Page 34 of Bratva Menace

Nikolai handed the stopwatch to Drea and stood to clasp Tatiana’s hands. With a gentle pull, he guided her to her feet. He gave her belly a tender caress and kissed her cheek softly before switching places, sitting down in the seat she’d just vacated.

Tatiana waddled a few steps forward and plucked one of the Pictionary cards from the coffee table. She glanced at it, placed it face-down, picked up another marker, and made her way to the board. She wiped it clear of Illayana’s horrible attempt at drawing a cat, took the lid off her marker, and had it poised in the air, all set to take her turn.

“Ready…set…go.” Drea clicked the stopwatch.

Tatiana drew a curved line, almost like an oval, before adding in some jagged lines at the bottom⁠—

“Umbrella,” Nikolai immediately guessed.

“Yes!” Tatiana cheered.

My mouth dropped open. I was on my feet before I even knew what was happening. “What?! Are you kidding me?! They cheated!”

Nikolai’s smirk was full of smugness. The prick. “How could we have possibly done that?”

“I don’t know, but I demand a redo.”

Nikolai shrugged. “Fine.” He leaned back, crossing his ankle over his knee, relaxed and casual. “Do another, love,” he said to Tatiana.

She went to the coffee table to pick up another card.

“Wait a second.” Eyes narrowed in suspicion, I swiped up the cards and gave them a big shuffle. “Okay. Go ahead.” I offered her the deck.

“It’s not going to make a difference,” Nikolai sang under his breath.

Tatiana picked up a card. Her lips puckered in thought. “Hmmm.” She went back to the board and stared at it for a moment before she began to draw.

“Shoes,” Nikolai said instantly.

She shrieked excitedly. “Yes!”

I shook my head. “Nope. No. No way. Bullshit. It’s a bunch of rectangular boxes all stacked up on top of each other. How the fuck did you get ‘shoes’ from that?”

“It was pretty obvious.”

“I did make it a little obvious, huh.” Tatiana laughed.

I felt like my face was turning red. “Gimme that.” I snatched the card out of her hand just to check it in case they were cheating.

They weren’t.

Mental note: Tatiana and Nikolai are not allowed to be partners in any of our family games. They were too in sync. Freakishly so.

“And you couldn’t even guess a cat,” Illayana mumbled under her breath as I sat back down, taking a not-so-subtle dig at me.

“Big talk for someone who can’t even draw a cat,” I fired back.

She glared at me.

“Our turn!” Drea passed the stopwatch back to Nikolai and turned to Aleksandr, her face the most serious and focused I’d ever seen it before. “We can do this.” She used her fingers to point at her eyes and then turned her hand to point at Aleksandr’s. “In sync, yeah? One mind.”

I snickered under my breath. Drea was just as competitive as I was.

Maybe even more so.

“This is ours for the win, baby. Focus. Teamwork. Head in the fucking game. We got this.”

Aleksandr smiled one of his rare, carefree smiles—the kind of smile only Drea could bring out of him. “We got this,” he repeated for her sake, not his.