Down the Line (Volkov Bratva Book 6) Read online

  While he hadn’t been upset at all that she’d kept the pregnancy a secret from him this long, he had also made it clear that whatever appointments came after, he would be going with her to each one.

  “She looks perfect,” the technician said in a happy voice, seeming just as excited to see the image as they were. She clearly loved her job.

  Mishca didn’t seem to hear her as his gaze remained glued to the screen, even as he took a step closer.

  He was … riveted, in a word.

  Lost in his own thoughts.

  But even with his back turned to her, she caught glimpses of his profile. The hard line of his jaw. The dimple in his cheek.

  The way a corner of his mouth was slowly curling up as he stared on.

  Their little girl was months away from entering the world—months away from drawing her first proper breath—but already, she had her father wrapped around her tiny little finger.

  Six months and her stomach had popped in a way it hadn’t with Sacha.

  Lauren would have thought she was pregnant with twins had she not double-checked during one of her monthly checkups. Even though she could hardly fit in anything anymore—and yoga pants had become her favorite again—Mishca didn’t seem to mind it at all.

  Like now, when they should have been getting up and getting dressed before heading over to Niklaus and Reagan’s new place. Instead, she was lying on her back, her fingers sifting through Mishca’s thick hair as he rested his hand against the curve of her belly.

  Ever since she had been in class and felt the quick kick of her little feet and had excitedly texted him about it, he did this every morning and every night, waiting for the moment he felt a response to his probing.

  If he could keep her in bed like this forever, she imagined he would.

  “Maybe we should get a puppy,” Lauren said, having a sudden thought. “Sacha loves Loki, and it would be so cute if they got to grow up with their own puppy.”

  She felt his chuckle more than heard it, smiling despite herself. “Do you really want to train a puppy too? Cleaning up after it as well as changing diapers?”

  When he put it like that … “We have three months,” she said with a wave of her hand. “That’s plenty of time.”

  He kissed her stomach before rolling away. “Whatever you want.”

  The beauty of having a husband who agreed with her.

  Getting Sacha ready to leave had been surprisingly easy, considering how late he had gone to bed the night before, and the fact he was still sleeping by the time she started to dress him.

  She thanked her lucky stars for that, considering his penchant for crankiness when he was sleepy—a trait she was almost positive she was responsible for.

  They hadn’t had the opportunity to introduce Sacha to the twins the last and only time they had come around since the babies were born. Between work and school and everything else, the timing had never been right

  But today, that was going to change.

  Mishca had his men take the day off—though one still trailed them over to Hell’s Kitchen—and by the time they arrived, Sacha was wide-awake and babbling, more than a little excited to see his uncle.

  Undoubtedly because he looked just like his father

  But even before Lauren had known him well, she had always felt a fondness for Niklaus. The damaged ones usually needed the most love.

  Sure, he was prickly around the edges and had a tendency to lash out when he was annoyed, but the other nicer side of him made it easier to love him. The side that willingly helped save her life more than once simply because he hadn’t wanted his brother to feel the same pain he had.

  Or the person who would slowly renovate a house room by room into what his wife wanted without her ever having to ask.

  More often than not, Niklaus’s bark was worse than his bite.

  A slightly frazzled Reagan opened the door, the relief on her face almost palpable as she ushered them inside. Her fatigue disappeared as she smiled down at Sacha, but he could only spare her a moment of his attention as he hurried past her into the house.

  Lauren was just stepping over the threshold, one hand resting on her stomach when she caught sight of Niklaus coming downstairs, wiping his hands on a paint-spattered cloth.

  It was always interesting, seeing the differences between him and Mishca.

  Like now.

  Mishca still wore a suit despite it being the weekend—a sight she really enjoyed—while Niklaus was in jeans and an old T-shirt.

  They were opposites in most ways.

  “How’s my favorite nephew?” Niklaus asked, reaching for Sacha just as he was lifting his arms to be picked up.

  “Let’s get you off your feet, darlin’,” Reagan said to Lauren, her Irish accent still there but faint.

  “Oh, it’s nothing,” Lauren said with a wave of her hand, though she did sigh with relief once she was sitting in a chair.

  Their baby girl seemed to be pretty active today, kicking away every so often. She couldn’t say she minded.

  “How’re the babies?”

  Lauren recognized the expression on the other woman’s face. She quite imagined she had looked the same when Sacha was born.

  It was a mixture of wonder and fatigue and the greatest love a person could ever feel in their life.

  “They’re sleeping, but you can come on up.”

  Mishca hung back, talking with Niklaus while Lauren and Reagan went upstairs with Sacha in tow.

  It looked as if they were in the middle of renovations—small things, she imagined, like painting the walls of the guest bedroom she passed—but once they arrived at the room with the partially closed door, her heart skipped a beat.

  In just a few short months, this would be her all over again.

  The twins were already approaching three months old, though it felt like only yesterday when they’d surprised everyone on Christmas morning with their arrival.

