by Selena Scott
“No,” AJ answered, accepting a kiss from both Dora and Ivy before stepping away. She looked like she wanted to hug Glory as well, but she was sitting next to Anton. So AJ was obviously not going over there.
“Ah,” Maxim said jokingly through a mouthful of food. “Just pregnant then.”
“Goodnight everyone,” AJ said quickly, darting out of the room.
Anton froze, a bite of meat halfway to his mouth. He felt as if he’d just fallen through the ice of a frozen lake. Halfway between drowning to death and freezing to death.
Pregnant.
He could feel his pulse in his head as he carefully set down his fork.
Pregnant.
He wasn’t breathing. He knew that. But he couldn’t get his lungs to work.
Pregnant.
AJ. His AJ. His baby.
Pregnant.
He rose, ignoring everything but his need to get to AJ. Skirting the table, hopping the couch in the living room, flinging open the front door and sprinting after her, Anton slid in front of her just at the edge of the woods that separated their houses.
She sucked in a breath, like he’d startled her, and then spared him one death glare before stepping around him and continuing on her way. “Go away, Anton.”
He strode after her. “I make you pregnant?”
She doubled her pace, gripping both elbows in her hands like she was cold, despite the down coat she wore. “Go away, Anton,” she repeated.
He got in front of her again. “I make you pregnant?” he repeated.
Again she stepped around him, ignoring him completely at this point. He could see the lights from her front porch through the woods and somehow he knew, if she went in that house, locked her door, they’d be severing a moment they could never get back. He had to get her to look at him, speak to him. Answer his question. Before it was too late and she closed herself off from him forever.
In the back of his mind, Anton knew that getting her to step away from him forever had been the very reason he’d come back. It was the whole plan. But he felt his plan crumble away behind him.
Pregnant.
It had been a stupid plan anyhow.
New plan? Get her to look at him. At any cost.
Ducking ahead again, Anton fell to his knees in front of her, looking up at her as if she were holy. Which to him, she was.
“I make you pregnant?” he asked her one more time.
AJ’s lip trembled for just a second before she tightened her jaw. When she looked at him, finally looked at him, her eyes were glazed with tears, but they were filled with disdain.
“Yes, you fucking asshole. You got me pregnant. And then left me behind like I was the most shameful mistake of your life.”
Her words stabbed at him like knives, took the breath right out of him. God, how could he have let her think that? He thought he’d been clear that it was him he was ashamed of, not her. Nothing could ever change the way he felt about her. That she was the most golden, gorgeous ray of light in his life. He opened his mouth to say any of that, but the English wouldn’t come. A few strings of Belarusian trailed out of him, but AJ was already stepping around him again and bounding up her porch.
“Save it,” she said, her voice more tired than angry now. “Just leave and let me sleep, Anton.”
Shit. She probably needed more sleep now that she was pregnant. What else would she need? He didn’t know very much about pregnant ladies. But he would learn. He knew enough to know that it wasn’t good to make her very upset. He had to do as she asked. But he couldn’t leave without one thing.
“You will speak to me tomorrow.” His words came out much more like a command than he’d intended but he was having so much trouble with his damn English! “Da?” he added, to soften it into a question.
The hardened, hostile look on her face sank his spirits. He went for broke. “You will speak to me about baby?”
Something seemed to break in her expression and she squeezed her eyes closed, shutting him out.
“Fine. You can come by tomorrow after class and we’ll talk about the baby. But that’s all. I’m not going to talk to you about anything else.”
And with that, she slipped inside, clicking the locks on her front door. Anton sunk to the steps of her front porch and let his head fall into his hands.
***
Sergei watched Anton Malashovik stretch out on the girl’s front porch as if he were going to stay the night there.
He sighed at the grainy image that the surveillance camera was feeding him. Not for the first time, he wished to God that Navuka had graced them with better fucking equipment.
He lolled his head to one side as he traced Anton’s image on the screen, an idea forming in his brain.
“Did you know he loved the girl?” Sergei asked the woman beside him. His partner, Lana.
It pleased him to see the way she was sitting. Straight back and her hands folded in her lap, like a child who’d been spanked and was trying to please her parent. He supposed that she had been spanked rather viciously. When the president of Belarus, and the secret head of Navuka, had found out how badly Lana’s secret plan had failed over the summer, he hadn’t been kind.
Even knowing that Anton Malashovik was Navuka’s ultimate prize and goal, she’d deviated from the plan, wasting time and resources on capturing Linc. She’d been more interested in experimenting on a young bear shifter cub than she had been on reclaiming Anton.
Bad girl.
Soon after the Malashoviks foiled those plans, Lana had been sent for by the president. She’d gone to Belarus for months. Only to return as almost a different person. Quiet. Acquiescent. Perfectly submissive.
As both his professional and romantic partner, Sergei was thrilled with the change in her. He’d always preferred a woman to be docile. Her avid scientific ambition of the past had always irritated him.
“I suspected he might,” she answered neatly, sipping from a cup of tepid tea.
“Maybe she can be used,” Sergei mused as he gazed back at the monitor. Anton Malashovik had returned from his time away and Sergei was thrilled.
