Page 51 of Pack Baby for the Bratva
"That's what we're here to discuss." Yuri's smile widened. "The seat requires a leader. Not a man playing house in where? London? Edinburgh? You seem to bounce around."
He knew.
“You followed me?”
“Just a precaution.”
Ivan leaned forward and stared at Yuri. It was just enough to make half the men at the table twitch. Uncle Grigory actually knocked over his tea. The cup rolled, clattering against the saucer, and nobody moved to right it.
I lifted one hand without looking at Ivan. He stopped.
"Playing house," I repeated, letting the phrase sit in the air like something unpleasant someone had left on the carpet. "London has never been more profitable. I doubled our arms revenue intwo years. Our European distribution is cleaner than it's been in a generation. The Irish route—"
"Is theoretical," Yuri cut in. "And you remain unbonded."
There it was. The real argument.
"A Pakhan without an omega is a liability," he continued, settling back in my father's chair like he'd already had the upholstery changed. "Volatile. Unstable. The Bratva needs alliances, Artem. It needs stability. You offer neither."
Which means he had me followed to Edinburgh but didn’t know what I left there. Interesting.
Murmurs around the table. The older men especially. Dmitri with his ridiculous cravat, Petyr with his reading glasses perched on his nose like an accountant who'd wandered into the wrong meeting. They all nodded along.
The same argument, generation after generation. An alpha rules better with an omega under his roof. An omega softens him and gives him heirs. Proves he can be managed.
Maeve's scar flashed through my mind. Not the way it looked. I'd memorized that long ago, but the way she touched it when she was nervous. The absent brush of her fingers against her own skin, as if checking that it had healed, that the worst had already happened, that she was still here.
These men wanted a symbol.
I had a mate.
Those were not remotely the same thing.
"The London operations should go to someone more stable," Yuri said, scenting blood now. "Someone grounded. Someone who understands what this family needs."
"Someone like you."
"I’m married." He spread his hands. "I have heirs. I have alliances with three major families through my wife's connections alone. What do you have, Artem?"
I have an omega who ran from monsters and still stopped to pick up a freezing dog on the side of a road because she couldn't stomach leaving something helpless in the cold.
I have a brother who would burn this building to its foundations and still ask, while the embers were hot, whether Maeve had eaten lunch.
I have Gregor, who caught our son in his bare hands and will guard them with his life.
And I have a son whose entire hand fits around his mother's finger and whose name is Mac, not Mikhail, not Aleksandr, not another Petrov dragged bleeding into another generation, and I still hadn’t held him.
I have for the first time in my life something that feels like it might actually be worth protecting.
But I couldn't say any of that.
If Yuri knew about Maeve, about Mac, he'd have men eliminating them in a flash. Because Maeve was my greatest strength and my most catastrophic vulnerability and I could not let this room know she existed.
"I have an omega," I said.
The silence was immediate and total.
Beside me, Ivan went rigid. Heat rolled off him. He leaned in, voice low enough that only I could hear.
