Mila Galina Petrov is twenty-seven, half-Russian on her father’s side, and has been bartending at Coven for six years. She knows exactly which whiskey to pour for a man who has just lost something he can’t name, which gin to pour for a woman who has just decided to keep something she can, and what to do with her own mouth when the Pakhan’s second walks into the bar in a black suit and doesn’t look at her for ten consecutive Tuesdays.
At her best friend Saoirse’s wedding in November in 2017, Yegor Sokolov takes Mila out into the alley behind Coven and kisses her against the brick. Three times. Without speaking.
Then he goes home.
Then he doesn’t call. For four months.
What he doesn’t tell her is that Galina, the Volkonsky housekeeper, sat him down at the long table on Beacon Hill the day after the wedding and said, in Russian, “Not yet. Let her miss you.”
Mila, in any honest sense, misses him.
Mila also, in any honest sense, takes a date called Liam to Coven on a Wednesday afternoon at three in March in 2018, specifically so that Yegor Andreyevich Sokolov, walking past Coven on a Wednesday afternoon at three, will see her.
He sees her.
What follows: a kerb confrontation on Tremont Street, four promises kept, a small Russian Orthodox wedding in May, twins on the way by February, and the second of four best friends getting her own HEA at the long table on a Sunday afternoon at three.
Dark Bratva friends-to-lovers romance. Standalone HEA. Book 2 of The Volkonsky Four. Read in any order.