He could feel the end coming. The end of his exile to America. He wanted to go home. He wanted to give the president everything that he wanted so that he could finally go home. And what the president wanted was right there on this monitor screen. Not fifty miles from where Sergei and Lana sat right then.
They couldn’t take him by force, Anton and his brothers were too skilled at combat for that. But there was another way to get Anton to come to them.
“Let me guess,” Lana said, just a spark of her old sass in her tone. “You’re going to hold her hostage and try to use her to lure Anton to you?”
Sergei bristled. That had been his old plan, one that Lana had treated with nothing but disdain.
“No,” he whirled at her and she flinched. Something she’d been doing a lot since she returned from Belarus. “I’ve got something much more… efficient in mind.”
CHAPTER SIX
He would have slept the night there, on her porch, if she hadn’t specifically asked him to leave before she’d closed the door on him. So, after 20 minutes of warring with himself, Anton jogged back through the woods towards his parents’ house. He was considering stripping down and shifting to bear form when Emin’s voice echoed across the driveway to him.
“No, brother,” he spoke in Belarusian. “No more bear tonight. You’re coming to the bar with your brothers.”
Which is how Anton found himself squeezed into a booth with his brothers, his first beer in six weeks warming on the table in front of him.
“So,” Maxim said, deciding to jump right in. “You knocked up our little sister.”
“Jesus, Maxim. Don’t be so crude,” Danil griped, scooting Anton’s beer a little closer to him.
“No one in this bar understands Belarusian, so we might as well be clear with each other, right?”
Emin held up a hand to silence their bickering. As the only man at the
table who knew what it felt like to get a woman pregnant, he felt a duty to Anton.
“You’ve loved her for a long time.”
Anton’s eyes shot up to all of his brothers, challenging them. “Da,” he agreed.
“Well, that’s not a surprise,” Danil said, sipping his beer. “You’ve been moping over her for years.”
Anton growled but he didn’t deny it.
“And she’s loved you for years,” Emin continued.
Anton looked up at him in surprise but Emin shrugged. “The two of you were the only ones who couldn’t see it. Meanwhile, to all of us,” he gestured around the table, “it was as obvious as the fact that you got her pregnant. You should have seen your face at the dinner table tonight. And then when you chased after her, well. Couldn’t have been more clear what had happened.”
“I had to get to her,” Anton scraped a hand over his shaggy hair. “I didn’t know she was pregnant until that moment.”
“So you didn’t leave because-”
“No!” Anton was shocked that Danil would even say that out loud. “Of course not. I wouldn’t knowingly get AJ pregnant and then abandon her.”
“But you would sleep with her and then abandon her,” Maxim finished, quiet, but clear.
“Protecting her and abandoning her are not the same thing.”
“Protecting her from what?” Emin asked, and then, when his eyes searched Anton’s, “From you? You left to protect her from yourself?”
“God, Anton,” Danil groaned. “This self-hate thing is getting a little stale.”
Anton leaned back in the booth, penned in by his brothers, and wanted the forest so bad he could barely breathe. He wanted the shift and the night air and the sounds of the bats through the trees.
He took a deep breath. “None of you understand. You’re not like I am. Navuka never touched you.”
“What are you saying?” Maxim asked. “That the pain they put you through made you evil? That’s the dumbest shit I’ve ever heard.”
“No.” Anton’s nostrils flared. “It’s not just the scars. The pain. Aren’t you listening? It’s what they made me into.” His voice was rising and he bit it back. He couldn’t believe he was doing this. He couldn’t believe he was about to tell his brothers the truth. He’d sworn that he'd take this secret to the grave. But that was before he'd gotten the love of his life pregnant and he needed his brothers’ help on what the fuck to do about it.
“Are you saying that they turned you into something?” Emin asked slowly. “Something other than a bear shifter?”
His three brothers stared at him. And Anton felt as if their eyes were lasers, boring into him. “Yes. They made me into a weapon.” He finally took a swig of his beer; it was warm. He grimaced and traded it for Danil’s fresh, cold one. He didn’t know how important that brotherly gesture was to all three of the other men sitting around the table. How it grounded them.
“You all,” Anton gestured to them, “can shift into a bear at will, just as I could when I was born. Genetic, whatever, natural. But after my time getting experimented on with Navuka, I can also shift into something else.”
He felt his brothers go still, processing his words.
“Something I’ve never shown you, or anyone, since you rescued me from the lab in Belarus. I’ve never initiated the shift outside of the lab. But I can feel it. Inside me.” He pressed his hand to his chest. “When I’m angry or frustrated it beats a drum inside me. It wants to come out.” Now he lifted his eyes to his brothers again. “When I feel what I feel for AJ, when she was finally, for the first time, naked for me. I could feel it.”
He took another huge swallow of beer like it was medicine and dropped his eyes to the golden, effervescent liquid.
“When we fucked, I thought I held it inside me well enough. But the next morning, I realized that… I didn’t. And, I didn’t know what else to do. I left. It is too dangerous for me to be close to her in that way.”
“But you’ve slept with plenty of women since Navuka,” Maxim spoke up, confused.
