For a tiny thing, she was remarkably strong. The door slammed in my face, and I just stood there, confused as hell, mouth agape.
Firstly, excuse the shit out of me. This was my house, dammit. She had some nerve pushing me around in my own home. But when I heard her whine through the door, my anger left as quickly as it came.
I wrapped my fingers around the doorknob and slowly tried to open it. “Mina? Are you okay?” I jiggled it. “Shorty?”
There were three of us in the family. Sasha, the eldest, who took over the role of patriarch when our father died. Lev, the middle sibling, whose quirks made him both infuriating and endearing as hell. Lastly came me, the youngest. The girl who grew up with mobsters and criminals and thought nothing of it, because although it wasn’t normal, it was normal for me.
When you’re a teenager and your brothers are members of a subsidiary of the Russian Bratva… well, you could imagine how colorful life must’ve been.
On the day our father died, Sasha had been expected to take over control of Chaos. It seemed like the natural course of events, and Sasha never did things half-assed. He was in, which meant we were in.
I’d seen shit, heard shit, and taken part in shit that no teenager should have ever been part of. And it didn’t take long for Sasha to come to the same conclusion.
It took some convincing, but Sasha talked himself out of the role, and soon enough, without a proper leader, Chaos was falling apart. Bratva soon heard of the mismanagement and bickering between its firms, and the motherland came calling. And when Bratva tells you to stand down and disband, that’s what you do.
Now, any Russian firms out there were acting on their own. They no longer had the backing of the big guns. And although I had a feeling Sasha sometimes missed that life, I knew he did what he did for me.
Because family was everything.
The door to the bathroom shot open, and Mina, anxious as a gazelle drinking from the waterhole, stood there holding a plastic cup filled with a light-yellow liquid. I spotted the rectangular box in her other hand, and my brows bunched.
Her voice shook as she begged quietly, “Help.”
It took me about ten seconds for it all to click.
My brows rose, and I let out a humble, “Mina.”
“I know.” She nodded with tears in her eyes.
I tried to speak, but nothing came out.
She nodded again. “I know.” Higher in pitch this time.
I found my voice and asked gently, “Are you sure?”
She let out a watery laugh. “Um….” Reaching for the white bag, she turned it upside down, and the contents fell to the white-tiled floor of my bathroom. Nine different brands of pregnancy tests told me she wasn’t sure.
“Okay,” I said calmly.
“I’m scared,” the little woman croaked out, and, goddammit, it broke my heart.
“Look,” I tried to reason with her, “this is not an issue. You’re married. You’re in love. You’re not some teenager who did it with the quarterback under the bleachers, got knocked up, and is now being sent away to live with her grandma.”
But Mina wasn’t listening to me. She moved to sit cross-legged on the cold floor, opening each box and taking out one test, and when her fingers began to shake too much, she started to rip open the cardboard with her teeth.
My brows rose.
Oh yeah. This was fine.
Breathing shakily, she tried to read the instructions and talked to herself. “How do I do this?”
“It depends. Some of them, you dip in and wait, and others, you put a couple of drops into the little hole.”
She stilled, then blinked up at me. “You’ve done this before?”
My eyes widened a moment, and all I said was “Yeah.”
Two men. In my entire life, I’d only ever been with two men. One, to whom I was briefly engaged, and we used a condom each and every time. The other was Vik, who had my head swimming with nothing more than a glance of his fingers down my spine. He hadn’t used a condom with me since I was nineteen years old, so, yes, I knew how to use a pregnancy test.
I helped her. I told her she didn’t need to use all nine, but she just kept handing them to me, and before we knew it, the counter of my bathroom sink was covered in white plastic sticks.
We waited a full three minutes, and we did this in complete silence. One look at Mina told me that nothing I said would distract her from what was going on inside her head.
And when the timer went off and I began to check the tests, relief fell over my expression. I looked over at her and smiled kindly. “See? All good, li’l bit.” I held up a test. “You’re not pregnant.”
Her face blank, she took the test from my hand and stared at it. She then stood and looked over all the others, her face remaining passive. But when she sat on the closed toilet lid, her bottom lip started to tremble.
Oh, sweet girl. “You had a scare. It’s stressful,” I said in way of understanding.
“You don’t get it” was her soggy reply.
I choked down the scoff threatening to rush up my throat. “I do. I really do. But it’s okay, Mina.”
She shook her head and blinked away tears. “It’s not okay.”
“It is,” I reassured her with a squeeze to her knee.
Mina looked down at the floor, her face crumbling, and her hands came up to cover her eyes as she began to cry.
No, not cry.
She was sobbing. Body-wracking sobs.
My brow furrowed in perplexity. “Hey,” I crooned, moving to squat down in front of her. “What’s going on?”
She continued to cry, and when she removed her hands, she rolled her red eyes, shrugged, and let out a laugh that held no humor. Her voice shook. “I don’t know.”
And then it hit me.
I spoke slowly. “Did you want it to be positive?”
Her eyes closed, and she dipped her chin, nodding as she began to weep again.
Well, shit.
My arms went around her, and I held her tightly as she cried openly. I began to feel her loss on a personal level, and when my own eyes began to sting, I sighed softly, then asked, “Why didn’t you tell me?”
She spoke into my shoulder, miserable. “We’re not trying, but I haven’t been feeling well, and it made sense that I might be… and I was scared, but once I thought about it… then I was kind of happy about it. And thinking about how nice it would be for Lidi to have a brother or sister… I started planning where the nursery might go and wondering who the baby might look like… and now—” She took in a deep breath and let it out shakily. “—it’s over before it began.”
I squeezed her, gently rubbing her back.
Her incoherent babbling should not have made sense, but it did. And it was heartbreaking.
I pulled back, taking hold of her hand and swiping away a stray tear trailing my cheek. “Look,” I told her. “If you want it, this is going to happen for you. Now just wasn’t the time, okay?”
Mina started to calm. “I guess.”
“If you want a baby, you need to talk to Lev, get off the birth control, and start trying. Like, really trying. You get what I mean?” She snuffled out a small laugh, and I smiled widely, then swallowed down the sickness in my throat at the thought of my brother shooting his boys into Mina, but that was how it was done. “Go home and seduce my brother. Enjoy the process.” I sobered quickly. “It’ll happen, Mina. I just know it.”