“To win you over, June,” she explains patiently. “To try to earn your trust again. To weasel his way back into your life.”

I slump down on the window seat, feeling suddenly listless. Sara comes over and starts unpacking her medical bag with brisk efficiency. I lapse into silence while she examines me.

Her fingers are warm and gentle. It’s easy to give myself over to the procedure. To pretend that I don’t have feelings or a past or a future or a baby. That I’m just a crash test dummy being weighed and measured.

“Your pressure looks good. Your vitals read well, too,” she says after a few minutes. “The baby seems to be thriving. But I’ll have to do a more extensive test when we’re back at the mansion with all my equipment.”

I look up at Sara dumbly. “You talk as if you know Adrian.”

She gives me a hard smile. “I knew him way back when he was Bogdan Uvarov.”

My eyes go wide. “Seriously?”

“Deadly serious. I told you that my father worked for Kolya’s father, didn’t I?”

“Yeah,” I say. “I guess I just didn’t put the two things together.” I take a deep breath, then venture, “So you were around when… when…”

“When Kolya killed Luka? Yes, I was around.”

I swallow audibly. “W-what was that like?”

“It was chaos,” she admits. “For a long time. I only found out about the politics of it all because my father was on his first bout of chemotherapy and I was the one taking care of him.”

“Didn’t you tell me that your father worshiped Luka Uvarov?”

She nods. “Like a god. When he found out what Kolya had done, he turned his hospital room upside down. He demanded I take him to confront the new don. So off we went, on what amounted to a suicide mission. At least, that’s what I thought we were walking into. My father burst into Kolya’s office, crutches and all, and told Kolya to explain himself.”

I blanche. “Kolya didn’t…?”

“Did he like it? No,” she laughs. “But did he kill him? Not at all. Not to ruin the ending, but the cancer is what got Papa. Kolya had nothing to do with that.”

I let out a tense breath. “Oh. Okay. That’s good.”

“Papa would’ve been okay with it, though, I think. He was a tough old son of a gun. Stood right in Kolya’s face and roared, Tell me why! Tell me why you did it! I was frozen stiff, but Kolya just nodded gracefully and explained.” She tucks a stray hair behind her ear and leans one shoulder against the wall next to me. “He told my father that he was freeing Adrian. That Adrian no longer wanted to be a part of this life, and Luka would have sooner killed Adrian than watch him walk away from the Bratva. So he did what needed doing. For his brother’s sake.”

“And your dad was okay with that?”