After a while, I felt Taras’ eyes watching me, so I turned and lightly rested my cheek on top of Hendrix’s head, and opened my eyes.
“I can’t believe he’s sleeping through all of this,” he murmured, gently skimming his fingertip over the top of the baby’s head.
“He’s a chilled baby.”
“Unfortunately for the other vehicle,” Simeon said from behind us in the trunk. “His brother is not quite as chilled.”
The prospect of Bogdan and Hunter trying to calm Walker down made all of us smile, an expression that was totally at odds with how fucked up our situation currently was. How could any of us find anything funny after what’d just happened?
“Don’t worry, krasavitsa, I won’t let anything happen to any of you,” Taras said quietly as he leaned in closer to me. “I’m proud of you for thinking so quickly, and getting into the small space.”
Initially, he hadn’t believed me when I’d proposed using it as a panic room. But once his men had checked it over, and had confirmed it would work, he’d organized some quick upgrades to make it even safer.
That said, it was one thing to have a space available to go to when you needed to be safe. It was another thing to have the cognitive functions to remember to go there when your house was being shot up.
I couldn’t believe I’d managed to go to it.
Would I have done it if Lena hadn’t been there telling me what I needed to do? I just didn’t know.
“Lena’s the one who planned out how we’d get there. I was too afraid of one of them getting hit.”
Lifting his eyes from his son, Taras raised an eyebrow. “Nell, I’ve never met a stronger or more capable woman in my life than you. So I have no doubts that you wouldn’t have done it yourself once you were unstuck.”
Moving closer in his seat to me, he whispered into my ear, “You’re an enigma in every way, but your love for the boys is the only thing anyone can read, and it’s that love that would’ve made you move to protect them. Don’t doubt yourself, dorogoy, because no one else is.”
I had no words to say back to that, but I had many thoughts about it. Was what he’d said true? I had pulled their swings behind the couch, so maybe he was right?
Threading his fingers through mine, he looked back out of the window. “A lot of your anxiety stems from their birth, and that’s only to be expected, baby. You just have to realize that none of any of it is your fault, and that you’re a great mother.”
“You’re also not alone,” Zoran said as he turned to look at me from the front.
Ideally, a child’s life wouldn’t be filled with men like the Fedorov Bratva’s. Then again, look at my own family, and what the men in it did that I knew about. Yes, it was dangerous, but it also made them the most protected children I could think of.
I don’t know how long we drove for as I thought everything through, or even where we were headed, but it seemed like hours passed before the car pulled up in front of a metal gate.
“We’re here,” Taras said as it slid open, and we drove through it and down a long driveway.
The whole area could only be described as intimidating from what I could see. A thick wall surrounded the grass around the property, and men were walking about everywhere, some with ferocious looking dogs, their focus sharp on the area around them.
It was when we stopped in front of a large house that my mouth fell open.
The property itself was gorgeous and looked out of place for the country it was in. But that wasn’t what took me by surprise. A man like Taras would hardly live in a small house like my own.
No, it was the thickness of the doors that were open for us, and how secure it all looked, even from the outside.
“The house has all of the security you can imagine,” he told me as he pushed on my bottom jaw to close my mouth for me. “I’ll go through it with you once we get inside, but suffice it to say, there’s nowhere that would be safer for you than here. Let’s get Lena and Walker from the other car, and get you safely inside, malysh.”
In my dreams, I’d had this with him—a house and the boys, a life with us together. Not once in those dreams, though, did I picture it being under these circumstances, after almost being killed.
Chapter Twenty
Taras
They’d almost killed my woman and children.
An hour ago, a message had come through on the phone belonging to the man who’d tried to kidnap the boys from the hospital.
Withheld: It’s a go.