Page 127 of Pack Baby for the Bratva
An hour later, I was in the nest with my laptop, surrounded by cushions and blankets and the lingering scent of my pack.
I opened a blank page.
For years, every decision I'd made had been about survival. Where to sleep. How to eat. Which name to use. Which exit to memorize. There hadn't been room for anything else. I had no hobbies, no ambitions, no version of myself that existed beyond the next bus ticket and the next locked door.
But somewhere in the past few weeks, I'd started composing sentences in my head again. Walking Fergus around the gardens, I'd catch myself shaping dialogue. Folding Mac's tiny sleepsuits, I'd think about opening sentences. The old instinct was still there, buried under three years of fear. It hadn't died. It had just been waiting.
I typed my name at the top of the page.
Maeve Petrov.
Not Porter. Porter was the woman who ran. Not O'Shea. O'Shea was the woman who'd been sold. Not McCarthy because that belonged to a man who'd put a gravestone in Dublin with my name on it rather than admit I'd escaped.
Petrov.
I'd earned it. I'd stood in a chapel in Las Vegas and said yes to a man who'd refused to use me as a pawn. I'd faced my father in a sitting room and told him I wasn't currency. I'd watched Finn O'Shea crawl on his knees and realized I didn't care enough to want him dead.
The name was mine because I'd chosen it.
I typed the first sentence.
I refuse to let the trauma of my past poison my future.
Then I kept typing.
The words came faster than I expected. The years of silence hadn't emptied me out, they'd been filling a reservoir I hadn't known was there. Stories my grandmother told. Places I'd seen from bus windows while running between cities. The way rain smelled in Edinburgh versus Surrey. The exact shade of caramel in Artem's scent. The weight of Mac's fist around my finger. The sound of Gregor humming when he thought no one was listening.
I wrote until my wrists ached and my eyes blurred and the house had gone completely silent around me. Somewhere downstairs, a clock chimed an hour I didn't bother to count.
When I finally closed the laptop, the sky outside the window had changed from black to gray.
Fergus lifted his head from his bed in the corner, yawned, and went back to sleep.
I slid under the covers between Artem and Ivan, and Gregor's hand found my ankle in the dark.
"What were you writing?" Artem murmured.
"A book."
"About what?"
"Me. Us. Everything."
He pulled me closer. "Good."
"That's it? Good?"
"That's it."
"Emotionally constipated Russian," I said into his chest.
"Your emotionally constipated Russian."
I smiled in the dark. The laptop was on the nightstand with forty pages that hadn't existed yesterday, and the men with me smelled like champagne and home, and somewhere down the hall our son was asleep.
It wasn't the life I'd planned. It was better.
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