Ravaged Throne: A Russian Mafia Romance (Solovev Bratva #2)(23)

LEO





I bury the axe in the trunk, sending shards of bark flying. Before the dust even settles, I yank the blade free and hack at the stump all over again.

“Jesus Christ, Leo!” Gaiman approaches me cautiously from the left.

He keeps his distance. Probably because I’m swinging an ax around. But it’s not going anywhere. My grip is strong, even if anger has made my technique sloppy.

“Leo, for fuck’s sake, just stop!” Gaiman says, when I don’t halt my hacking at the sight of him. “Fuck, man.”

I keep going until I’ve split the stump in two. Once it’s completely destroyed, I throw the axe onto a fresh bed of snow. It sinks beneath the powder.

“I take it dinner didn’t go well,” he says wryly.

“I got the truth she was hiding.”

The moon is perched high above us, radiating silver light over the entire mountain range. It’s bright up here, and somehow even that is pissing me off.

Gaiman approaches slowly and leans against a tree. “Tell me.”

“The baby… the boy.” I’m still panting from trying and failing to burn off the anger inside of me. “He’s alive.”

His jaw drops. “What?”

“She lied to me about the miscarriage. She had my baby,” I growl. “And then she told me he fucking died.”

“Jesus,” Gaiman whispers, looking up towards the moon.

“I knew it,” I continue. “I knew that my son was out there. I just didn’t think she could lie so goddamn convincingly.”

In that way, I underestimated her. I won’t make that mistake again.

“She’s had a crash course in deception,” Gaiman points out. “We always knew that Anya Mikhailov was no sleeping dog.”

“I was going to keep the bitch out of it,” I snarl. “But now she’s placed herself right in the middle of my war.”

Gaiman tenses noticeably.

I’m not in the mood for tact tonight. “What?” I snap. “Spit it out.

“Do we have the resources to go after both Anya Mikhailov and Belov?”

“I don’t give a shit if we do or not. She has my fucking son!”

I yell the last word. It echoes across the mountains. Birds caw and flock out of the trees. Gaiman isn’t perturbed. His expression is calm and measured, unshakeable as the mountains around us.

I’m glad he’s the one who found me here. Jax is useless in moments like these. All he knows how to do is make stupid jokes that me want to rip his head off with my bare hands.

“Leo, I know. We have to get the boy back,” Gaiman says quietly. “But we also need to be smart about this. We have to ask ourselves: is he in danger with her?”

“She’s a Mikhailov. The answer is self-evident.”

“She’s also his grandmother.”

The knowledge is a little bitter now that I’m confronted with it, but it’s the bargain I entered into. “That doesn’t mean I trust her.”

“Neither do I. But that’s not the point,” Gaiman argues. “We don’t need to trust her. We just need to trust her with him. At least for now. At least until we can deal with Belov.”

“He’s still weak. It can wait.”

“He is for now,” Gaiman agrees. “But he’s rebuilding fast. He’s going to hit us back for taking those two buildings down. You know that as well as I do. We didn’t cripple him with a second blow while he was at his weakest, so we lost some time.”

Gaiman is right. I know he is. Instead of hitting Belov again, I put all my resources into finding Willow.

I shake my head. “This is my fucking son, Gaiman. Everything else can wait while I get him back.”

Gaiman looks down for a moment. I can tell he’s biting back his words. But I’m too lost in my sorrow and anger to give a shit.

“I don’t even know his name,” I whisper, mostly to myself.

Gaiman looks up at me. “His name is Solovev. That’s the only name that matters.”

I nod curtly. He’s right.

“Do you think she’ll help you get him back?” Gaiman asks.

“I’m not really giving her a choice.”

“The woman in that bedroom is not the same one that Belov stole, Leo,” he says. “She’s more Anya than anything now.”

“She’s pretending. That hard mask she’s wearing? It’s a fa?ade. And it’s slipping more and more every day. But if she needs motivation, I can give her that.”

“With what?”

“I have her parents.”

Gaiman raises his eyebrows. “Benjamin and Natalie are sitting pretty in a cozy little house you bought for them.”

“She doesn’t know that.”

He smirks. “How long do you think it’ll be before she figures you out?”

“There’s no figuring me out, Gaiman,” I say. “You should know that better than anyone.”

He smiles, and I feel some of the tension in my chest release. I sit down on a broken hunk of the stump I just split. Gaiman leans on a tree a few paces away.

“I’ve been having a lot of dreams lately,” Gaiman says unexpectedly.