Chapter 5 - The Heir to the Freight Empire
The silence that followed was heavier than any gunfire or boardroom shouting match.
Leo stood at the head of the table, his chest rising and falling beneath his tailored suit. The mask of absolute control was entirely gone, stripped away by the raw, staggering truth of what had just transpired.
"Sokolov Logistics," Leo repeated, testing the words on his tongue as if they were foreign objects. "You built an entire parallel freight network right under my nose while I thought you were just waiting for me to come home from the warehouses."
"You were too busy fighting your cousins and protecting your pride to notice what was happening outside your front door," I said, stepping closer to him until only a few feet of polished mahogany separated us.
"You could have told me," he said, his voice tightening, a flash of genuine hurt cutting through his anger. "When Carlo died—when I told you to leave—you could have told me you had the leverage to break Marcus and Victor before they ever made a move."
"And what would you have done, Leo?" I asked sharply. "Would you have let me stand beside you as an equal partner? Or would you have locked me in a safer room, told me to keep my head down, and tried to fight the war alone like some tragic hero in a cheap crime novel?"
He didn't answer. Because he knew I was right.
He had treated me like a possession to be protected rather than a partner to be trusted.
"Why didn't you get on that plane to Geneva?" he asked softly, taking a step toward me.
"Because I don't run," I said.
I reached up, placed my hand flat against his chest, right over his heart. I could feel it hammering hard, fast, beneath the expensive fabric of his shirt.
"And because there is something else you don't know, Leo."
His eyes narrowed, searching my face with sudden, frantic intensity. "What are you talking about?"
"When you told me to take nothing of yours and walked out of the penthouse..." I paused, holding his gaze, letting the truth settle between us like a lit match in a dark room. "...I was already taking something with me that belonged to both of us."
Leo stopped breathing.
His hand came up, trembling slightly, catching my wrist. His dark eyes searched mine, moving from my pupils down to my lips, and then slowly dropping toward my hand, which was still pressed flat against his chest.
"Natasha..." he whispered, his voice cracking for the first time in our three years together. "Tell me."
"Six weeks and two days," I said quietly. "A heartbeat just became visible yesterday."
The ruthless, untouchable head of the Tomlin freight empire—the man who had stared down cartel bosses, buried his uncle without shedding a tear, and dismantled a family coup in forty-eight hours—stumbled backward half a step, catching the edge of the mahogany table with his hip.
He looked at me as if he were seeing a ghost. Or a miracle.
"You're... you're pregnant," he said, the words tasting foreign, terrifying, and sacred all at once.
"Yes," I said. "And I'm not leaving Chicago, Leo. And I'm not hiding. Sokolov Logistics controls the peripheral terminals, and your child’s father controls the primary warehouses. If we're going to run this city, we do it together—or not at all."
Leo didn't answer with words.
May you like
He reached out, his arms wrapping around me with desperate, crushing force, pulling me against him as if he were afraid I would dissolve into the Chicago rain.
Outside the floor-to-ceiling glass, the snow began to fall over Lake Michigan, blanketing the city in white. But inside the boardroom, the real war was just beginning.
