Page 75 of Obsessed Bratva's Pregnant Claim
She held her cup in both hands and looked at the counter for a moment. Then at me.
“And now,” she prompted.
“Now we need to have the conversation we’ve not been having for a week.”
She looked at me steadily. “Yes,” she said. “We do.”
We went outside.
This, too, had become something we did when the penthouse felt too contained for what needed to be said—walked out onto the building’s rooftop terrace, which I had not used before Sofia. The terrace looked west, away from the primary Strip corridor, toward the residential district and the desert formations visible at the city’s edge.
We stood at the railing.
I had been organizing what I wanted to say since the Monarch Club. Not scripting—I had learned that scripted things did not serve me with Sofia, that she received them as performance rather than speech. But organizing.
“The marriage,” I said.
She nodded.
“I want to tell you something about it that I did not tell you when I arranged it.” I looked at the horizon. “I told you it was a strategy. That it was the only option that kept you alive. That the logic was clean and the protection was real.” I paused. “All of those things were true.”
“I know,” she said.
“They were the justification I used to do what I was going to do regardless. I had decided I wanted you close before the justification existed. The justification arrived afterward to explain the decision to the part of me that required explanation.” I looked at her. “I want you to know that. That you were never purely a problem to be managed. You were—from the corridor, from the first night—something I had decided mattered before I had a name for it mattering.”
Sofia looked at me for a long moment. Her face in the morning light was open.
“Why didn’t you say that?” she asked. “Instead of the strategy.”
“Because the strategy was available and the other thing was—” I found the word— “exposed. And I have spent thirty years not being exposed because exposed was the condition under which things went wrong.”
“The chaos theory,” she said. “Control as religion.”
“Yes.”
She looked at the horizon. “I understand that,” she said. “I’ve been self-sufficient for the same reason. If you don’t stay, you can’t lose the staying.”
“We built the same structure from different materials.”
“And then we kept running into each other inside it.” The corner of her mouth moved—not the casino smile, not the sharp edge of defiance. Something quieter. “I don’t know how to stop fighting,” she said. “I want you to know that about me. It’s not—I’m not going to become someone who doesn’t push back, who accepts things that should be pushed back on. That is not something I can offer.”
“I don’t want it,” I said.
She looked at me.
“The fighting is the clearest version of you. When you stop managing and start arguing, I can see you think. I can see what you actually value. What you’ll hold the line on.” I held her gaze. “I don’t want you to stop. I want to be the person who can receive it without trying to manage it into silence. I don’t want anything less than you.”
She was quiet for a moment.
“By the time I came into your casino, I was already… I had been carrying the anger for years without a direction. And when Cruz’s people offered me a direction, I took it, and I told myself the direction was justice when it was—” she looked at me— “it was having something. When everything else had been taken or left or—” she stopped again.
“Control,” I said.
“Yes. I wanted something that was mine. The arrangement felt like mine. And then it stopped feeling like mine and started feeling like something I was inside. And the inside had no exit, and—” she looked at the horizon— “I couldn’t come to you because I had already broken the thing that would have made coming to you possible.”
“You came to me anyway,” I said. “In the penthouse. You told the truth when I asked.”
“And you told me I was outside your protection.”
