcer, the killer. But I also know that staying means waiting for the Korelovs to find us, raising my son in hiding, and teaching him to be afraid instead of teaching him to be strong.

"Okay," I say. "We go back together."

Now if I can convince Maksim to get some sort of safehouse ready for us, it'll go a long way toward convincing her it's not us walking into an ambush or our personal executions. If not, we might very well be dead seconds after driving back into Moscow.

30

ALANA

Dimitri navigates the sedan through Moscow's evening traffic, and I glance into the back seat where Misha sleeps in his carrier. Two weeks old and I'm still watching his chest to make sure he's breathing all the time.

We arrived in the city two days ago and holed up in a flat Maksim arranged on the outskirts of town, barely leaving the place while we gathered our courage. Now we're headed toward the safe house where my sister waits for us, though I'm feeling sick to my stomach again. And this time, I swear it's not pregnancy. It's nerves.

I haven't seen or talked to her since Christmas Eve and it's September now. She's probably angry with me, or worried sick. Or maybe she's been living terrified and she'll be relieved to see me. Either way, I never want to let anyone down, but Natalia is my oldest and best friend, not just my sister. Hurting her was never part of my plan.

The city feels different than I remember. The corners stand empty where dealers once lingered, and shops that used to pay protection to our families now have their doors shuttered, the owners having fled rather than choose sides in a conflict that consumes everything. And there are more police out and about than I ever remember seeing in Moscow my entire life. It's eerily quiet and sort of foreboding.

"You think she told him?" Dimitri asks as we stop at a light. He keeps his eyes forward, watching for cars, but I hear the worry in his voice.

"Natalia would never do that," I say, though doubt creeps in at the edges. "She's my sister. She might be angry, she might not understand why I left, but she wouldn't hand me over to our father like that." Natalia has never once been untrustworthy, not ever. I would trust her with my life, but I don't trust my father at all. He's a snake, and I never saw it until I met a real gentleman. It makes me thankful for Dimitri, and I reach over and take his hand.

"People do things when they're scared," Dimitri says, tightening his fingers in mine. "They convince themselves that loyalty means choosing one person over another, that protecting family means controlling them."

"She's not like that," I insist, though I haven't seen her in months, and I don't know what the war's done to her, what our father's influence has twisted in my absence. "She wants out too. She just never had the courage to take the step or someone to take it with her."

Dimitri glances at me, then back at the road. "Let's hope you're right. Because if she told him, if he's waiting for us⁠—"

"He's not," I tell him bluntly, feeling confident now. "She wouldn't."

My sister refused to listen to me for months preceding the planned wedding last December because she felt it was right. I never could convince her to back down. But after Dimitri and I broke that wedding up, I saw her relief. She was finally allowed to show her true feelings, and she did. She never wanted to marry Alexei back then, and if I'm right, she doesn't want this war going on now.

When we pull up in front of the safehouse and park, it's indistinguishable from a thousand others, peeling paint and curtains drawn. Dimitri checks his weapon before he helps me unbuckle Misha's carrier, and we climb out of the car cautiously. We're in a borrowed car dressed inconspicuously, but every shadow and dark corner that lurks around us could be the place someone hides lying in wait.

I've walked on pins and needles before, but this tops it all.