Page 48 of Bound By the Bratva
Batya. The word hits me like a physical blow every time he says it. Three months ago, he didn't know I existed. Now I'mBatya, the man who gives him rides on my shoulders and teaches him about horses and reads him stories before bed. The man who just destroyed his mother's last hope of freedom to keep him close.
"She was very brave," I agree, catching his eyes as he grins at me. "Sometimes, being brave is more important than winning."
"Is that why Mama isn't sad? Because Dancing Queen was brave?"
Out of the mouths of babes. I glance at Anya, but she doesn't react, doesn't acknowledge that she's listening to this conversation at all. Her reflection in the window looks like a ghost, pale and ethereal and already half gone.
"Your mama understands that some things are more important than winning races," I say carefully.
"Like what?"
"Like family. Like keeping the people you love safe and close." The words come easier than they should, familiar phrases that have been drilled into me since childhood. "Blood loyalty is stronger than anything else in this world, Nikolai. Stronger than money, stronger than power, stronger than any promise anyone might make to you."
My father's words, delivered in his voice, with his absolute conviction. Sergei Vetrov built an empire on those principles, raised his children to believe that family came before everything else, that betraying blood was the one unforgivable sin. He was a hard man, a cruel man in many ways, but his loyalty to his own was absolute.
I believed him then. I believe him now. But watching Anya's reflection in the window, seeing the way she's already disappearing from me even though she's sitting three feet away, I wonder if there's something missing from that philosophy. Something my father never taught me because he never learned it himself.
"What about love?" Nikolai asks, and the question stops my heart.
"What about it?"
"Is love stronger than family?"
Before I can answer, Anya finally speaks, her voice soft but carrying clearly in the confined space of the car. "Loveisfamily, sweetheart. The best kind of family is built on love, not just blood."
She's looking at our son with quiet strength, her expression gentle in a way that makes my chest ache. This is the mother he knows, the woman who raised him for the first five years of his life with nothing but her own strength and determination. Thewoman I took him from because I was too proud, too selfish, too convinced of my own righteousness to consider any solution that didn't end with complete victory.
"ButBatyasays blood is stronger than anything," Nikolai says, confusion clear in his young voice.
"Yourbatyais right about many things," Anya replies, still not looking at me. "But sometimes, there are different kinds of strength. Sometimes, the strongest thing you can do is let someone go because you love them."
The words hit their target with surgical precision. She's not talking to Nikolai anymore—she's talking to me, delivering a message wrapped in the kind of gentle wisdom that makes it impossible to argue against. Letting me know that she understands exactly what happened tonight, exactly what it means, and exactly how she feels about it.
I want to defend myself, to explain that everything I've done has been for him, for us, for the family we could be if she would just stop fighting me. I want to tell her that love without power is meaningless, that protection requires control, that keeping them safe means keeping them close no matter what the cost.
But the words stick in my throat, trapped by the memory of how she felt in my arms last night, how she looked at me like I was something more than the sum of my sins. For a few hours, I was just Rolan, not thePakhan-in-waiting, not the man who owns everything and everyone around him. Just a man who wanted a woman desperately enough to risk everything for her.
And now I've thrown that away for the sake of principles that taste like ash in my mouth.
The estate gates come into view, wrought iron and stone that represent everything I've inherited and everything I'll pass down to my son. Security, stability, the kind of power that ensures no one can hurt the people I claim as mine. It should feel likecoming home. Instead, it feels like returning to a beautifully appointed prison.
Nikolai falls asleep somewhere between the gates and the front door, exhausted by excitement and the late hour. I carry him upstairs while Anya follows silently behind, and together we put him to bed in the room that's become his over the past few months. His room, in my house, surrounded by toys I've bought him and books I've read to him and all the trappings of the life I'm determined to give him.
She kisses his forehead and whispers something I can't hear, then straightens and finally looks at me directly for the first time since the race ended.
"Thank you," she says, and the words are like a knife between my ribs.
"For what?"
"For letting me say goodnight…"
Before I can respond, before I can tell her that this isn't goodbye, that this is just the beginning of something different, she's gone. Walking down the hallway toward her room, leaving me standing in my son's doorway with the taste of victory turning to poison in my mouth.
I've won. The race, the bet, the war of wills that's been raging between us since the moment she walked back into my life. She'll stay now, sign whatever papers I put in front of her, play the role of dutiful wife and devoted mother. Nikolai will grow up as a Vetrov, learn the family business, inherit everything I've built and everything that was built before me.
Everything I wanted. Everything I fought for. Everything I was willing to destroy her to achieve.
So why does it feel like I've lost the only thing that actually mattered?
