I stared at Alejandra as she carefully looked away from me. “You’re pregnant?” I repeated, hearing the shock in my own voice. Of course, that would explain why she was avoiding me. That would explain the tears in the grocery store. But- “It’s not mine, is it?”

She couldn’t be pregnant with my baby. She just couldn’t be.

I mean, logically, she could be. We had had sex. I had been careful, and I assumed that she had used some sort of contraceptive as well. But those things weren’t foolproof. And in the heat of the moment…well, things could have happened; I wasn’t stupid.

But as though things weren’t problematic enough, with my business involvement with her father…

“I don’t know for sure that I’m pregnant,” Alejandra said, but something about the way that she was folded over, the unhappiness to her tone as she looked out over the water, had me convinced that even if she hadn’t taken the test yet, she somehow just knew. She paused. “But yes, if I was pregnant, it would be yours. It would have to be.”

I sighed and ran a hand back through my hair. I’d always thought about starting a family. I was getting to that age, even. If I were still in Russia… But I wasn’t about to start a family here in Barcelona. And definitely not with Alejandra.

I cared for her, in some ways. That at least, I was starting to realize. But not in the sweep-her-off-her-feet, romantic sort of way. I wasn’t going to propose to her. I hardly knew her. I just liked talking to her, I liked that she was independent and strong, and I thought that she was incredibly sexy. That wasn’t the kind of thing that could make a marriage work, though, and especially not if there were children involved.

God, I couldn’t believe I was thinking through this all so logically, so reasonably. Like we might ever get married and raise kids.

“What are you planning to do?” I asked her.

“What am I planning to do?” she asked, her voice edging slightly towards hysteria. “Is that really all you have to ask?”

“Well, I assume you’ve had more time to process it,” I told her. “And I assume that you know what you’re going to do.”

“My father’s going to kill me,” she said, burying her face in her hands.

I rubbed a hand on her back. Even though I knew that this wasn’t good, I felt the need to comfort her. “I’m sure it won’t be that bad,” I said. “After all, won’t he be thrilled that he’s going to be a grandfather?”

Alejandra shot me a murderous look. “He might be, except for the fact that he’s promised me to this guy Franco, who works for one of our rival gangs in Seville. That match was supposed to broker the peace, but now…” She trailed off, looking pale.

I stared at her with wide eyes, hardly believing the situation she had gotten me into. “If you’re telling me that gang wars are going to break out because you slept with me-”

“They’re not going to come after you,” Alejandra was quick to say. “I’ll make sure they don’t know about you. Just…” She swallowed hard. “I need you to stop calling me. I need you to pretend like you’ve never even met me, outside of our brief interactions at the Audaz headquarters building.”

I stared at her, thinking that through. Was I really going to be able to do that? No matter how bad the situation was, I couldn’t help feeling partly responsible for it. For her. I wanted to take care of her. I didn’t know if I could see her again, in the future, with a kid—our kid—and just pretend that I had never known her, that I didn’t have any sort of ties to the kid.

But then again, what choice did I have? My situation in Barcelona was already so tenuous. And besides, if she didn’t want me around the kid, I wasn’t going to push.

I pushed myself to my feet, not daring to even look at her. I still wanted to comfort her—such a strange feeling for me to have. But then again, it isn’t every day that a man finds out that he’s going to become a dad.

Not that I necessarily was going to. I wanted to press for details, to find out what she was thinking. But again, it wasn’t my place. It was her decision, whatever she wanted to do.

Given the whole engagement thing, I doubted she’d be keeping the kid anyway.

I shook my head and walked away.

The next day, I got called into Uncle Evgeni’s office. I sighed, knowing it had to be something to do with the deal with Ignasi. Maybe they’d finally gotten on board with the idea. But I couldn’t even muster enthusiasm at that thought. I felt off, after the previous day. Guilty. I was tempted to call Alejandra back, to press her to talk to me again. But I couldn’t do that.

Instead, I went to Uncle’s office and sat down across the table from him. “What’s up?” I asked wearily.

“A little birdie overheard a very interesting conversation yesterday,” Evgeni said, narrowing his eyes at me. “It seems that you got that Audaz brat, Alejandra, pregnant.”

I gaped at him. Of course, I knew that he had his sources, but how many people knew? From the way Alejandra had told me about it the previous day, I had thought that I was the only one who knew. Her father definitely didn’t or else he would have been all over us already. I had no doubt that he would have called me immediately, raging at me for defiling his beautiful, perfect daughter. And if he didn’t know, I had to assume that no one in Audaz knew—because they would have been obligated to tell him about it, whatever the other person’s relationship with Alejandra.

“You’ve been having me tailed!” I said in shock.

“Don’t be so dramatic,” my uncle said, rolling his eyes. “After what happened in Moscow, I wasn’t taking any risks. You may be family, but that doesn’t mean-”

“I can’t believe you don’t trust me. As family, I would have expected better,” I interrupted.

