Satin Princess(75)

“The thought of walking past Freya’s apartment… of going back there…” She sighs and shakes her head. “But I should probably break my rental agreement, right? And I have stuff there I want. My cookbooks and photographs and documents. I can’t abandon it, as much as I wish I could.”

“I can take care of all of that for you.”

“Only if you want.”

“I want.”

She smiles, but the expression starts to slip.

“Is there something else?” I ask.

“With these crazy hormones, there’s always something else,” she chuckles. “Now, I’m kind of sad about not saying goodbye to the apartment. I’d like to see it again. Maybe I could take the security team you assigned me and—”

“No,” I growl. “I’ll take you myself.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes. We can go now.”

She glances at the clock. “Don’t you have some big meeting in an hour or so?”

“They’ll wait for me,” I say. “In any case, this shouldn’t take too long.”

“Okay,” she says with a shy smile. She twines her fingers through mine and doesn’t let go.

I have one of my men bring my favorite Porsche around front and we load up. I keep the top down as we cruise through the streets, driving slowly because I can tell that Jessa is enjoying the fresh air. She throws her head back and looks at the sky. Her hair flows freely in the wind.

She looks like a photograph, like a magazine cover, blissfully untethered from grief and heartbreak and fear, if only for the length of a car ride.

“What was your father like?” she asks abruptly, glancing at me.

I arch a brow. “That’s what you’re thinking about right now?”

“I’m distracting myself,” she says. “Indulge me.”

I sigh. “Well, he was brutal. And demanding. Necessary qualities in any don.”

“So that’s how you’d want people to describe you?”

“They do. Or they’d better.”

She smirks. “Okay, fair enough. But I guess I mean, what was he like as a father? As your father?”

“He wasn’t much of a father at all,” I say honestly. “He looked at me and saw only a tool. I was his heir first, son second. I’ll be…” I hesitate. But I’ve come too far to back away from this thorny topic now. “I’ll be different with our child.”

Jessa blinks slowly. “You mean, you’ll, like, play ball with him on the weekends? Read bedtime stories to her at night? You’ll go to all their soccer games?”

“I’ll do whatever it takes to show our child they are loved.”

“And you wouldn’t see him as your heir?”

“If it’s a boy, he would be both,” I say honestly. “But it would be son first, heir second.”

“What if he doesn’t want to be your heir?” she asks cautiously, wondering if she’s crossing some invisible line.

I shrug. “Then he doesn’t have to be.”

She seems shocked by that. “Really?”

“Really.”

“You’d just let him leave the Bratva and become… I don’t know, a DJ or a carpenter or an artist or a priest?”

“Okay, well, if those are the only choices then I think I’d rather chain him in the basement.”

She punches me in the arm lightly. “I’m serious. He could have a normal, everyday job? If he wanted a normal, boring life, is that something you could get on board with?”

“If that’s what he wanted… yes,” I say. “I am not my father.”

“What about the whole ‘heir’ business? You’d still need one of those.”

I shrug. “I guess we’ll just have to make more babies then.”

She stiffens, a nervous kind of excitement making her sit up taller.

“And what if we have a girl?” she asks. Her eyes are bright as if she can already see this hypothetical future.

“What do you mean?”

“Could she potentially be your heir?”

I bob my head back and forth. “It’s not done often, I’ll admit.”

“Because even the Bratva is sexist. Not such a different world after all.”

“Fuck yes, it’s sexist. But I’m not. If I had a daughter and she wanted in, then she would get a fair seat at the table.”

“Hm. Okay. Do you know what you would like to have?” she asks. “A boy or a girl?”

I consider that for a moment. “I know how to handle boys. I understand them better, for obvious reasons. I can relate. For that reason alone, when I think about this baby, I picture a boy. But I would be equally as happy to have a daughter.”

“Margaret told me that daughters and fathers have a special kind of connection.”

“Well, if we have a girl, I guess we’ll find out.”

We turn down a broad road lined with greenery on either side. There’s an oncoming car that, as it gets closer, looks familiar.

Then I notice the license plate.

“Hey, it’s Yulian,” Jessa says.

Yulian pulls up alongside us and rolls his window down. “Fancy running into you two. Where are you headed?”