  Reagan gently pushed the door open and quietly stepped inside.

  Lauren walked in next with Sacha at her heels, his hand fisted in her shirt, but his attention wasn’t on her, but rather the cribs on either side of the room.

  He was just tall enough to see through the slats at the swaddled babies inside, both sleeping peacefully.

  She had wondered, as her stomach had grown more prominent over the months and Sacha found it more curious each day, how he would react to a newborn. He was too young, she imagined, to understand he was a big brother, and how the baby’s arrival would change things.

  But he wasn’t indifferent when he looked at his little cousins.

  And she was starting to think that in all the days that followed this one, he would always do something that would top the last.

  Chapter 8

  Considering the journey life had taken her on, Lauren should have known better than to expect anything to go according to plan.

  The doctors could have predicted that she would be giving birth on a Friday, two full weeks from now. She could have even had everything in order to make sure she was prepared for just that.

  But it didn’t change the fact she was standing in the middle of the grocery aisle, staring at her favorite jar of peanut butter when she felt the unmistakable wetness between her legs. The shock of it made her glance down as her maternity pants darkened.

  And the moment she saw the evidence of what was to come, panic rode in, making her heart trip over itself.

  It didn’t matter that she had the nursery perfectly set up, or that she had been reading all the books and manuals she could on what it would be like to raise two children under the age of three, because for just a moment, she only felt terror.

  What if she wasn’t good enough?

  What if she gave the new baby too much love and Sacha suffered because of it?

  What if something went wrong and there was no way she could fix it?

  The questions whispered in her mind one after the other, but she couldn't focus on any of that at the moment.r />
  Their baby girl was coming.

  She hurried out of the store, grabbing her phone along the way, and let the stress and worry and everything else fade away.

  None of it was important anymore because it was time to have her baby.

  Liliya Catja Volkova came into the world with a soft cry and a pinched face, but Mishca had loved every second of it.

  There was nothing quite like seeing Lauren overwhelmed with emotion, tears spilling from her brown eyes as she clutched Liliya to her chest, looking up at him with so much love in her eyes he knew it had to be reflected in his own.

  He knew Lauren had worried, though she had tried her best to hide it, and he knew nothing he could say would truly calm her.

  He had to show her.

  That everything she wanted was still possible.

  That their dreams could still come true, even if the timetable was a little different.

  Even now, in the wee hours of the morning, he found himself unable to sleep, his mind going a mile a minute.

  So much was changing all around him.

  The bratva and all the structural changes he was making. The new people he had surrounding him—people he trusted more than anyone.

  With both Niklaus and Luka in top positions, he was no longer worried about anyone plotting against him, but he also knew that between the two of them, they would be bringing in new men.

  Starting with Luka, apparently. He’d taken his new role as captain quite seriously despite the way he usually handled things. But what would come of that was yet to be seen.

  Soft cries drew his attention to the baby monitor sitting on the nightstand next to Lauren. It didn’t take long before she stirred, reaching out blindly, but he smoothed his hand over her back before she could get up.

  “I’ve got this one.”

  She whispered a contented sound, already back asleep before he was on his feet and walking out of the room.

  He considered himself a bit of an expert at this point with bottle making, so it took him no time at all to have one made and head into Liliya’s bedroom.

  Her cries were always so soft and slightly melodic, sounding far too lyrical for what they actually were, but they never failed to pierce his heart, making him feel as if he were breaking.

  It felt like the worst sort of pain when she cried, scrunching up her beautiful little face in frustration. Just like tonight, he found himself getting up in the middle of the night as much as he possibly could. Not that Lauren was complaining—she welcomed the extra sleep.

  He pushed the door open, breathing in the scent of fresh laundry and powder as he quietly moved through the room, using the little light that spilled in from the open door onto the hardwood floors.

  Liliya had managed to get one of her little arms free of her swaddle—his doing, no doubt—grasping at the air above her, her little body jerking with the force of her tears.

  “Shh, moya malen'kaya printsessa—my little princess,” he whispered to her, setting the bottle off to one side of her crib before he reached for her.

  She quieted a moment, resting her cheek against his chest, her fingers curling in. He was over six feet tall, and this crib was a fraction of his size, but no matter how uncomfortable it was, he didn’t mind climbing inside it and getting as comfortable as he possibly could before he grabbed the bottle again and began to feed her.

  Before the thought even crossed his mind, he found himself humming a soft melody—a lullaby his mother had sung to him.

  This moment would live with him for a long time to come, and God help the person who ever thought to break his daughter’s heart because he wouldn’t hesitate to break them.

  BONUS SCENE: BESA

  Luka Sergeyev was good at fucking and fighting.

  He liked the spike of adrenaline. The bite of animalistic desire.

  And since the former of the two couldn’t be fulfilled—Alex had rehearsal late tonight to prepare for opening night—he found himself climbing out of his truck and walking toward the warehouse some feet away.