That only seemed to anger the other man further. “Of course I’ve been having you tailed!” Evgeni said, slamming his fist down on the table. “I know you think I don’t know much about leading this family, but I didn’t realize you thought I was stupid. Clearly, it is you who is the stupid one Damien.”

I had to admit, everything that he was saying right then made sense. Of course, I had been tailed. I was an idiot to expect otherwise. Especially after the screw-up in Moscow and the lukewarm reception that I’d received from both my uncle and my cousins—as well as everyone else involved with the Volkov family—from the time that I’d arrived there in Barcelona.

Uncle spins his chair around and peers out the window. “You know, Ignasi is a powerful member of Audaz, and this looks very bad for us.”

“I doubt he’s going to start a war on the Volkov family just because I’ve gotten his daughter pregnant,” I said, even though I didn’t really know what Ignasi might do. I had never had the opportunity to see a vengeful side of him, I had only seen the side of him that I had been working with: the friendly, businesslike side of him.

I was starting to wonder if maybe Evgeni was right to be frustrated with me about all of this. I just didn’t know enough about the man that I was doing business with.

But I wasn’t about to let my uncle know that I was feeling regretful and uncertain.

As though echoing my thoughts, Evgeni said, “You don’t know what that man might do. You don’t know the history between the Volkov family and Audaz.” He paused. “When I first came to Barcelona, when we were trying to find a foothold here, there was so much fighting. So many men died. There’s a reason we’re still paying off the local garda to allow us to stay here. If they had their way, we’d all be on the first flight back to the motherland, or dead in a box.”

“That was years ago, though,” I pointed out. “If Audaz really wanted you out of here, they would have tried something a long time ago. Besides, you have more people here now to back you up. They’d have a hard time getting rid of all of you.”

Evgeni gave me a look. “Again, you show your ignorance of the situation,” he said. “Audaz tolerates us because they don’t need sole control of the city. This isn’t where their headquarters is. Their trade in Madrid and through the south of Spain is much more lucrative. They don’t mind if we scrape a little of Barcelona. But once things become personal, that’s when we don’t know what they might do.”

“I don’t think Alejandra would be so stupid as to keep the baby,” I protested.

“Even if she doesn’t, she’s going to have to get rid of it,” Evgeni snapped. “And where do you think she’ll get the money from? Her father. Where is she going to go while she recovers? To her father’s home. Ignasi will find out about this, if he doesn’t already know.”

“Even if he does find out that she got herself pregnant, there’s no reason for him to suspect anything of us,” I said.

Evgeni snorted as he moved to the bar at the side of his office and poured himself a drink. “You think I was the only one having you tailed?” he asked. “If I know about this fling between you and Alejandra, you can rest assured that Ignasi does as well.”

“It wasn’t a fling,” I protested. “It was a one-night stand, nothing more.”

“Whatever you call it, it looks bad,” Evgeni snapped. He took a deep breath, visibly composing himself. “He has people around Alejandra at all times—for her protection. She’s just as deeply involved in Audaz as Ignasi is, didn’t you know that?” He leered at me. “But of course you didn’t.”

“She’s done a few deliveries and things like that, that’s all,” I said weakly, even though I knew I didn’t have the whole story. Suddenly, I had the wild thought that maybe Alejandra had planned things like this. Maybe this was all part of some deeper Audaz plot to make war on the Volkov family. I couldn’t figure out what their end goal might be, but suddenly I felt stupid for ever having trusted either Alejandra or her father.

Again, that wasn’t something that I could admit in front of Evgeni, though.

I stood up. “Well, if you think you need to attack-”

“Sit down,” my uncle said firmly. “The least you can do, since you created this mess, is give me the information that I need.”

“If you want information about Ignasi, I don’t have much,” I admitted, even though the words stuck in my throat.

Evgeni waved that away. “The Audaz headquarters,” he said. “You’ve been there a number of times now. I want information about what the place is like from the inside. So that we can launch our attack before Ignasi and Audaz can launch theirs.”

I slowly sat back down in my seat. “What do you want to know, specifically?” I asked.

For a moment, I thought about sweet Alejandra—her body, but also the conversations that we’d had. She could be there, in the Audaz headquarters building, when the Volkov family launched their attack. She might be injured, she might be…

And she was carrying my baby.

But I knew I couldn’t let that sway me. As much as I might tempt fate by going against Evgeni, I really didn’t want to be sent away from Barcelona, exiled from the family. I reminded myself again that this was my ticket back to Russia, to the life that I’d always been meant to lead.

Besides, there was no reason to trust Alejandra. Except that those tears, in the grocery store, were definitely real…

I pushed that thought out of my head and started answering my uncle’s questions. If anything, I’d just have to find a way to make sure that Alejandra wasn’t in the building when we attacked. And the only way to really do that was to keep Evgeni happy with me. I needed to be involved in this operation. If I didn’t have any of the details of the attack, I wouldn’t be able to help Alejandra at all.

I only wanted to help her because she was an innocent woman who was already going through so much, I told myself.

But I was starting to wonder if maybe there was something deeper there.