“I’ll explain everything later. Right now, I need to help Aaron get his bags packed and then we need you to get us some fake IDs.”
“Fake IDs? What?” Steve grasped her arm, serious alarm etched across his face. “Eva, you need to tell me what’s going on right now.”
“That is just what I was about to say,” came a voice from behind them.
Eva turned and clapped a hand over her mouth. Standing on her brother’s front lawn in a black business suit, over five thousand miles from South Padre Island, was her ex-boyfriend, and the father of her child.
“Where is my son, Eva?” he said, his body positively vibrating with barely contained rage. “Take me to him. Now.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
FRESH grenades of rage were still going off in Alexei’s chest by the time he got off his plane in Milan. How could Eva have done this to him? Left him because she was pregnant and didn’t want to be without her daddy’s money? And why had she let him believe Aaron was her boyfriend as opposed to telling him the truth?
It said something about how far he had come from his criminal roots that his first instinct hadn’t been to call his uncle and have her disposed of, as any self-respecting Rustanov would have done just a decade ago if crossed in such a way. However, he did spend the thirty minutes it took to get from the airport to the address in Milan concocting increasingly vicious revenge scenarios. Taking sole custody of Aaron wouldn’t be enough, he decided. He’d also make sure she never saw him again. He’d buy every judge from New York to Texas if that was what it took. Business ethics, be damned. He’d use every underhanded tactic he could to ensure she was robbed of Aaron the way she had robbed him of his son all these years.
The thirty minutes passed by fast in this manner, and before he knew it, the Bentley Emilio had secured to get him from the airport was coming to a stop in front of a mustard-yellow apartment building. He knew this must be the right place, even without looking at the address Emilio had given him, because Eva and her brother were outside the front door, so engrossed in conversation neither of them noticed the car pull up behind them.
“I will let myself out,” he told the driver. “Stay here.”
He exited the Bentley with grim determination pumping through his veins. When he returned to the car, it would be with his son in tow.
“I’ll explain everything later. Right now, I need to help Aaron get his bags packed and then we need you to get us some fake IDs,” he heard her say as he approached.
“Fake IDs? What?” A black man in glasses, and only a few inches taller than Eva, took her by the arm. This must be her brother, the Foreign Service officer. “Eva, you need to tell me what’s going on right now.”
“That is exactly what I was about to say,” he said, interrupting their conversation.
When Eva gasped and turned around, he saw real fear in her eyes. Good, he thought. He wanted her scared. No, he didn’t just want her scared, he wanted her to rue the day she’d decided to cross him for the rest of her life.
“Where is my son, Eva?” he said. “Take me to him. Now.”
Despite her previous moment of uncloaked fear, she stood her ground, folding her arms across her chest. “No, not like this.”
“You kept him from me for seven years and now you think you can just tell me ‘no?’” he roared, approaching her.
“Now calm down.” Her brother stepped in front of him and tried to stop his advance. “We don’t want to cause a scene.”
But Alexei shoved him aside and pointed at Eva. “You will take me to him. Now.”
“No!” she said, her voice quivering with her own anger. “Leave us alone. You’re a bully and a liar and you need to just go away now.”
“You call me a liar? You lied to me for seven years. You kept my son from me for seven years!”
Now Steve approached them again. “Wait a minute, Eva. You said he didn’t want anything to do with Aaron and that’s why you refused to seek him out for child support.”
Eva had the nerve to throw her brother an annoyed look. “He didn’t want anything to do with Aaron. He didn’t even want children back then. He still doesn’t.”
“I said I didn’t want children,” Alexei said through gritted teeth. “That does not mean you can’t tell me I have one.”
Her brother came to stand beside him, shaking his head at Eva. “You can’t not tell a man he has a son!” Steve pursed his lips together in obvious disappointment. “And here I was thinking you had grown up, that you’d finally gotten some sense in your head—“
She cut her brother off with a vicious glare. “I swear to heaven, Steve, if you take his side in this, I will never talk to you again. You don’t know anything about me. Neither of you do. You don’t know why I did what I did or what I’m willing to do to protect my son.”
Alexei once again stepped in front of her brother. “I do not care why you did it, because trust me in this, Eva, when my lawyers are done, you will not have a son to protect. I will have full custody and I will never again let you see him.”
Eva swung at him, a surprisingly adept, open-fist punch that connected with his face at just the right angle to send him stumbling a few steps. “You can go to hell, Alexei Rustanov! I will never, ever let you anywhere near him.” Her voice sounded as vicious as she looked.
He recovered from the punch with a shake of his large head. And he was just about to tell her exactly who could go to hell and whose lawyers would send her straight there, when small fists began pummeling his mid-section.
“Leave my mama alone!”
Chapter Twenty-Three
EVA hadn’t been able to sleep on the plane rides from Dallas to London and then on to Milan, which meant she hadn’t slept in almost twenty-four hours. She also hadn’t eaten, and that had probably been a mistake, because by the time Alexei showed up, the only things keeping her on her feet were adrenaline and fear. Perhaps because of this, when he’d started throwing around threats and accusations like she had known he would back when she was actually considering telling him the truth, she had shot past trying to reason with him to screaming at him before straight-up punching him.
At first it felt good, to finally be able to literally hit back at him after keeping her real emotions under lock and key for weeks. But then Aaron came out of nowhere and started throwing wild punches of his own at Alexei, and the world suddenly went into slow motion. Luckily for Aaron, Alexei was so stunned by his son’s sudden appearance that he froze, not responding to his physical attack in any way that could get Aaron hurt.