  Spring was slowly creeping its way in, finally freeing winter’s clinging grip to the world. The chill in the air wasn’t quite so bad tonight. Not that it would have made much of a difference for him.

  He was still in his second favorite pair of black jeans, a T-shirt Alex had tried to toss on more than one occasion, and his usual Doc Martens with the laces tied around the back.

  To anyone else, he would have looked like just another person walking on the street, but to those who knew him … his casualness was more alarming than anything.

  They would be worried. Ask what was wrong. Dig into a part of him he was trying unsuccessfully to keep locked down.

  Which was why he was here of all nights.

  He needed something to take his mind off the itch beneath his skin. The desire to do something reckless proving nearly irresistible.

  Entering through the side of the building, he found the elevator and punched the button to go down to the level of the warehouse that didn’t appear on any official documentation.

  It took a bit of finessing, the fight club’s owner making sure no one could stumble upon the battleground below.

  There was the camera in the upper righthand corner of the elevator he was in—whoever was watching on the other side undoubtedly knew his face by now—and then came the series of buttons he had to press, a code, of sorts, that would take him where he needed to go.

  Even before the doors open, the farther he descended, the sound of excited yelling bled through the walls, making him stand a little straighter as his anticipation grew.

  He could almost imagine it now. The feel of flesh-covered bone. The spill of blood—the bright color of it, and the coppery tang that clung to the air afterward.

  This was what he needed most.

  The sweet oblivion that came at the hands of making something bleed.

  For a moment, he closed his eyes, allowing all the dark thoughts he’d kept locked away to come to the forefront. He finally let them consume him until they were all he could feel. See. Taste. Think about.

  He saw faces and names.

  Taunts and terrible, curving smiles.

  By the time Luka walked out of that elevator, he wasn’t himself anymore.

  “Oi, I promised the lads a fair fight, didn’t I?” a voice called the moment Luka stepped out, the charge of everyone’s energy making the hair along his arms stand up. “Can’t very well have you in the muck.”

  Luka smiled as he found Celt in the crowd. Not that it was hard, considering the Irishman was walking directly toward him, the wall of people who separated them quickly moving out of his way.

  “What’s not fair?” Luka asked, a smile twisting his lips. “I left my knives at home this time.”

  “As if it’s really the knives they’ll have to worry about.”

  He shrugged, good-natured. Wasn’t his fault that the men who ventured down into this place looking for bloodshed and carnage weren’t actually good at producing it.

  If anything, they should have been glad he was willing to show them exactly what they were looking for.

  “If it makes you feel any better, I pinky promise not to hurt anyone … permanently.”

  “What’re you doing down in these parts anyway? Thought you had a new gig.”

  Luka grimaced, wishing he could go a day without having to remember that shit wasn’t as simple as it had once been. He was no longer just the enforcer—paid to fuck shit up when the time called for it.

  He didn’t get to use the wet rooms as his own personal playground when it came to extracting knowledge from people.

  No, now he was a captain—with the stars to fucking prove it. He wouldn’t say he was necessarily thrilled about the promotion, but he couldn’t really say the opposite either.

  Things were … different.

  For as long as he could remember, he’d been one thing—the brawler. Someone who was brought in to fix a problem in the most painful way possible.<
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  But now he was expected to be … something else.

  Someone else.

  And he wasn’t sure he could be that person.

  Instead of acknowledging Celt’s question, however, he dug out the envelope filled with more than a dozen hundred-dollar bills. “Finder’s fee.”

  “Aye, all right.” Celt thumbed through the envelope, a frown forming. “What’s the rest for?”

  Luka shrugged, even as he started pulling his shirt off, mindful of the tightness around the fresh tattoos beneath his collarbone. “Hospital bills.”

  Celt made a low sound in the back of his throat that sounded suspiciously like a curse before he melted back into the crowd, but not before Luka noticed a kid standing off to the side.

  Twelve, maybe thirteen at the oldest, with a mop of blond hair that fell over his forehead. Even if he hadn’t been the youngest person in the room by more than a decade, Luka found it hard to miss him with the way he shuffled on his feet.

  He wasn’t like the others. He didn’t seem particularly happy to be there. If anything, he looked as if here was the last place he wanted to be. It wasn’t like Celt to let someone as young as him down to O’halla.

  But then again, it wasn’t really his business.

  Putting the kid to the back of his mind, he strolled forward, tucking his hands into his pockets as he made his way to the edge of the makeshift ring, eyeing the two men still grappling inside.

  Neither was particularly skilled, he knew, just from the way they threw wild punches and let their emotions get the best of them. Rookies.

  Luka counted down the seconds until the two men were ushered off, and it was finally his turn to step forward, but before he fully stepped into the ring, his gaze strayed in the kid’s direction, still wondering why the hell he was there.

  But this time, he wasn’t alone.

  A larger man stood over him, his hand with scarred knuckles resting heavily on the boy’s shoulder. He tried to hide a wince as the man jostled him, seeming to demand his attention, but Luka was a master in recognizing pain in others.