“I need for you to take your sister-in-law and keep her company,” I finally said. “And don’t get her into any sort of trouble.”
“She’s safe in our hands, Gavrushka!” My sisters giggled, and I gave them a true smile. I would do anything to keep them safe.
And now my wife was one of those people.
Fuck.
“Tell Mama that I will be back for dinner after work,” I finished as I closed the distance between Naomi and me, brushing my lips over hers lightly.
I felt her start of surprise, but before she could react, I pulled away. Naomi’s lips were parted slightly, a flush coming over her cheeks, and I thought for a second about dragging her into one of the many bedrooms in this palace of a home and fucking her against one of the walls.
It had been too long between us, almost a full fucking day since I had buried myself in her body and just let go.
Instead, I leveled a gaze at my sisters. “I mean it. Keep her here in the house.”
“You’re the worst!” Katarina rolled her eyes before she made shooing motions at me. “Go! She is fine with us.”
I looked at my wife. “I will be back.”
“I will be fine,” Naomi insisted. “Be careful.”
Both my sisters sighed, tucking their arms in hers. “You are so lucky to have Sveta,” Aleksandra said with stars in her eyes. “She’s too good for you.”
An unfamiliar thread of pride shot through me as I winked at them and moved back toward the front of the house, where Anatoly waited patiently for me.
“I take it that your sisters approve of Sveta?” he asked lightly as we walked out of the house and to the car we had just climbed out of.
“A bit too much,” I admitted before sliding in.
He took the seat up front and the car pulled around the fountain to exit, the house being left in the rear-view mirror as we pulled out onto the main road. Once the house was out of sight, I let out the long breath I had been holding in. We had just arrived in Russia, and already I wanted to leave. It wasn’t because of my family.
It was because I was worried about keeping Naomi safe and our secret secure at that.
I thought back to what Aleksandra had said about me being lucky to have Naomi. She wasn’t wrong. I had played around with the thought myself, how she hadn’t decided to expose me to everyone she came across before I could silence her.
Naomi had become Sveta, and for that I was a lucky bastard.
A thought hit me square in the chest. I was thinking of her as Naomi again. Hell, since I had learned the truth about who she was, had I ever really thought about her as anyone else?
No, and that could be a problem, a fucking big one.
Clearing my throat, I looked out of the window. Now wasn’t the time to think about Naomi or Sveta or anything to do with my personal life. I had business to attend to while I was here, the sole reason I had come home to begin with.
I had to get my head on straight for this meeting and all the others that would follow. I was the Pakhan of the Belaya Bratva.
It was time to start acting like it.
“So?” Anatoly asked as the car drove through the streets of St. Petersburg. “Are we about to go see Surov?”
I smirked, wiping my palms on my pants. “Did you think we’d be doing anything different?”
Anatoly chuckled, shaking his head. “Just wanted to make sure, boss.”
My smirk remained. Maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad thing to be home for a little while, to ground myself in what I was and what I used to do, how I got started. There were all sorts of memories here, good and bad, but all of them had made me into the man I was today.
Maybe they would help me be reminded of what I was fighting for, why I had done what I had to get to the pinnacle of the career I wanted.
That was far more important to me than anything else in my life. I had fought, scraped, and clawed my way to the top.
I just had to stay there.