“I didn’t love them. They didn’t stir me,” Anton replied. “There wasn’t the same danger with them.”
“So,” Danil grabbed his beer back and eyed his brother curiously. “What is it? The thing that you shift into?”
Anton studied his brothers then. And what he saw surprised him. There was no fear. No pity. There was a bit of sadness, yes. And curiosity.
“It is like a bear. But bigger. Angrier. There’s none of the calm that a bear has. It is only rage. There’s teeth and claws and…” Anton waved his hand through the air. “Weapons.”
Emin leaned back, ran one arm over the back of the booth. “The real question is, can you be close to AJ without fucking her?”
“What?” Anton scowled at his brother.
“Seriously,” Emin shrugged. “If you can be close to her without losing control and fucking her, then she’s safe from your beast, right? So you could still be in her life. And in your child’s life.”
The thought settled down on Anton like a cloud descending from the sky. It made him feel foggy. But lighter, somehow. He ran a hand over his tangled beard. “Well, I did it for a decade.”
“Great,” Maxim said, gesturing to the waitress for another round. “Then you make up with her and you can be her husband. Problem solved.”
“How can I be her husband if I can’t fuck her, Maxim?” The words were like stones in his belly.
“Well, did you lose control when you were doing… other stuff for her?” Danil asked.
“Excuse me.” Anton’s voice was low and threatening. He didn’t like his brothers thinking about ‘other stuff’ and AJ in the same sentence.
“He means that you can be her husband and still make her come and not turn into a monster, just as long as you don’t fuck her,” Maxim clarified.
“Yeah, I understood,” Anton snapped. He stopped, dragged a frustrated hand over his eyes. He refused to let hope light inside him for nothing. “This would be enough for you and your wives?” he challenged them.
Emin shrugged. “If it meant that I got to be with Glory, raise our child together. We’d make it enough.”
“But that’s not the real problem here.” Danil squinted at Anton. “The real problem is how the hell you’re gonna get back in her good graces. Because, brother, she looked pissed as hell.”
***
AJ silenced her phone for the ninetieth time that day. She knew that she shouldn’t be avoiding her friends’ phone calls, but she was hanging on by a thread here and she didn’t think she could handle any consolation. Not without breaking into a hundred pieces.
And she didn’t want to break into a hundred pieces. Because it wasn’t just about her anymore. She planted her hand over her stomach and took a deep breath. This was about a tiny little gumdrop who deserved a good life. The hand on her stomach travelled up to her forehead. Holy crap. She was gonna be a mom.
Yeah.
She couldn’t deal with her friends right now.
But, she couldn’t keep them guessing, either. It wasn’t fair. She opened up the group text that they shared.
Seriously, guys. I’m okay. I saw my doctor this morning and everything is looking good health-wise. And in terms of Anton, I’m taking it one hour at a time. I said he could come talk to me this afternoon. I’ll let you know how it goes after he leaves. But really, I’m fine.
Long text, but she’d wanted to cover all the bases in one go. Silencing it for good now, she tossed the phone onto the couch where she wouldn’t have to look at it for a while.
She needed a shower and a nap. And a burger. And a bowl of ice cream. But Anton was going to be here any minute, so she was just going to have to settle for the shower.
The shower did little to help with the knots of tension in her back and neck, but at least the scent of her coconut shampoo soothed her as it always did. She rubbed lotion on head to toe, but that was it. She refused to primp for this dillhole. And if she chose leggi
ngs that cupped her ass and a flowy gray sweater that happened to make her eyes pop, and he happened to suffer a little bit, well, that was his problem.
Braiding her wet hair back, she slicked on some chapstick and called it a good job. And now she needed to deal with the raging hunger in her belly. She figured she had about an hour before it switched to crippling nausea. Apparently this baby had quite the sense of humor.
AJ slammed open the fridge and found her sour, anxious mood was immediately sweetened by the presence of about eight labeled Tupperwares staring back at her. With her dad’s handwriting on them.
Sweet.
He hadn’t been a stellar dad in the years after AJ’s mom had died. But over the last year, he’d really doubled down. He was back in Spokane for good now. He’d hung up the keys to his rig, sold it in fact. And now he was working construction on the other side of town where he and Serena, Glory’s mom, were living.
Personally, AJ thought it was a little fast to move in together, but it meant that she had the house to herself again, so she didn’t mind too much.
And her dad had started doing lots of little things to make AJ’s life better. Like emptying the gutters, and fixing the broken tile in the bathroom. And dropping off food once a week. He was a damn good cook.
AJ’s stomach dropped just a little bit when she realized that her father was definitely next on the list of people to tell. Since she’d pretty much blown that news bomb wide open last night.
Dora had texted her to say that it had been pretty clear from her face and Anton’s that she was pregnant with his baby.
Ugh. Add Katya and Ilya to the list of people she needed to talk to. And what was she gonna tell them? This kid is your grandkid. But I hate your son?
AJ leaned her face against the cool edge of the fridge as the labeled Tupperware all blended together behind her swimming eyes. This was such a mess.
Her head came snapping up as she heard a knock at the door. Anton.
