in danger, as well. I was to stay away until he deemed it safe enough to come for me himself.
I knew the mafia code well enough to understand what all of this meant.
“Da, zaika,” he answered. “But this man can keep you safe in the meantime.”
“What makes you so sure?”
He pursed his lips. “Let’s just say that his family has a long history with the New York Firm. Nico Rossetti can protect you until I come for you.”
Which meant I’d be moving to New York, away from everything and everyone I knew, and away from him. The only family I had.
The oversized lump in my throat prevented me from responding.
Batya’s face softened. He was still a pretty youthful-looking man for his age. Olive skin, midnight hair that had only begun to gray at his temples over the last few years, but was still long enough to pull into a small ponytail at the nape of his neck. A few more wrinkles had formed around his eyes as of late, but he in no way looked his sixty-two years.
Rising to his feet, he took me into his arms. “It will be all right, zaika. It is not forever. Just for a little while. And if anything should happen to me, I want your future to be secured. This way, you’ll have a respected family to take care of you if I’m no longer there to do it. At the very least, you’ll no longer belong to a criminal enterprise.”
Part of me wanted to resent the implication that I needed anyone to take care of me. But I let it roll right off my back because I was used to his antiquated, old school ways of thinking. He was merely a product of his own generation and upbringing. In his world, men were always the providers, and women were always the nurturers. Besides, the larger part of me caught on the somber undercurrents of what he saying.
“Stop talking like you’re not going to be around for much longer,” I said brokenly, feeling tears rise to the surface. I couldn’t stand the thought of him being taken away from me. “You promised me we’d go live on the beach someday.” He’d promised me that when I was eleven. I always liked to tease him with it. “You have to stick around long enough to make that happen, you know.”
He chuckled in his smoker’s rasp that was so comforting to me, so familiar. “I’ve never broken a promise to you, have I? I don’t intend to start now.”
I wrapped my arms around him and squeezed as hard as I could. As if the harder I squeezed, the more real he was and the more real he would stay. He couldn’t go anywhere when he was this alive and vibrant in my arms, right?
This man was everything to me. Had been from the day he’d plucked my seven-year-old self off the decrepit Siberian streets and generously taken me in as his own. He’d given me his name, his shelter, his care, and his love. Everything I could have ever possibly wanted. I didn’t want to even think about where I would have ended up if he hadn’t stumbled upon me on that snowy street that fateful day.
Back then, I thought I’d been running away from neglect and misery, toward freedom.
Instead, I ran right into my hero.
I didn’t care about batya’s reputation as a ruthless mafia vor. Boss. Didn’t care about his lifetime of crime, nor how he’d reached his level of success or how he’d acquired his wealth. All I cared about was how good he’d been to me. No one had asked him to claim a scarred, emotionally damaged little girl as his daughter. But he had.
To me, that proved there was good in him. Damned what all the rumors said.
“It won’t be long before we see each other again, zaika,” he murmured against my hair as he stroked it. “I promise I will come for you with all haste.”
I nodded. “All haste.”
“I love you, my daughter.”
I swallowed back tears, though one still escaped the corner of my eye. “I love you, too, batya.”
He’d left for that business meeting shortly after our conversation, pawning me off on Nico Rossetti so fast I didn’t have time to blink. I’d been lost in a trance for hours after that, trying to work out whether or not I had dreamed the entire discussion.
But once I’d entered batya’s study and spotted the priest standing there waiting next to