“That isn’t what I said.”
He twists his lips. “It isn’t the words you speak, Nero. It is the confirmation on your face.”
The nonchalant way he refers to our world reveals why I was so at ease with discussing its semantics with Miranda.
If the darkness of our industry doesn’t scare away the women we love, nothing will.
Justine’s brows lower as her nose crinkles. “Your mother?”
When I nod, I use the sorrow on her face to my advantage. “But Nikolai won’t pardon her mistake, even if she only did it to teach me a lesson.”
“Nikolai!” She glares at him like he’s a naughty puppy who chewed up her favorite stiletto.
His ego feeds off every narrowed glare, but he tries to act coy. “Pardons aren’t how I operate,Ahren.”
Justine showcases some of the gall she hit the Popov crew with when she helmed the crusade to bring Nikolai home alive only months ago after he was taken by his enemies. “Then I guess it’s lucky you said she stoleourcoke. That makes it as much mine as it is yours, which frees me to say”—she locks her eyes with me—“your mother won’t face any prosecution from the Popov realm if the missing items are promptly returned.”
“Ahren…” Nikolai’s tone is full of silent warnings, but there’s no true heat in it. He loves when his angel fans her wings as much as I love when my butterfly stretches out hers.
I know this, and so does Justine.
She peers at her husband-to-be with a sultry grin stretched across her face before she says, “Now that wasn’t so hard, was it?”
I don’t know what her saying references, but Nikolai is more clued on. A smirk plays at his lips as a gleam I never wish to see again passes through his eyes.
I’m out of his office before his demand for privacy leaves his mouth, my strides as confident as my belief Justine has what it takes to make Nikolai abide by her pledge.
21
NERO
My mother survived in the ruthlessness of the bratva because she has the gall of a woman with a heap more power, and an inability to stand down even when she’s in the wrong. The way she pegs her shoe at me when I enter her condo is a sure-fire indication, not to mention the words she spits out in Russian.
She tells me I am not the son she raised, and that if I’ve come to ask for forgiveness, to walk straight back out, but she is nowhere near ready to speak with me yet.
I dodge a second flung object when I don’t heel to her command before following the direction from where it came.
A reason for her red-hot anger confronts me first when I enter the roomy kitchen. Tasha is sitting on one of the stools nestled around the kitchen island, eating the baked goods my mother usually makes for me.
I didn’t arrive to collect my weeks’ worth of supplies, because I have the world’s best baker as a neighbor, and a hunger that suddenly has nothing to do with baked goods.
“What the fuck are you doing here?”
Tasha’s gleam ripens when my mother reacts negatively to my scorn.
Her aim is precise this time, and it thrusts me back three spots.
Who knew a rolling pin could be used as a deadly weapon?
“That is no way to speak to your wife. I raised you better than that.”
I narrow my eyes at Tasha, warning her our discussion is far from over, before shifting my focus to my mother. “You also taught me not to steal. That if I want something, I have to earn it.”
I bounce my eyes between a pair nowhere near as aged as they should be. She had me young—young enough for only the faintest wrinkles to crease the corners of her eyes.
“Where were those morals when you stole fifteen million dollars’ of uncut coke from the Popovs?”
Tasha draws in a sharp breath, wordlessly announcing she had no clue my mother’s theft was so significant, and the consequences such an action could invoke, before she adds words to her reply. “I had no idea she would take that much. I swear to God.”
