“Gabriella, you look like you could do with the night off,” I suggest.
“I feel like I could,” she replies, running a hand through her obsidian hair.
“Then let me go. You stay here and put your feet up,” I offer to her surprise.
Gabriella laughs. “You? Closing a beauty salon?Really Aiden? Talk about bull in a china shop.If my girls see you, you’ll scare the shit out of them.”
I rise, walk over to her and hand her the baby.The moment she takes him, that motherly love twinkles in her eyes.“You stay with the baby and you won’t have to worry about me flying around the house with him.”
She smiles at me. “Okay. You win.And now I love you even more than I did.” Her champagne-colored eyes twinkle with the love she speaks of.
“I love you too.”
“Could you take my car? It has everything you’ll need in there.”
“Of course. I’ll see you in a bit.”
I kiss them both, grab her keys and as soon as I step through the door, fire consumes me.
Then everything changes into an infernal blaze.
I jump out of the nightmare and nearly bolt out of my chair.
I’m covered in a cold sweat, and although my throat works, it’s dry like I’ve been standing next to the furnace in a crematorium.Justlike the hell blaze from that night.
Fuck, that was a memory of the hours before disaster struck.
The final hours I spent with Gabriella and Aleksei.
There was a time when I’d have that reoccurring nightmare every night then it got to a stage when I didn’t dream at all for years. Not until I started taking hardcore drugs.
Then those fucked me over.
After I discovered the images with Dominic, I came back to my office at Romanov Logistics where I could have some privacy to look at the images by myself.
Now my screen is blank.
I wanted to look at every single of them. I did and I must have drifted off.
Like everything else I don’t know what the fuck to make of it.
I never knew Jude knew Gabriella.
But it wasn’t entirely a shocker given the ties that bound our families.
I met her when I was eighteen and we went to the same school. Her family had come to L.A. when her father moved up in ranks in the Bratva.
Her family could have known Jude before I even knew of him. It would have been easy because of the business relationship my father had with the Kuzmin’s. That stemmed back to over twenty years before the relationship dissolved.
That motherfucker.
Fucking pervert. He had naked pictures of her. thousands.
He would have had the same camera set up as he did with Olivia.
He was obsessed with them both.
Olivia and Gabriella.